O, to be in England…
After a long absence, I am back in the land of my birth. My title comes from Robert Browning’s poem, “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” and the line continues ‘now that April’s there.’ Well, it’s actually August. but the weather forecast is for intermittent, sometimes heavy, showers. If I wish to imagine it is April, it isn’t a huge leap.
My wife has often remarked in bewilderment that I have a strange aversion to wet weather. She was brought up to believe that the entire English nation was immured to rain; that an umbrella was essentially given to every English child as soon as they could walk independently. This may be partly due to the fact that many English people still use the weather as an opening topic in conversation with a stranger. It is a favoured topic because there is always something to say and it is unlikely to lead to embarrassing information. Avoiding embarrassment is an Englishman’s prime directive. Like the Inuit vocabulary for snow, the English differentiate their rains. There can be something refreshing, even exhilarating, about a short, sharp shower, especially if you escape from it quickly, and watch it from shelter. At the other extreme, nothing locks in gloom quite like a day of unrelenting drizzle, the kind that wraps itself around you like a wet blanket, and clings, until you have taken off every garment and know for certain that you do not need to go out again that day. My own particular dread is the squall: an ambush of very cold rain driven by swirling gusts of wind. No matter which way you turn the umbrella, the wind catches it, and after half a dozen paces, it is blown inside out and in my case, usually broken and rendered useless. And unlike Italy, there are no longer small shops in England that will mend umbrellas (as well as countless other things). That is why the life expectancy of my small pocket umbrellas is so short. Hence, I have come to regard them primarily as totems that you take with you to ward off the evil rain gods rather than as reliable protection against the rain when it comes.
My son belongs to a different school of thought. He declares there is no such thing as bad weather; just the wrong clothing. I attribute this ‘Devil may care’ attitude to his mixed parentage (his mother is American), although it is part of the imperial legacy that the British once wandered the Earth and ruled, while dressed inappropriately. Costume dramas set during the Raj in India, for example, are apt to depict dinner parties in which the men wear dinner jackets and bow ties. The kind of thing now largely confined to weddings. They may have worn pith helmets and khaki during the day but they knew that civilisation required them to dress for dinner. This may explain why on one of my first trips to the American South, I had to spend my first day buying clothes since everything in my suitcase was an open invitation to sweat, and to do so in a way that no deodorant could overcome.
Of course, times change, and shorts and T-shirts are ubiquitous. Not everyone in England who chooses skin-hugging micro-shorts has made an aesthetically wise choice in my opinion, especially if the gap between this garment and a tank-top is filled by a distended stomach of what appears to be a blancmange-like consistency. What is more perplexing is that the weather seems to have so little influence on the wardrobe of English youth. An evening stroll with my wife in the depths of winter is likely to prompt her to reflect volubly on the health hazards of exposing your stomach to cold air as she watches people heading into town for an evening’s clubbing. In mitigation, I point out that the nightclubs themselves are usually over-heated and that safe storage of coats or over-garments of any kind is an issue. But for Italians, baring your abdomen to the chill is just inviting illness. Germ theory has not entirely replaced humours and vapours in their cosmology.
Given the current pandemic, returning to England was full of specific challenges. The government was at that point unable to accept proof of vaccination within the EU and so I had to take the pre-flight test, the Day 2 and Day 8 tests and abide by the 10-day quarantine rule. And of course, the same test in England was twice as expensive as in Italy. Such expense was needed in order to move to a city in England whose infection rate was ten times higher than that found in the part of Italy from which I was coming. After all, we follow the ‘science.’ The accompanying paperwork meant that checking in with the airline took just under two hours. What will it like at border control, I wondered? In the event, British passport holders were directed to the electronic entry gates and required simply to scan their passports. In marked contrast, the lines for “others” snaked their way through and beyond the hall and I overheard officials offering water and juice to families with young children with the bleak words that their processing time was estimated at over two hours. That, like drizzle, was a reminder of England, or at least the England of today.
Having relied on friends to deliver groceries during my self-isolation period, I set out directly to a supermarket on my “Freedom Day.” I felt a certain trepidation: partly due to the recent decision to make in-store mask-wearing a matter of personal choice and partly because of reports that supermarkets were facing some food supply issues. I was generally reassured. Most people had a face covering, although I seemed to be the only one to have invested in a filtered mask with its potentially greater level of protection. Even the checkout staff were wearing thinner cloth masks. There was also plenty of fresh produce (it is summer after all), but the price hikes were obvious.
Over the next few days, I ran into a couple of acquaintances on separate occasions. Each of them greeted me warmly but added the comment: ‘My, you’ve lost weight.’ I remember that when I was living in America, I would occasionally overhear this comment. In American etiquette, it is the only safe observation one can make about a person’s weight. The recipients — many of them as svelte as a sumo wrestler, I recall, — invariably preened. Occasionally, they mentioned a new diet or fitness regime. As if to corroborate Oscar Wilde’s observation that Britain and America are two cultures divided by a common language, my acquaintances added: ‘Are you well?’ with the unmistakable implication that they were bracing themselves for bad news. I reassured them that I was fine. My regimen of long walks and a healthy diet with fewer pints of beer seems sufficient explanation for a dip in weight: 77 kilos is hardly ‘wasting-away’ territory. All the same, it did not feel like a compliment, more like a typically oblique English enquiry.
There are few things better than time away to make you realise that your own culture is peculiar. All too quickly, I will stop noticing such oddities and they will become the background to my life. I may even put on weight. And would you believe it, it’s raining again.
