Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 5: At the top of our lungs
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 5: At the top of our lungs
Thu, Apr 12, 2012
We weren't looking forward to trudging down to Kingham last night, however picturesque it may be, and not just because it was raining on and off. In fact, Robert agreed to trudge solo down the hill (and back) so that Laura could rest her tootsies. And we knew that we weren't getting a ride back, because Wesley (whose real name is Simon, so that's probably what we'll call him from now on) really wanted to catch the early concert so he was headed into Kingham early and would be coming back early.
Which meant that not only would Robert be trudging into town, but also back up the hill to the school. Possibly in more rain. (Snivel, whine).
Anyway, Robert is merrily off down the hill listening to "Car Talk" on the headphones (because nothing enhances the aesthetic of English countryside like listening to a couple of Boston boys snort and laugh about cars), when he hears his name. Since it seems unlikely that Click and Clack would be calling his name, he takes his headphones off and here's Laura running (well, perhaps not running exactly) and hollering his name.
Turns out that there's Internet available IN THE VERY ROOM where Laura has been taking class. But it was a secret.
And don't let anybody tell you that whining doesn't pay off, because we'd been whining about having to walk across broken glass and bloody hedgerows into Kingham every day, and somebody got tired of hearing about how we had to battle off legions of hedgerow foxes and decided to cut us in on the Internet secret.
So we now can send out our trip logs without making the hazardous trek into the local village (and the real hazard was the cars going at light speed past us, driving on the wrong side of the road). We're happy that we had a chance to visit the village and enjoy local posh life, but we're also quite happy to rest up here.
British keyboards
Of course, the computers here are British computers, which means they're Hewlett-Packard computers running Windows 7, but with British keyboards. Instead of the @ key being above the 2 key, it's stuck over where the double-quote is and the double-quote is moved above the 4 key (in place of the $) and above the 2 is the £ key, which is how the English say "money."
All of which takes some getting used to, but what really bolluxes things up is that the keyboard is the old "six-finger IBM style." The left-hand shift key is half the usual size and a \ key is stuck between the shift and the Z key. It's quite comfortable if you have six fingers on your left hand, but normal people end up typing a \ every time the want to \capitalize \something.
This keyboard design was introduced by IBM in the 80's and was widely mocked and didn't last too long, but apparently, there are a lot of six-fingered Brits around because this was a new keyboard yet it still had this old design.
Back to the pub
Since we didn't have to spend time getting to (and from) Kingham village, we decided to use the time profitably and visit the school pub. Not only do they serve beer and wine, they also have a pretty large selection of hard liquor (hey, teaching is a tough profession!).
Better yet, there's a bunch of musicians in the bar who spend their time playing various tunes. One of the best bass players in Robert's class is there and it's fun watching Jules play with the other folks. He clearly spends about 23 hours a day playing bass and enjoys the hell out of it. He can do a lot of fancy stuff on the bass, but he also knows how to keep it simple and let the other players shine.
Plus, there's beer! So we spend the rest of the evening there before toddling off to bed. (The last time anybody saw Jules was around 3:00 am when he was still playing in one of the classrooms.)
British Money
In one of our idle moments, we decide to have a look at British money, which is quite different than real money. For one thing, each note is a different size (and the British think we're looney because our money is all the same size, but we explain that we have so much of it that it's more efficient to stack it when it's all the same size and that makes it easier to form it into bricks to build our houses from).
Each note is also a different color (or colour) and has a different scene on the back. On the back of the £20 is this quote: "The division of labour in pin manufacturing: (and the great increase in the quantity of work that results)" and there's a drawing of what we assume is pin manufacturing (although we can't tell if it's bowling or firing pins that they're making). Next to that is a picture of Adam Smith.
So the British use their money for history lessons! While our money features dead presidents and monuments, their money features live monarchs and little history lessons! The £10 note is Darwin, and the £5 is the Poverty Act (which gives poor people the right to live in poverty or something like that).
8:00 am
While we're at breakfast (and the queue is getting shorter every day, because more people are staying up late and not waking up in time for breakfast), bass guy John stops by and pours Robert a cup of coffee from his French press.
"I just want to prove that not all coffee in England is rubbish," and boy howdy is he right! It's a proper cup of coffee and after all the instant coffee and tea bag coffee we've had for the last week, it's a little bit of heaven. There's still no cream for it, but Robert's taste buds are merrily leaping about in his mouth in celebration.
John's band has a website, and we'd like everybody to go there and take a look and if there's someplace where you can make comments, be sure to mention how absolutely fabulous their bass player is. Splendid chap, good fellow and all that.
Here's the website:
They play American music ("From Texas Swing to Rock and Roll"). John's been a real help in sorting out all this odd British stuff, plus he's had to listen to us mock British stuff.
Our favorite line from John: "Hey, we invented America, you know!"
9:00 am
General Assembly
There are "Scratch" bands formed by various groups of students and they all get a chance to play two songs at the concert tonight. This morning's assembly is mostly to sort out who's playing. We like some of the band names:
-- Fiddle Envy
-- Ex's, Losers, and Other Men
-- Leonardo de Capo & The Titanics
The emcee badgers us about the importance of being at General Assembly in the morning (which is kind of wasted, because the people he should be badgering are the ones who aren't here).
12:45 pm
Lunch!
Someone has finally lit a fire underneath the bums* of the bums who are catering this event. Lunch features not one little old lady carefully serving lunch a plate at a time, but four ladies with two supervisors and one ex-Drill Sergeant hollering, "Right! Who's next?"
* Bums = British for bottoms
Things move right along, at least until all the seats are filled (about 80 people) and there's stacks of folks standing around with lunch trays waiting for a vacant spot.
We choose the steak and kidney pie (featuring real kidneys!) over Gammon and potato because we haven't liked Gammon since he fought Godzilla. We'll say this for the Brits: they name dishes literally. This is chunks of steak and chunks of kidney baked into a pie and not much else. Still, it beats Gammon.
2:00 pm
Laura has found a washer and dryer in the kitchen that's on our floor and is checking to see if British laundry machines work the same way that ours do, or if there's some odd thing we have to do ("You forgot to liver up the plover!"). Turns out there are many odd things about the washer, and the directions printed on the front are nearly impenetrable. It's taking quite a long time and Laura is concerned that our clothes will be reduced to threads and buttons. If not, the dryer luckily has simple controls--heat and timing.
We are enamored of British electrical sockets. They use 240V, because they got electricity after we did and they chose a sensible system (240V is more efficiently transmitted than 120V). And every electrical socket has an On/Off switch, so you can safely plug things in and then turn the socket on.
This also has the huge advantage that if you can't find the off switch on something (like say, your computer has become sentient and is about to send a killer robot after you), you can just switch off the socket. It's brilliant!
4:00 pm
Sacred Harp singing
Usually in the afternoon, we head off to a second session of class between 3:45 and 5:00 pm (although not usually a very high-energy session). Today, though, there's a set of one-off classes and we decide to go to the Sacred Harp singing session.
This is a sort of a weird type singing where everybody sits in a square and sings at the top of their lungs (there's no "soft" or "quiet" singing). It originated in England in the 1700s and was brought over to America when all those English wised up and emigrated.
Once it reached here, the English forgot about it, but those Southern Baptists kept it going. In the last couple of decades it's been spreading across the U. S. as more people discover it. Then some English folk came over and re-learned it, and now they're re-spreading the tradition across England.
One of the things about it is that they use the shapes of the notes to indicate the pitch. But they put the notes on standard music notation. So if you read standard music notation it's confusing as hell if you pay attention to the shapes.
Once the class full of musicians learns to ignore the shapes, we do a pretty good job of singing at the tops of our lungs at each other and it's good fun and you end up a little dizzy because singing loud means breathing in a lot and hyperventilating. Which is probably why the Baptists liked it.
5:45 pm
We're off to the student concert where 21 different bands will get up and sing songs. And Robert will know somebody in just about every band, becacyse every band has a bass and he's been in bass class. They will all do splendidly.