Gentle readers,
When I started this blog, you may recall, I wasn't sure if my life in the UK would be interesting enough to support a regular blogging habit. Eleven months and 47,000 words later, I'm happy that this worry was unfounded. Some thanks are due for the non-boringness of my year. In particular I'd like to thank the University of Cambridge with its endless oddities; Ryanair and easyJet with their cheap European air travel; and my former employer (frequent flier miles), the U.S. Treasury (2008 tax refund), and my favorite Peace Corps volunteer for facilitating my Cameroon trip.
But now, as I turn my sights to the Garden State, I feel a change in the air. While I always reserve the right to change my mind, I'm not planning on keeping up a regular blog at Princeton. I like the idea of keeping this site as a sporadic travel blog, as I did with my Israel trip-- though I may be grounded for quite some time. (I realized, as I deplaned at Logan, that for the first time since college I don't know when my next flight will be.) There's also the possibility that I will be somewhere very interesting next summer, as my MPA program at Princeton requires all of us to complete a summer internship. Those who followed my Philippines blog may recall a certain Congressman's daughter; she just graduated from the program I will soon start, and last summer she did her internship in Sudan. I can't say that blog-worthiness will be a major factor in my internship search process, but if I do end up someplace sexy, you will certainly hear lots about it.
So I will sign off, for now, and say thanks to all of my readers and commenters for making all of this writing worthwhile. And in the unlikely event that this leaves a blog-shaped hole in your heart, let me know- I have a few others I can recommend!
27 July 2009
19 July 2009
graduation weekend dispatches
Grantchester revisited. Among the items on the Cambridge tourist to-do list that we missed when my family visited in January is the walk to Grantchester. This may sound familiar to longtime readers with sharp memories. Grantchester is a tiny village a few miles up the River Cam where the poet Rupert Brooke once hosted future members of the Bloomsbury Group—including John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Bertrand Russell—for tea and civilized conversation. Today Brooke’s old home and orchard are a teahouse that preserves some of the memory of that group.
After my parents and I arrived back in Cambridge for graduation weekend, the Grantchester walk was first on the agenda, but unfortunately the appointed day did not turn out quite the way I might have hoped. Contradicting an observation I had made earlier in the trip that thunder and lightning are rare in Britain, the afternoon was spotted with thunderstorms and pouring rain, with spells of cold drizzle in between. Dispirited by the weather and feeling a touch of pre-departure depression, I felt like calling off the walk, but my parents were game to face the storms, mud, and cows. The teahouse and surrounding orchard would usually be jammed with people on a summer afternoon, but for at least part of the time we were the only people sitting outside. In the end I was glad we went—the hot tea, conversation, and visiting a fun old place helped to restore my mojo for the festivities to come that evening.
Latin lessons. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed to Emma, where I had organized a graduation-eve formal dinner for Development Studies classmates and their families. The countries represented included China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Germany, and Greece. We had pre-dinner drinks in the cloisters by the college chapel and then moved on to a cozy upstairs room with lots of portraits of dead white men in wigs. I was incredibly grateful that Dave, a member of the catering staff who we always prayed would be the one quarterbacking our MCR dinners, was overseeing things. Dave did throw me one surprise, though: shortly after we were all seated, he came over to me and asked if I wanted to recite the College grace. I think my initial response was on the lines of, “uhhhh… I don’t speak Latin, Dave.” He showed me where both pre- and post-dinner graces were printed in the program and we had a 30-second dress rehearsal. I remember exactly two things from the third of a year of Latin I had in seventh grade (and any Latin scholars in the audience are welcome to correct me on this). First, the letters more or less always make the same sounds, unlike in English; second, it’s pronounced more or less the way a native English speaker would expect. With that slender bit of background knowledge and Dave’s confidence, I read out the grace without any obvious stumbles. I don’t know if the same could be said for my pronunciation, but I doubt anyone in the room had the slightest idea what I was saying. If you're curious you can check out the graces, with translations, here.
Pull my finger. Graduation, like so many other things in Cambridge, is steeped in formality and 800 years of tradition and takes little note of the way the rest of the world prefers to do things. There are lots of graduation ceremonies on different throughout the year, and the timing of any particular student’s graduation depends a lot on the idiosyncrasies of his or her course. There are no go-out-and-get-‘em speeches. Graduates shuffle through their small piece of the all-day ceremony by college, so I wasn’t even with my Development Studies classmates. My required outfit included a tuxedo, a white bow tie and bands (which made me feel like I should be trying somebody for witchcraft in 1690s Salem), a black gown, and a big black hood lined with blue silk draped over my back. I knew little about the ceremony going in and warned my parents not to expect much.
What I did know was that I was going to have to hold some guy’s finger. (Eight hundred years of solemn tradition, building up to… a fart joke?) Each college appoints one of its fellows as Praelector, and from what I can tell that role involves presenting the graduating students and enforcing the dress code. Rumor has it that if one of us students commits a wardrobe infraction, our college Praelector is fined… in bottles of port. Anyway, the graduates from each College march into a fancy old building known as the Senate House, and their Praelector extends a hand to the first four graduates in the phalanx. As each graduate holds onto one of those fingers, the Praelector leads the group forward and gives a brief testimonial, in Latin, to their learning and morals and their fitness to proceed to the degrees which they are to be awarded.
Now comes the really weird part. Picture, at the center of this grand assembly, a fairly senior man or woman sitting in a fancy chair and dressed in a bright red cape lined with white fur. This is (rarely) the Chancellor, Prince Philip; or (less rarely) the Vice Chancellor; or (usually) a deputy of hers, often the Master or President of a college. Our caped MC was the Master of Magdalene College, and the outfit combined with his kind face and round glasses gave him the appearance of a clean-shaven Santa Claus. After the Praelector’s testimonial, each individual graduate’s name is called, and each in turn kneels on a cushion in front of the big chair and extends his or her joined hands as if in prayer. It looked a bit like we were being knighted, minus the part with the sword. The presiding officer then clasps the graduate’s hands and formally confers the degree, in Latin. The new graduate rises, taking extreme care not to trip over the gown in the process, and gives a bow before exiting stage right.
Amazingly, the least ceremonious part was the paper diploma. After all of these traditional flourishes, I was expecting a huge piece of parchment with Latin calligraphy and perhaps a wax seal. Instead, what I got was a piece of 7x10 paper that looks like something I could have easily printed out on a home laser printer. It certifies, in English, that I attended the Congregation of 18 July 2009 and only later gets around to mentioning that I was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. The mode of presentation was no more dramatic: we received our diplomas inside a plastic sleeve from an usher as we exited the Senate House. Like most of my friends, I opted to get a wooden University of Cambridge frame—partly because I fear that no one will believe it’s a diploma otherwise, and partly because I fear that one day I might accidentally toss it out with some old bank statements.
This has probably sounded a bit snarky, and there certainly was plenty of joking all around about the sillier aspects of the ceremony. But like many other things here, I think Cambridge’s odd approach to graduation is best approached with an open mind, a sense of humor, and a healthy dose of respect for eight centuries of history. And most importantly, after the red capes and Latin incantations we all get to walk away as Cambridge alumni—which is really, really cool in any language.
After my parents and I arrived back in Cambridge for graduation weekend, the Grantchester walk was first on the agenda, but unfortunately the appointed day did not turn out quite the way I might have hoped. Contradicting an observation I had made earlier in the trip that thunder and lightning are rare in Britain, the afternoon was spotted with thunderstorms and pouring rain, with spells of cold drizzle in between. Dispirited by the weather and feeling a touch of pre-departure depression, I felt like calling off the walk, but my parents were game to face the storms, mud, and cows. The teahouse and surrounding orchard would usually be jammed with people on a summer afternoon, but for at least part of the time we were the only people sitting outside. In the end I was glad we went—the hot tea, conversation, and visiting a fun old place helped to restore my mojo for the festivities to come that evening.
Latin lessons. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed to Emma, where I had organized a graduation-eve formal dinner for Development Studies classmates and their families. The countries represented included China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Germany, and Greece. We had pre-dinner drinks in the cloisters by the college chapel and then moved on to a cozy upstairs room with lots of portraits of dead white men in wigs. I was incredibly grateful that Dave, a member of the catering staff who we always prayed would be the one quarterbacking our MCR dinners, was overseeing things. Dave did throw me one surprise, though: shortly after we were all seated, he came over to me and asked if I wanted to recite the College grace. I think my initial response was on the lines of, “uhhhh… I don’t speak Latin, Dave.” He showed me where both pre- and post-dinner graces were printed in the program and we had a 30-second dress rehearsal. I remember exactly two things from the third of a year of Latin I had in seventh grade (and any Latin scholars in the audience are welcome to correct me on this). First, the letters more or less always make the same sounds, unlike in English; second, it’s pronounced more or less the way a native English speaker would expect. With that slender bit of background knowledge and Dave’s confidence, I read out the grace without any obvious stumbles. I don’t know if the same could be said for my pronunciation, but I doubt anyone in the room had the slightest idea what I was saying. If you're curious you can check out the graces, with translations, here.
Pull my finger. Graduation, like so many other things in Cambridge, is steeped in formality and 800 years of tradition and takes little note of the way the rest of the world prefers to do things. There are lots of graduation ceremonies on different throughout the year, and the timing of any particular student’s graduation depends a lot on the idiosyncrasies of his or her course. There are no go-out-and-get-‘em speeches. Graduates shuffle through their small piece of the all-day ceremony by college, so I wasn’t even with my Development Studies classmates. My required outfit included a tuxedo, a white bow tie and bands (which made me feel like I should be trying somebody for witchcraft in 1690s Salem), a black gown, and a big black hood lined with blue silk draped over my back. I knew little about the ceremony going in and warned my parents not to expect much.
What I did know was that I was going to have to hold some guy’s finger. (Eight hundred years of solemn tradition, building up to… a fart joke?) Each college appoints one of its fellows as Praelector, and from what I can tell that role involves presenting the graduating students and enforcing the dress code. Rumor has it that if one of us students commits a wardrobe infraction, our college Praelector is fined… in bottles of port. Anyway, the graduates from each College march into a fancy old building known as the Senate House, and their Praelector extends a hand to the first four graduates in the phalanx. As each graduate holds onto one of those fingers, the Praelector leads the group forward and gives a brief testimonial, in Latin, to their learning and morals and their fitness to proceed to the degrees which they are to be awarded.
Now comes the really weird part. Picture, at the center of this grand assembly, a fairly senior man or woman sitting in a fancy chair and dressed in a bright red cape lined with white fur. This is (rarely) the Chancellor, Prince Philip; or (less rarely) the Vice Chancellor; or (usually) a deputy of hers, often the Master or President of a college. Our caped MC was the Master of Magdalene College, and the outfit combined with his kind face and round glasses gave him the appearance of a clean-shaven Santa Claus. After the Praelector’s testimonial, each individual graduate’s name is called, and each in turn kneels on a cushion in front of the big chair and extends his or her joined hands as if in prayer. It looked a bit like we were being knighted, minus the part with the sword. The presiding officer then clasps the graduate’s hands and formally confers the degree, in Latin. The new graduate rises, taking extreme care not to trip over the gown in the process, and gives a bow before exiting stage right.
Amazingly, the least ceremonious part was the paper diploma. After all of these traditional flourishes, I was expecting a huge piece of parchment with Latin calligraphy and perhaps a wax seal. Instead, what I got was a piece of 7x10 paper that looks like something I could have easily printed out on a home laser printer. It certifies, in English, that I attended the Congregation of 18 July 2009 and only later gets around to mentioning that I was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. The mode of presentation was no more dramatic: we received our diplomas inside a plastic sleeve from an usher as we exited the Senate House. Like most of my friends, I opted to get a wooden University of Cambridge frame—partly because I fear that no one will believe it’s a diploma otherwise, and partly because I fear that one day I might accidentally toss it out with some old bank statements.
This has probably sounded a bit snarky, and there certainly was plenty of joking all around about the sillier aspects of the ceremony. But like many other things here, I think Cambridge’s odd approach to graduation is best approached with an open mind, a sense of humor, and a healthy dose of respect for eight centuries of history. And most importantly, after the red capes and Latin incantations we all get to walk away as Cambridge alumni—which is really, really cool in any language.
10 July 2009
“we have not become more concerned with men than profit”
Edinburgh – I’ve left the farm, but I suspect it will be days before I can close my eyes without seeing kale or beetroot leaves. On my last day, Uwe took me on a walk to the far corner of the property that they are renting. At 80 acres, the entire farm is far bigger than the area under active cultivation, and I had not even seen most of it prior to this eleventh-hour tour. Uwe told me that before they moved here, their landlord kept a herd of sheep. Their dream is one day to buy the land from him, in partnership with ten or so other families, and divide it into a series of small family crofts. This sort of thing is happening in small pockets all over Scotland, Morven later told me.
If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.
The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.
Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."
There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.
Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.
Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.
On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.
If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.
The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.
Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."
There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.
Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.
Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.
On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.
05 July 2009
dispatches from the farm
Ross-shire, Scotland – In my first 72 hours as a WWOOFer I have harvested potatoes, built trellises for peas, picked strawberries, collected and packed eggs, fed hogs, pulled weeds, and witnessed the beheading of two hens. I am here for a little over a week on a family farm in a moderately isolated patch of the Scottish highlands with Morven, my super-energetic hostess, her builder partner Uwe, their two adorable children, a fellow WWOOFer from Germany named Katrin, and a massive complement of four-legged and winged friends. Somewhere in my head a treatise tying my observations here with the history of the Scottish highlands is simmering—would you expect anything different from me?—but for now, here are a few tidbits from my first days of WWOOFing.
Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.
Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.
How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.
Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.
Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.
Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.
How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.
Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.
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