A cup that doesn't cheer: why the French and the Americans can't make tea

It’s ghastly trying to drink tea in the US or France. They bring you a sorry offering of a cup of hot water, distinctly off the boil once it’s made it to your table, with a tea bag by the side. You dunk the bag in the water and what emerges is an insipid liquid which shares with tea only its colour, and even then in a paler shade.

The cup that cheers but never inebriates
Not that it's particularly cheerful in the US or France

It’s long been a theory of mine that, in the case of the States, the problem was caused by the Boston Tea Party of 1773. In that deplorable incident, a bunch of rebels – or possibly freedom fighters, depending on your point of view – dressed as ‘Indians’ (though the real one were just as much native Americans then as now, they weren’t called that at the time) boarded a tea clipper, broke open its chests and tossed the precious leaves into the chilly waters of Boston harbour. 

That pouring of tea into cold water seems to me to have been a traumatic moment in the development of the American psyche, leading to the nation’s inability to make tea properly to this day.

However, I’ve recently come to know – and enjoy enormously – the work of Edith Wharton. Don’t know her writing? The Age of Innocence is well worth reading. I strongly recommend it.

The early pages of The House of Mirth contain a description of tea making in New York at the turn of the twentieth century that can leave one in no doubt that they knew how to do it. It would seem that the loss of that ability is much more recent than I had believed.

I’m forced to conclude that something far more profound is at work here. Might it be that later waves of immigrants, from such coffee-drinking nations as Italy, left the country with a population that really didn’t understand tea and, what’s more, probably didn’t care?

Because if that’s the answer, I can understand the attitude. It may be true that attaching so much importance to how tea’s made might just be one of our national bad habits over here. Perhaps US indifference to how the stuff should be served is just a salutary hint to us to lighten up a bit.

That would explain the French too, of course. Teaching the British how to behave is very much a French national sport. Why, François Hollande was indulging in it yesterday, telling David Cameron that it was all very well for him to decide he wanted EU laws changed to suit him, but that didn’t mean the rest of Europe was going to go along with the idea. Least of all France.

Such a lot of symbolism riding on the cup that cheers. Just like back in Boston in 1773. It’s clearly much more than a mere beverage.

Enough of such deep thoughts. They’re enough to work up quite a thirst. Time for a cuppa, I reckon.

Just got to make sure the water’s piping hot before it hits the tea.

Bondi and the Barrier: how a great eccentric kept us dry in London

If a Frenchman talks about the weather, claimed a pronunciation exercise I had to do when I was studying that glorious language, it means he has nothing else to talk about. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather as it is today, as it was in the past and as it might be in the future.

Well, let me tell you, it’s a bit bloody wet in England at the moment. In fact, if you happen to live in the area known as the Somerset levels, your property’s likely to have been under water since 15 December. Which I imagine must be a bit wearing, by now.

Plenty of other areas have been hammered pretty badly. Not just rain but gales. And in coastal areas, tidal surges, which have even swept people to their deaths. The weather isn’t just small talk. For some it has been the cause of pretty big talk too.

Such conditions aren’t unprecedented, however, they just happen more often now that global warming’s getting a real grip. But tidal surges led to terrible flooding back on 31 January 1953, just five days after my birth.

I like to think the two events weren’t related.

As a result of that disaster, which mostly affected the East of England including the Thames Estuary, the government called on Hermann Bondi, Principal Scientific Officer, to draw up a report on how to prevent or mitigate such calamities in future. He proposed the creation of a barrier on the Thames to limit flows up the river.

Hermann Bondi. Brilliant, eccentric, entertaining
And right about the flooding

Seventeen years later I became a student at King’s College London, at which oddly enough Bondi was a visiting lecturer. He was the only lecturer I ever had who stuck religiously to class times, starting at precisely five past the hour and stopping equally exactly at five to, as all teachers were required to do but few did. In fact, at five to he would simply put down his chalk and walk out, without saying goodbye or making any kind of comment to suggest he’d finished.

The following week, he’d walk in at five past, pick up his chalk, walk to the board – which no one else would have touched in the intervening period – and say something like ‘cancelling through by x, we get the following statement’, as though there’d been no interruption.

On one occasion, he turned to the class and asked ‘does anyone know what a vector is?’

I was a little surprised no one answered, as it’s a pretty elementary question, and most of the other students were senior to me. I didn’t stop to think that they had perhaps been to more of his lectures than I had.

‘A vector is something with magnitude and direction,’ I volunteered.

‘Aha!’ he said, in his strong Central European Jewish accent, ‘we have here someone who thinks vectors are arrows.’ He shook his head, sad at the foolishness of the world. ‘Very dangerous to give mathematicians arrows. Someone might lose an eye.’

He fell silent, contemplating this dreadful prospect. Then suddenly he looked up.

‘Does anyone here like the Marx brothers films?’

There were some mumbled replies of ‘yes’.

‘I particularly like the scene in Duck Soup,’ he went on, ‘where Groucho is defending Harpo in front of a court martial and he says, “the man in front of you may look like an idiot, and he may behave like an idiot, but don’t be fooled! He is an idiot.” That is how a vector is. If it looks like a vector, and it behaves like a vector, it is a vector.’

That was the only definition of a vector we ever received.

One day during my time at King’s, conditions conspired to bring us close to disaster in Central London. Exceptionally high tides after a lot of rainfall and wind blowing the wrong way made flooding extremely likely. The embankments of the Thames were piled high with sandbags, but the water was lapping at the tops.

The King’s College canteen was in the basement. So it was quite fun to sit down there, with the straining sandbags not 20 metres away and well above the level of my head, and contemplate the crowds gathered ghoulishly on Waterloo Bridge in the hope of watching me drown as I enjoyed my fish and chips.

But then came 1982 and, 29 years after the flood of ’53, the Thames Barrier came into operation. And Bondi was right: it worked. There’s been no repetition of the disaster. A great monument to a fine, eccentric and highly entertaining man.

The Thames Barrier
A fine monument to Bondi. And highly effective

No consolation to the inhabitants of the Somerset Levels, though.

Afterthought I like writing this kind of post. The start has little to do with the end, and practically nothing to do with the middle. But there’s a linking theme. That amuses me in the writing; I hope it amuses you in the reading.

Immigrants: cutting the branch we’re sitting on

After withdrawing some money to pay for the service, I walked over to the car wash where our vehicle, with Danielle sitting behind the steering wheel, was surrounded by seven men with mops and sponges busily covering it in foam and rubbing every speck of dirt off it.

It was barely a couple of minutes later that they dropped sponges and buckets and, as she jumped clear, moved in with brushes and vacuum cleaners to make an equally thorough and comprehensive job of cleaning the inside.

I got chatting with one of the men and it emerged that he was from Romania. He gave me a sideways glance as he said it, worried no doubt that I might have been touched by the anti-immigrant rhetoric that seems to ratchet up every day in Britain. It particularly targets Romanians and Bulgarians: these two groups won automatic right to live and work in Britain on 1 January, after seven years of transitional arrangements since both nations joined the EU in 2007.

There hasn’t been the predicted flood of people from the two countries. There has, however, been a wholly predictable deluge of poorly informed invective against immigrants, charging them with coming to this country to claim benefits (in reality a smaller proportion of immigrants make claims than of native citizens) or indulge in crime (a smaller proportion of immigrants are convicted of offences than of the native population).

Workers not criminals. And doing useful work too
So what's UKIP's problem? Or the Tory right's?

Poorly informed the attacks may be, but they still hurt. 

Immigrants appear in every walk of British life, not just in car washes. In particular, large numbers are employed in healthcare: immigrants make up 11% of total NHS staff and 26% of doctors. And the poison is beginning to get to them. For instance, a trainee doctor in England, Felicia Buruiana, told the Guardian that ‘people would tut or pull a face when I said I was Romanian.’

Are we really so insensitive to the feelings of other people that we are prepared to be that offensive to them, even when they’re working hard to help us – and in the case of healthcare staff, to help us when we most need it?

And to be that offensive based on such a completely inaccurate reading of the impact of immigrants on our society?

The behaviour seems shameful, but also counter-productive: if we deprive ourselves of the services of people who are hardworking or highly skilled, or both, we harm ourselves at least as much as them.

So why do we persist in doing it? Why do we side with the Tory backwoodsmen and the mendacious propagandists of UKIP against such welcome contributors to our quality of life as Dr Buruiana? Isn’t it time we learned to be superior to that? 

Even if we can’t behave better for reasons of ethics, or simply good manners, we should just to protect our own interests.

After all, everyone of us gets ill some time.

Hey, Australia! Happy birthday to us

I can’t remember meeting an Australian I didn’t like. Fine people and a joy to know. 

Not that I like facing them on a sports field. I can’t imagine that any fellow Englishman does. In a bar, however, on a beach, in a dining room – all the ones I’ve had the pleasure to spend some time with have been excellent company.

They’re open, warm-hearted, cheerful, generous, amusing. I’ve been out there on a couple of occasions, at a time when I was living in France. The banter I encountered in Sydney was so like what I was used to in England that it felt like a homecoming. But with more heat and sunshine.

In fact, ever since that experience, I’ve found that an excellent opening gambit to a conversation with an Australian is to tell him that his country is ‘just England with better weather.’ I always find it gets things off on just the right note.

England with better weather

But that’s not the reason I want to pay tribute to the Australians today.

It’s because the entire nation has had the goodness of heart to celebrate my birthday. I appreciate it deeply and thank all those fine people warmly. It strikes me as great generosity on their part to hold Australia Day on the 26th of January.

Now some might think that my daughter-in-law has a better deal than I do: born on the 14th of July, she has the whole of France celebrating her birthday with her. There are nearly three times as many people in France as in Australia. But I say it again, I like the Australians, and I’m more than satisfied that is they who’ve chosen to celebrate with me.

I’m off out shortly to mark the event. I’ll raise a glass to you, Australia. Many happy returns to us both.

Spooks: what becomes of them?

Old soldiers never die, according to the old song, they just fade away.

It must be even worse for spies. What do they turn into? A near lifetime spent tracking opposition sleuths, and being counter-tracked by them, crawling through the Moscow sewers gun in hand to save the world from the most powerful and nefarious organisation it has seen (practically unbeatable by anyone other than a single man with a light Scots brogue), and then – what? A retirement bungalow in Surbiton amongst neighbours who’ve swallowed the story of a career in the Ministry of Transport, and who keep issuing invitations to unbearable bridge evenings where they lose contracts by not drawing trumps?

It’s probably just as well that the reality of a spook’s life doesn’t generally involve much defusing of timers on nuclear bombs, with seconds to spare, but far more checking through e-mails ordering take-away pizzas to find out whether they reveal a nefarious pattern (other than a dislike of anchovies and a preference for capers), or listening to phone calls for minicabs in the hope that they represent something other than a desire to get from central London to Dulwich after the last showing of Casino Royale.

In other words, it isn’t a lot more interesting than spending a career in the Ministry of Transport.

Still, there must be the elite few who live on the edge throughout their careers, and then have to fade into retirement. They fight their fights necessarily in the shadows, and then vanish into obscurity. They hide behind assumed identities and then slide into anonymity.

Take James Bond. Look at his appearance in his heyday:

James Bond in his prime and his most glamorous role

 And look what he’s become:

The same in his latter-day role of grumpy old man

Just your common or garden pensioner, isn’t he? The kind you might expect to meet in a Glasgow pub, wittering on about taxation or Scottish independence. Which is what he mostly does, these days, come to think of it.

So it’s great to come across one spy who has gone from the glamour of that profession into the profession of glamour.

Anna Chapman, née Kushchyenko, was part of a sleeper cell of Russian agents in the US. How glamorous is that? Leading a daily life based on an elaborate fiction while all the time maintaining readiness to spring into action when called on by the fatherland to do her duty. Even in an enemy, that level of dedication has to be pretty inspiring.

Anna Chapman in her role as Mata Hari

As, of course, does the ingenuity of the people sent to track her and her associates down. Step by step they unravelled the web of deception, tracked down the network of links, and identified the individuals. In June 2010, the FBI swooped. They arrested Anna and her nine associates. Within a couple of weeks, she was back in Russia, her whole devious plot foiled, and her life of glamour over.

Except that she’s just shown that it isn’t. She’s back. And not so much in work that is glamorous, as in the promotion of glamour: she’s launched her own fashion range. On her dress designs, the Guardian commented, ‘the biggest shock is they’re actually quite good.’

The Anna Chapman fashion look
I'm told it's called 'modern modesty'

Well, well, well. So one former spy hasn’t faded yet. She's gone from fashioning networks to storming the world of fashion. 

Can’t see it catching on in the shadow lands inhabited by James Bond, though. To say nothing of Smiley’s. Not sure that ‘modern modesty’ was quite their style.

War-weariness? Nothing to do with multiculturalism

It’s funny what a bad press multiculturalism gets. All sorts of failings are attributed to it. The latest charge against it, today, was that it was producing a growing war-weariness in Britain.

Now that’s a really curious accusation. It seems nothing short of perverse to go looking for a cause of war weariness other than weariness with war. After all, a whole bunch of US allies sent soldiers into Iraq, and ten years later the deaths are up there in six figures while the country’s a chaotic mess as well as being a client of Iran’s, the West’s favourite bogey figure in the region.

The Afghan war’s lasted even longer, and Afghanistan’s a complete basket case. The one achievement of the invasion was to kick out Al Qaida’s friends, the Taliban; just last week, a Taliban spokesman was crowing that once Western troops are out next year, the movement will be right back in control again. It would take a pretty convinced optimist to think he might not have a point.

How we turned Afghanistan into a haven of peace and plenty

You don’t have to be multicultural to have got pretty weary of war after those two episodes of our recent history. 

In any case, it doesn’t seem to me that we need less multiculturalism just now. Rather more might be an improvement. I mean, the point of multiculturalism is to consider the possibility that other cultures may not be entirely worthless, and may actually have something legitimate to say for themselves. Or at least, that ours may not be so obviously superior to theirs that we’re entitled to kick them around over here and invade their homes over there. 

A good starting point would be Oliver Cromwell’s plea to the Scottish Presbyterians: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ That salutary capacity to doubt oneself didn’t actually stop Cromwell giving the Irish a pretty miserable time, at the very moment when he wrote those words. It would be fun, on the other hand, to think that getting on for four centuries later we might have learned to go a little further and do a little better.

Imagine how it might have been had Tony Blair, say, considered the possibility that he was wrong. He might not have been so keen to invade Iraq. At least 100,000 Iraqis might not have lost their lives.

Now, I say that about Blair because no one could suggest that Dubya might have entertained any doubts. That would have required that he hold one idea while comparing it with another. Two ideas? Getting his head round ‘we’re gonna get that Saddam guy’ pretty much exhausted his capacity in that direction.

Fortunately, few of us are quite as intellectually challenged as Dubya. It would be good if rather few of us were as closed to other points of view as Blair. Then we might open up a little to multiculturalism and perhaps avoid a few wars.

Of which more and more of us are well and truly weary.

It’s Martin Luther King day in the United States, a nation which even a man with a dream like his, could hardly have imagined would have a black President within half a century of that great speech.

Not of course that it really does. Funny how we all accept that someone who’s half black is black, whereas the fact that he’s half white doesn’t make him white.

In any case, in the Presidency of Obama, it seems appropriate to mark Martin Luther King with a few thoughts about the first ever black head of state, in that part of the Western world that used to be considered the preserve of whites.

That head of state was not Obama, though like him he was part black. Which made him, like Obama, entirely black, of course. Black ancestry, it seems, is just far more powerful than white, so the slightest trace of the former wipes out any effect that could have been exerted by the latter.

The earliest white state with a black ruler was the newly created Italian dukedom of Florence, rich financially from centuries of banking, culturally from being the cradle of the Renaissance. And the black leader, back then in the sixteenth century? The first Duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, nicknamed ‘Il Moro’, the Moor.

He was, it seems, the son of a Medici Pope, Clement VII.

The son of a Pope? I hear you gasp. Yes, yes, those were lax times. Catholic priests were sometimes less than irreproachable in their sexual behaviour, hard though that may be to believe these days.

I say ‘it seems’ he was the son of that Pope, because he was passed off as the child of a different Medici so he could be treated as legitimate. These days, people tend to treat that story as no more than a smokescreen.

And his mother? A mixed race serving woman in the household.

In other words, a great Florentine family was indulging, nearly three centuries earlier, in the same practices as Thomas Jefferson applied in Virginia, when he fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings. They were light enough in complexion to pass for white, but naturally, like Alessandro and Obama, they were black all the same.

Alessandro de Medici, the Moor
Remember, a bit black is black

Things didn’t work out too well for Alessandro. Seems he suffered from Bill Clinton syndrome and couldn’t turn down the opportunity for a sexual adventure if one presented. His cousin, Lorenzino (popularly known as Lorenzaccio, and the ‘accio’ ending in Italian never means anything good), invited him over to enjoy the favours of his sister (Lorenzaccio’s, not Alessandro’s). And then bumped him off. 

Sad. At least Obama seems well above all that kind of stuff. Shame Clinton wasn’t. What a presidency his might have been, without all that impeachment mess.

Still, these are gloomy thoughts Americans shouldn’t be contemplating on a public holiday. Have a great MLK day, cousins across the pond. Have a dream in his tribute. And a ball.