ME - IN NEED OF COMFORT; YOU - MERRY & OLD
It's pale and chunky and shot through with big, blue veins. Sounds like my aging thighs. But, trust me, it's something even tastier: a wedge of Amber Valley Blue Stilton, the "King of English Cheeses."
It's my latest purchase from Brits, a store here devoted to all things from the Emerald Isle. I've become addicted to this place, its squeaky wood floors and well-ordered shelves and all the prim, well-packaged things on them.
What is so comforting about British things?
I mean, I'm not a "comfort shopper," one of those people who try to spend their way out of existential angst by buying a lot of crap they don't need. I don't even understand that. When I get depressed, I just like to sit on my ass and feel sorry for myself. Comfort eaters I understand, because devouring a tub of cookies doesn't interfere with sitting on your ass and feeling sorry for yourself.
Not that I haven't made the occasional comfort purchase because I weakly succumbed to the notion that it would make my life better. Occasionally I get seduced by, say, a big row of pink fluffy towels at Target and have to buy some. But as soon as I get home I'm disenchanted. I realize that it's not the two towels hanging sparely in my bathroom that I really coveted, but the whole wall of pink, fluffy towels. It was the effect of 50 together — pillowy, plush, excessive — that touched my aesthetic. As savvy a consumer as I am, I can still be a huge sucker for marketing displays.
But this British stuff is the real deal. My enthusiasm for it doesn't wane. It lasts to the last drop of lemon curd in the jar, the last morsel of Wensleydale in the package, the last crumb of cream crackers in the cupboard. Then I want more. Whether I'm happy or sad, hungry or full, it's comforting on all occasions.
I was thinking the other day that the British know so much about the good things in life — sex excluded, of course — because of that whole empire deal.
For centuries they just traipsed around the globe pillaging (the raping they left to the Spaniards) treasures and foodstuffs and culture and know-how from their many colonies. So you end up with this tiny little island in the North Atlantic that has a "Best of Everything on Earth" collection that no one else can rival. Pungent cheeses and creamy soaps and malty ales and milky toffee and fragrant teas and spicy chutney and tart marmalades and clotted cream and Portmeirion porcelain, for heaven's sake.
Not to mention treacle and port and currant chewing gum and mushroom ketchup and malt vinegar and crumpets and citrus curds and kidney pies.
And don't get me wrong. I'm not an Anglophile. I mean, I used to be. In junior high I could list every British monarch back to William the Conqueror. I could tell you which Bronte sibling wrote which book and when.
I wanted an old MG. But my lust has mellowed. British accents tend to annoy me. British humor often fails to amuse me. Obsessions with the royal family, so tediously common, strike me as banal. Still, I have a terrible weakness for certain British things, especially those that come in pretty packages that can be bought five blocks from my house.
God save my favorite store!
posted by kc @ 1:43 PM
12 comments
12 Comments:
I’d say you are so lucky that you never got the MG. If you had, you disenchantment would have been precipitous. So they have some good marmalade there? I like to make scones and eat them with a strong, slightly bitter, marmalade, but I have a hard time finding one that isn’t cloyingly sweet and lacking in fruit flavor.
A few years back I read a book about the British Empire that argued that the Brits were as successful as they were in part because of their willingness to “go native”. Young men would ship out to some strange place with a willingness to learn the local language and customs, and they might stay for decades or even their whole lives. In India, for instance, they got on very well for nearly a century by adapting to and accommodating the culture instead of trying to change it. It wasn’t until religious reformers showed up with liberal ideas (like not burning widows on their husband's funeral pyre) in the later Victorian era that they started having revolts and the like.
So it doesn’t surprising me that the British were always on the lookout for the good tidbits to be found in all these cultures. I’m sure they were all chauvinists to some degree, but not so much so that they didn’t realize that all things Brit could be even better with, say, a nice curry.
You didn't even mention the Marmite! Mmmmm....
I think a lot of people go through an Anglophile phase. A few years ago I was looking to see what it would take to get a work visa to get a job at The Guardian. Didn't seem likely to happen. I was going for Spring Break '03, but war broke out and the some of the guys I was going with freaked out about the terror alerts, so we went to Vegas instead.
One of these days I am going to take a trip to London, though.
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Yes, DW, the marmalade is great, not too sweet. I will pick you up some. They have like 20 different brands of orange marmalade alone. It'd be fab on warm scones with Devon cream.
Yeah, the British are good at going native. I always had the sense that British people, particularly at the height of empire, lived in such a stuffy, gray culture at home that their assignments in the tropics and deserts and Orients of the world were like a breath of new life, and some of them took to it like wildfire. I'm thinking particularly of Sir Richard Burton, who tramped through Africa and the Mideast and translated the Arabian Nights, and, of course, T.E. Lawrence. Did you ever read George Orwell's novel "Burmese Days"? Same premise. Or Forster's "A Passage to India"?
George! We should go to London instead of Vegas in August. Wouldn't you rather drink warm Guinness on the banks of the Thames than some watered-down well drink in Sin City? Wouldn't you rather visit Jane Austen's former home than Liberace's. Wouldn't you rather take a day trip to Canterbury than one to the Hoover Dam?
Actually, it would be pretty cool. It also would be more expensive, which is why it doesn't look like a jaunt across the pond is likely.
Bullocks! How many times do you think you live? Twice? Thrice?
ONCE!
I almost went to England once, but I got into a little trouble with the law just before I was supposed to go, and I wasn't allowed to leave Kansas for a while.
I sure hope I get another chance someday.
Umm ... so you say you have nothing to blog about? That sounds like an entry to me.
I know, I know, but I only have a couple of interesting stories about my life, so once I write about those, I'll never have anything else to say!
By the way, this particular story will include a high-speed chase and a sledgehammer, among other things.
If you keep reading Erin's blog, she'll tell you all about it. She has to get all the way to 1996 first, though!
But I should tell the story, too. There's something special about seeing the story from the perspective of the felon.
By all means go to England instead Vegas. Vegas is nothing other than a festering cancer oozing out across a beautiful desert. I mean, how long can you laugh at a bad joke—an hour? On the other hand, how ever long your trip to England is, it will be too short.
Agatha Christie! Agatha Christie!
I have all 70-something of her novels in battered paperback, and I've been reading them in order for more than a year when I have a yen for high tea and murder.
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