Six kinds of Anglophilia

1) Voices
While I was on the plane on the way over, I was wondering why I was finding myself so taken with British phrases and voices. When the flight attendant -- who really was turned out in 50s perfection, complete with practical heels, perfect bun, and red and blue scarf knotted round her neck -- issued instructions about 'hand luggage' in her lilting British accent, it sounded so melodious that I didn't even really stop to think that I was mooning over someone talking about suitcases. Now that I've had a bit more time to adjust, I've become a bit more self-critical on this point, and a bit more sensitive to content. So yesterday, when a friend of a friend of Tom's told me that all Americans carry guns, I didn't just say "mmm-hmm" and nod happily. This was the very same guy who told me that if you staged Hamlet, but without all the death and tragedy, it would be the 'American' version.

2) Curries
During my trip this summer, I got a brief introduction to the belly-stretching wonder that is the English curry. The English curry is the kind of curry made by diasporic Indians and Pakistanis. Like a dialect, it's particular to time and place. I'm hardly an expert, but I've learned enough to know that it goes best with beer and that for some it's a sign of machismo to order it so hot that you sweat. Suffice it to say, I'm not really all that macho. Anyhow, Tom and I made a curry the other night when Tom's friend Harry (not Harry Perrin, but philosophy Harry) was coming round for dinner. I'm sure it was a simplified version, but it took two different combinations of spices (masalas) and cooked for ages in the oven in this large ceramic pot. Nothing to rival the Tandoori Palace, but pretty good for homemade.

3) Theater
The reason Hamlet came up in the first place in the pub was that we'd just come from seeing a really excellent version of it. It'd been years, maybe even a decade, since I'd seen a production, and so I was looking forward to seeing it on stage. They'd gotten Derek Jacobi to do the voice of the ghost, which was quite impressive, but a bit out of place, because the production was cast entirely from Cambridge students, and both Hamlet and Ophelia looked at once 12 and 22. Anyhow, watching Hamlet is a bit like reading the Bible, in that you suddenly remember that that's where all those phrases come from. It's funny memory-work, too, if you remember the lines out of sequence as I was last night. I was getting concerned that they'd cut "to sleep, perchance to dream," but then it showed up after all.

As for the production, the daring decision they'd made was to have a tank of water, sort of Hirst-style, on stage the whole time. When you came into the theater, you thought, "Oh, well, Ophelia's going to end up there," but they used it brilliantly -- as a platform during the play within the play, as the grave with Yorick's skull, and, during the scene when Hamlet calls Polonius a fishmonger, a way for him to avoid answering Polonius. He dives and surfaces between delivering his lines, and he's reading a book underwater.

4) Funny anecdotes about Blake
Apparently when Southey was visiting Blake one time, he knocked at the door and heard a distant call from Blake at the back of the house that he should let himself in. "We're just being Adam and Eve," Blake said. When Southey walked to the back of the house, he found Blake and his wife reading Paradise Lost stark naked.

5) Peep Show
Any summary I might offer would do it a disservice, and I have to say that the fourth season, which I just saw in two three-episode jags, is a bit dark, but this is amazing comedy. You can get the first season off Netflix, and rarely has the interior monologue been used to greater effect. Plus Bob Ross has a minor role as God. NB: it has nothing to do with actual peep shows; the title just refers to seeing into someone's head.

6) Record players
In fairness, there's nothing particularly English about record players, but Tom has an amazing B & O one here in the apartment that was his father's and it's been making me very happy. It's on a table under this graphite drawing of a very 70s gentleman, complete with gigantic 70s mustache, who superintends the whole operation and looks very, very cool no matter what you put on. Berg, Lekman, Simon & Garfunkel, the Specials: it's always the same expression from him. I dig.