South of the Mason-Dixon line

There was a “listicle” (ugh) on BuzzFeed recently: “26 Questions People from the South Need to Answer”.

Here are some of them:

“Why do people from the south always feel compelled to talk to everyone they see? WE’RE STRANGERS. Leave me alone.”

Definitely true.  People are just generally friendlier here.  As someone with introvertish tendencies, this occasionally makes me uncomfortable, especially if stuck in an elevator.  But actually, after the miserable gits who generally inhabit public transport in London, it’s rather refreshing.

 

“People from the South… Why do you guys monogram EVERYTHING????”

Definitely true.  All the blokes I see seem to have embroidered belts.  I have a South Carolina key chain, and South Carolina koozies.  (There’s another one: a koozie, apart from being a nightmare in autocorrect, is something you put around a beer can/bottle to keep it cold in the hot sun.)

 

“Why do people from the south call large roaches water bugs?”

Or, around here, Palmetto bugs.  This one should be obvious: “oh damn, there’s a Palmetto bug in the kitchen again” sounds so much nicer than “holy fuck, get that fucking cockroach out of my fridge”.

 

“Why do white people from the South always have weird names for their grandmas?”

This one merited a pop quiz in the office – and it’s partly true.  There are some Grannys and Grandads, but also more unique names: Grancy, PapPap, Dota and even Budge.

 

“Why do Southerners dress for college football games like they’re going to church?”

I don’t know, and I don’t even know if it’s true, not having been to a college football game.    Maybe because college football is a religion for Southerners?  Anyone want to weigh in?

 

PS. in case anyone is worried, there has NEVER been a palmetto bug in our fridge.

It’s official: since moving to the Deep South, I’ve gone soft.  In fact, I think the process started when I left North Yorkshire in the 1990s and headed south in the UK – though Cambridge always had its share of freezing winds direct from the Urals.  But here in Charleston, things are a little different.

Let’s just say that the south doesn’t deal very well with cold weather.  For example: the other week was a bit of a cold one; the temperatures dropped below freezing for a couple of nights.  This extreme of temperature had the weather stations putting out a wind chill warning, and local radio \ suggesting everyone should wrap up and stay inside.  Meanwhile up in Colorado, several feet of snow had fallen and everyone was getting outside!

The average low temperature in January here is 6 celsius , or 43 in old money. (And there’s another thing: I am totally not used to using Fahrenheit.  Frankly I have no idea what it means.  When people talk about temperatures in the 70s I just smile politely and look slightly blank).  So generally, when winter weather hits, no-one is ready for it.

And now, nor am I.  Weather that, when I was in London, I would have remarked was “a little parky” (or brass monkey) is now eye-wateringly cold.  Heated seats in the car are a must, every morning.  Brrrrr, it ain’t half cold here.  But this is good.  I don’t miss the cold weather in the slightest.  Move north again?  No ta.

 

 

I know what you are thinking.  He’s really lost the plot.  The writers’ block has come back. All that sunshine in South Carolina has addled his brain.  And I am sure that this was exactly what the butcher in Publix supermarket was thinking, as I tried to explain to him why I need beef fat.

“Do you sell beef fat?”

“??”

“I want to use it to make a dessert, you see.”

“??!?”

“You mix it with raisins, sugar and spices – ”

“??!!??!!”

” – it’s a British Christmas delicacy.”

“??!!?  No sir, we don’t sell fat.”

Backing up a bit, for our American readers… in the UK we often have mince pies at Christmas.  Simply pastry cases with mincemeat in them.  Delicious, especially with a piece of Wensleydale cheese.

(Warning: real research, from a book and not from Wikipedia, follows.)  Mincemeat, once upon a time, was actual chopped meat, with spices and fruits added.  Gradually it became sweeter and more of a dessert rather than a main course, although mutton was commonly used in mincemeat as late as the early twentieth century.  Samuel Pepys records eating mince-pie at Christmas in 1662 (along with “a mess of plum-porridge and roasted pullet”.

I have been a figure of fun amongst some of my friends for making my own mincemeat, despite the fact you can quite easily buy it in jars.  A key ingredient is suet, processed beef fat – the best suet comes from the fat surrounding the kidneys, I am told.  Anyway, suet doesn’t seem to exist in any supermarkets here in the US, hence my fruitless trek to the butcher at Publix.  Luckily in Whole Foods Market, the butcher was only too happy to let me have some beef fat.  So this year I can be even more of a figure of fun, because not only have I made my own mincemeat, I have made my own suet too.

Next challenge: converting all our American friends to this peculiarly British delicacy…

 

 

 

 

The fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving.  (Incidentally, this is my excuse for the lack of blogging last Wednesday, as I was busy dry-brining my turkey.)  This is one of the more historic of American holidays, dating originally from when the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest in the “New World”in 1621.  From then it has gradually developed into the eating and shopping binge that we know and love today.

When I first started in the bullion market in London in the late 2000s, Thanksgiving was known for a brokerage company hosting a particularly drunken party with some staggeringly inappropriate vodka luges.  Since the financial crisis, that all stopped and most City folk in London just take advantage of the US markets being closed to head home early, normally via the pub.

Over here, it’s a major event.  I’ve always thought that because Boxing Day is never a holiday in the US, whilst the Friday after Thanksgiving often is, Thanksgiving feels like a more important holiday than Christmas.  It’s certainly got most of the trappings associated with a European Christmas: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, roast vegetables, and so on.  But I don’t get the obsession with pumpkins.  What is it with pumpkin pie?  Ugh!  I’d much rather have pecan pie.

In fact, Thanksgiving dinner even merits its own Wikipedia page.  I was a bit English about the whole thing: there was no mac & cheese (heresy in the South, I know) and the sweet potatoes were fairly simple – some recipes call for cooking them with molasses, or even with marshmallows! I also failed to garnish anything with bacon.  Finally – what is the authentic way to cook a turkey?  There are pages and pages written about the relative merits of wet vs dry brining (dry is better), the best way to cook it (spatchcocking is apparently the best, so long as you have some butchery skills) and so on. One of our neighbours was extolling the virtues of deep frying – which seems to be as crazy as it sounds.  Basically you drop an entire turkey into a vat of bubbling oil and wait a while.  And whilst we are on the subject of all things crazy… turducken.  It might be delicious – but I just can’t see past the “turd”.

Still, I think – or hope – that everyone enjoyed the meal.  And the four days of turkey afterwards (note to self: make the carcass into stock).

My God – Hallowe’en is huge in this country.  Even as early as the beginning of October, the decorations started going up.  There were skeletons and ghouls hanging from porches, tombstones in gardens, spiders’ webs everywhere, and pumpkins by the thousand.  Prize for the best Hallowe’en display we saw goes to this house, with Clinton and Trump fighting and being refereed by a zombie (this is the ONLY election reference in this entire blog, I promise):

In the UK, Hallowe’en – despite its growing popularity – is really a bit of an afterthought.  It’s only a few days before that the pumpkins start to appear in force, and trick-or-treating is still a bit ad hoc.  Over here, it’s the first in a three-month holiday season: first Hallowe’en then, when the gibbeted ghouls have been cut down, the Thanksgiving decorations go up and the President pardons a turkey (maybe this year the turkey will be Hillary Clinton – oh sorry, broken my promise there), then the Thanksgiving decorations come down and the Christmas decorations go up, and before you know it we are in to the New Year and the Presidential Inauguration.

Of course, the schools got in on the act too – the kids dressed up for school, and they had a Hallowe’en carnival, then the actual day was a holiday.  The evening, as you can imagine, involved a great deal of trick-or-treating.  Mostly just treating, actually.  The little kids ran round like crazy things grabbing sweeties (candy) at every house they could find.  The bigger kids tried to dress scary, which worked until the voice from behind the Scream mask was that of an unbroken teenage boy.  Keep trying, chum.  Some adults got very into it, dressing up – see the overgrown Oompa Loompa here.  Something about the colour of his skin reminds me of someone I’ve seen on the TV a lot recently (there I go again!)

Others just trailed behind their over-sugared children.  Luckily a couple of public-spirited dads were handing out beer to harassed parents who looked thirsty.  Alice managed to collect more candy than you can shake a stick at; given her current rate of two sweeties per day, she will be finished eating them some time in 2018.

Bonus photo: our house looking spooky.  I should enter this in one of those iPhone photography competitions.

 

I guess a lot of people on the southeast coast of the US watch the weather forecasts pretty closely in September, the height of hurricane season.  I had been checking the progress of Hurricane Matthew fairly compulsively since it formed and for a quite a while it seemed as if it would pass close by, but not dangerously.  Indeed, the first I found out that it might be more serious than I expected was when two friends cancelled going to the pub, because they had heard that an evacuation order was imminent.  All of a sudden, this shit got real.

Sure enough, the next day, the State Governor announced that the entire coastal region was going to be evacuated.  Some people left immediately, whilst others, including us, decided to watch and wait.  In fact, we were um-ing and ah-ing right until the last minute, finally leaving Charleston the morning before the storm was due to hit.  Never having experienced a hurricane before, our preparations were a little shambolic: completely over-prepared in some ways (rope, gaffer tape and a Stanley knife in the car – check) and completely under-prepared in others (it took hours to close the storm shutters, as the staples didn’t line up with the bolts and mostly had to be unscrewed and re-attached).

Some people used the evacuation as an excuse to visit relatives, or for a holiday in the mountains.  We settled for a couple of days in Charlotte, NC.  This was far enough away from the coast to be out of the reach of the wind and flooding, but not far enough away to avoid the rainfall.  We didn’t spend a great deal of time outside.

We weren’t the only people in Charlotte: we bumped into Alice’s science teacher in the Lego store and Charlie’s employer in Whole Foods, amongst others.  A number of our friends and neighbours had stayed, though, and they kept us up-to-date with the storm.

Why did it take us so long to decide whether to stay or leave?  Partly because we’ve only recently bought this house, and wanted to stay here and look after it.  Partly because  – slightly embarrassingly – we were interested to know what a hurricane would be like.  And partly because the forecasts didn’t look too bad.  But the reasons we left, in the end: we knew that a slight change in the forecast could make a huge difference to the wind speed, the expected flooding, and so on; we had to think about Alice; and we are lucky enough to be in the situation where we have the choice to move to safety.

So here comes the serious part of this blog: I can’t begin to describe how lucky we were.  We live in a rich, developed country.  We have the means to flee from an advancing hurricane, and we have a place to go.  Our houses are built to withstand storms, and we have the technology to forecast them.  If there is damage, we have insurance, and the government, to fall back on. Meanwhile in Haiti, the death toll nears 1,000, and around 175,000 people are reported as being homeless.  It’s times like these that show quite how large the gap between the first and third worlds still is.

Hope for Haiti

 

 

 

 

 

Why is it dangerous?  Not because I am in any physical peril – I’ve not been to a Trump rally.  Rather, it’s difficult to be a dispassionate observer of politics without one’s own bias getting in the way, and then you can just sound like you are hectoring.  I don’t have too much of a bias in this election on policy, as my personal politics are neither Republican nor Democrat: I’m too socially liberal to vote for the GOP, and too economically liberal to vote Democrat.  Luckily, as an immigrant, I’m not allowed to vote so I don’t have to make that decision.

In any case, South Carolina is not “in play”.  According to the polls, South Carolina’s 9 electoral votes are around 93% likely to go to Trump.  Demographically, Trump gets more support from those who identify as religious, those who are older, those who are white, and those with less education.  Clinton takes all the opposite supporters: the young, the less religious, the better educated, plus around 85% support from blacks.

Given these demographics, it’s probably no surprise that Clinton is ahead on the West Coast and in the North East, whilst the rest of the country is swathed in Republican red, barring a few outliers like Colorado.  It’s all fascinating for data geeks – the problem is that the wall-to-wall news coverage is finally starting to grate.

Personally, I don’t find either of the candidates very inspiring.  Of course if I had to choose, I couldn’t imagine an unstable egomaniac like Trump as Commander-in-Chief, so I would plump for Hillary.  But it’s certainly not a positive choice for me, nor would it be for many others, more like the lesser of two evils.  Less pro-Hillary than anti-Donald.

And here is where the potential problem arises, and we can draw an unfortunate parallel with Brexit.  In the UK, Millennials were strongly in favour of remaining in Europe, but didn’t turn out to vote, only to be disgusted by the outcome.  Here in the US, Millennials and younger voters were strong supporters of Obama, but are not as enthusiastic about Clinton.  Of course, they would be appalled by the prospect of a Trump Presidency.  But will they turn out and vote?  Or will they, as in Britain, stay at home and then complain furiously on Twitter that they didn’t like the result they couldn’t be bothered to vote for.

Anyway, the best commentary on the Presidential election we have seen is this billboard, which has appeared just outside Charleston:

After a lengthy hiatus, where I was ill, we bought a house, we went on holiday, we were ill again, and so on, I have finally got myself back to the blog.  I hope you’ve missed me.

Two things to talk about this week.  First we are getting a good, old-fashioned, Yorkshire-style drenching from Tropical Storm Julia, who has parked herself just off the coast.  It’s been raining solidly for 24hrs so far and shows no immediate signs of stopping.  This being the Low Country, there isn’t a great deal of place for rain water to drain to, especially when the tides are high, so the lowest-lying parts of the area normally end up under water.  Apparently this is partly why so many people have SUVs or trucks, even though they live in town: so they can drive through the flooded streets without getting waterlogged.

Anyway, a day of solid rain prompted some absolutely hilarious jokes from my new colleagues: “I guess you’re used to this weather, Chris.” “I’m sure you feel at home now.”  Yeah, nice one guys, ha ha.

On a slightly drier note, it’s Charleston Beer Week at the moment.  So on Monday night, some friends and I went to two new breweries: one called Ghost Monkey, and one called Two Blokes – because the owners are, um, two blokes.  Here’s Ghost Monkey: despite being in an unprepossessing warehouse building with no obvious entrance, it’s pretty funky when you get inside, with a pool table, live music and a dog or two.

The beer is pretty tasty too, and strong – though pretentiously-named.  I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a pint of “Hey Bruh?”, so had to go generic and call it IPA instead!

The Charleston Brews Cruise (yes, really) took us to the next brewery, a similar warehouse-style place, run by the eponymous Two Blokes.  Both of said blokes have stupendous facial hair: the head brewer has gone full Fu Manchu.  I’m sure beards are obligatory for craft brewing.  The beer at Two Blokes was excellent, though it was also so strong that after only a couple more drinks I was trying to get myself home to collapse in an embarrassed lightweight heap.

Of course, as a British transplant I shouldn’t be celebrating the Fourth of July.  If you don’t know, this is the date when, in 1776, the thirteen colonies declared independence from Great Britain.  South Carolina, where we are, was one of the original thirteen colonies.

But as we were here, we thought we should join in the festivities – and it was a truly exhausting day. First up, a procession through the local neighbourhood (we skipped the early morning 5k run) culminating in the national anthem, a reading of the declaration of independence, and the pledge of allegiance.  We processed in a decorated golf cart – I don’t think we won the award for most pimped golf cart, but there’s always next year.

The most uplifting thing about the morning was a gentleman called Adam Gorlitsky, who finished the 5k run despite being paralysed from the waist down, using a re-walk exoskeleton. No mean feat, even more so given the heat and humidity.  (Here‘s his website, if you are interested.)

Following the procession, it was already getting way too hot, so we decided to throw ourselves into the river to cool off.  One of the great things about the area we live in is that there is a boat dock where you can jump into the creek.  Given that the tide was out, it was a good 10ft from the pavilion to the water, but that certainly didn’t seem to phase Alice, or Charlie.

It reminded me a little bit of when I was younger and used to climb up to the top diving board after my swimming lesson.  I’d walk out to the end, thinking “You can really do it this time, Chris”.  Then I’d look down – and decide that actually I’d be better off going back down the ladder.

After the dock, we obviously hadn’t spent enough time in the water, so headed off to the swimming pool for an hour or so.  And after that, we somehow spontaneously ended up at our friends’ house over the road, drinking cocktails and eating pulled pork sliders whilst the children – again – went in the pool.  Fireworks?  Did I mention the fireworks?  By the time the day finished, we were pooped – and I thought it was meant to be a holiday…

What I wanted to say when I started this blog was that the US really goes out of its way to celebrate on its special days.  And this makes me a bit sad about the UK.  There are so many amazing holidays in the British Isles, often with their origins lost in the mists of time, but often I feel like us Brits – particularly Londoners – are embarrassed to celebrate them.   So, England – dance around that Maypole!  Celebrate St George’s Day!  Don’t be shy!

 

 

Where to begin?!

Until the middle of last week, a large majority of Americans had no idea what was going on with “Brexit”: no idea why such a vote was happening, and no idea what the consequences would be one way or another.  Which, to be quite frank with you, didn’t make them any different from a large majority of Brits.

Now, of course, there have been huge moves in global markets, so many more people know something has happened.  As the local Brits, people are asking us what’s going on, and what our opinions are.  It’s hard to put our personal situation (long sterling assets, still) aside and give a dispassionate answer, and it’s even harder to give a clear explanation about why it actually matters so much – either to Britain or to the world.

It’s almost certainly the case that the UK vote won’t matter as much in the longer term as it seems like it does today, that markets are overreacting as they always do, that those people who are calling for a European banking collapse are hyperventilating drama merchants, and that equities and currencies will rebound given some time.  Don’t forget that Europe would take the gold medal in an intergalactic fudging competition: when Ireland rejected the treaty of Lisbon in a referendum in 2008, the result was conveniently put aside and another referendum was held the following year, which received the “correct” result; and in 2005 France rejected the EU constitution in a referendum, which has had no impact at all.

One comment doing the rounds on social media is that Britons have had a bit of superiority complex watching American politics and the improbable rise of the orange man with the stuffed weasel on his head.  “America might be the land of the free, but at least in the UK we aren’t stupid enough to consider voting without considering the long-term consequences.”  Ah well.

Talking of The Donald, the hilarity of the week to date has been his recent trip to Scotland, where he congratulated the locals on voting to leave the EU….errrrr…. except Scotland wanted to stay in.  Hence Scots took to Twitter to insult him.  The problem here is that the language used this abuse is peculiarly British.  So I’ve had to answer the question from my colleagues “have you actually called someone a spoon?” and “what the hell is a c*ckwomble?”  I was more than happy to explain, as you can imagine – and I have actually called someone a spoon, yes.

 

Finally, I might have mentioned that we have plenty of sport on TV in the office.  Unfortunately this means that I saw the “other” Brexit, as a bunch of clueless idiots bumbled their way out of Europe…