The United States of Eccentricity

You know, it's kind of ironic, the way the English have always had the reputation for eccentricity.

Clearly, the occasional English person is a certifiable eccentric. There was my uncle Charlie, for example - Aunt Deidre had constantly to intervene to stop him ironing the shar pei, on the grounds that it was "all creased". In his more eccentric moments he used to send the butler out to  drill the squirrels, apparently under the illusion that they were a division of the Anglian Regiment. And of course he spent the last six years of his life convinced he was a parking meter in the Caledonian Road. Which was awkward. Especially for the traffic wardens, when he requested they collect the day's takings. But I digress.

When you consider the religious movements they engender, the people of the USA are clearly miles ahead of us. I can barely think of a decent act of religious daftness in England since the End of Days mania that surrounded the last days of John Mason. Oh sure, there was that rector in Northamptonshire that used to keep goats, but he was hardly trying to be eccentric in the great scheme of things.

Whereas in the States you can barely throw a brick in some built-up areas without hitting a bloke who's got his own theory on the end of the world - or some strange concept of how many wifes, or indeed goats, a man is entitled to. And you can barely shake a tree without a couple of survivalists falling out of it and looking suspiciously at you in case you're the Dark One, a commie or homosexual - or all three.

I'm pleased to say that Hnaef is a calm character, who will not be spending his time across the Pond shaking trees or throwing bricks. Instead, as the time passes until he realises I may not have been quite so altrustic in insisting he took his trip "before the ash gets here", he is watching and observing. And I think he may have found the answer to why here in England we barely get past a bit of an ironic comment on each other's religious traditions, and some devout ministers barely believe in God at all - while in the States there's a new date for Armageddon held by every Christian.

Tea.

Isn't it obvious? The English had the Reformation, burning of Protestants, the torture and judicial murder of Catholics as traitors, the Civil War, John Mason, the Popish Plot - and then we "borrowed" India for a while and started drinking tea. Whereas the Americans think tea is for chucking in harbours (or harbors, for our trans-Atlantic cousins). But they have access to South America, and drink coffee.

Tea it was that brought, in England, a peaceful Enlightenment. Indeed, judging by most church coffee, the ministers and church committees, instinctively realising the danger that coffee can cause, have gone out of their way to encourage people to drink anything other than coffee. Faced with church coffee, who's not going to drink tea?
Whereas the French, maddened by strong coffee and Gauloises, chopped their king's head off and renamed the months of the year. And the Yanks opened Starbucks and invented Nirvana and Friends.  How are the Americans, consuming coffee as it seems on every corner, ever going to keep a clear head and stop discovering new theories of the End of the World?

So, my friends - if you want to calm down the Americans, have them adopt fewer doomsday cults and a more restrained line in clerical vestments - encourage them to drink tea. And make sure they don't put the milk in first. Ugh.

American musings

I am in America at the moment, on a leave of absence, at the Archdruid's suggestion after the Anglican revelation, and have noticed that it is, in many ways, different from Husborne Crawley. Or even Luton.

For a start, it turns out that the drive on the wrong side of the road. And that, if the lorry (sorry: "truck") driver I met as I drove the hire car out of the airport is anything to go by, they have a large and expressive vocabulary.

But two things have struck me forcibly. And I am worried that there may be a correlation. First, Americans cannot, just cannot, grasp how to make a proper cup of tea. I have tried explaining, and even the hotel staff for whom English (though not the Queen's English) is their first language fail miserably to understand. And it's not as if there are Polish, Turkish, even French staff in Enhlish hoyels who have such diffuculties. I'm not being unreasonable. I'm not asking for loose leaf tea. Or even a pot. A bag in a mug will do. But please, please, I beg, pour the water straight off the boil onto the tea. Or it doesn't work. And I just want standard tea. Not a poor Earl Grey. English breakfast, or similar. With milk. Not, for the love of all things Beaker, "half and half".

Second, the average Episcopalian (yes, I'm indulging my Anglican leanings) congregation is enthusiastic, thriving, welcoming, generous and has a good proportion of people in it under 40. Under 30, come to that. This, as any regular Church of England churchgoer will tell you, is against the natural order.

Is there a connection? And if so, can I fix their errant Anglicanism by teaching them to make tea? I think I may have found a mission.

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