What is the proper etiquette? Train journeys

Leye - Every other Wednesday

Photo by Yusaini Usulludin

You get onto a train carriage. It's full. You manage to find an empty seat. You wedge your recently expanding bottom, all 'sorry's and 'excuse me's, between two hitherto comfortable rail customers. You relax into the beginning of jour hour-long journey across London. As stops go by, the carriage thins out. Soon, it’s just you and the person next to you. Empty seats on both sides of both of you. An entire row of empty seats in front. Stop after stop, they don't get off and they don't move. Empty seats mocking you both for your lack of courage or your self-discomforting laziness.

But what's the proper etiquette here? Surely there must be one. If you get onto a carriage with just one person on it, you don’t go and sit next to them. No. You sit in a seat without neighbours. So why would you continue sitting right next to a stranger when the carriage becomes sufficiently empty?

But what is the proper etiquette? Move and risk offending them? Like saying, 'Sorry, but I'm gonna have to move because....'

You're likely to cause offense no matter what comes after the 'because'. You stink. I just don't feel comfortable next to you. I just want to move. I don't like you. Your perfume reminds me of toilet air-freshener. You just can't win. You don't know what insecurities they're in a programme for. What seven or eight or twelve steps your moving over to an empty seat might have reset to step 1.

And if it's socially allowed to move, who moves first? The person who was already sitting, or the person who came after? Surely, the person who came after. The person already sitting may have been first on an empty carriage. They may have already had to move to an empty seat. It’s unfair for them to have to move again. No matter the history of their current sitting situation, you got sat next to them. Not they next to you. It is you who must move to an empty seat when it’s just the two of you sitting next to each other on an empty carriage.

What about length of time before you move to an empty seat? Is it measured in stops or in seconds after the carriage first becomes empty? Do you wait one more stop before politely getting up – because you came after – and moving to an empty seat?

I just don’t know. I’m perplexed with this dilemma right now because I’m on a longish tube journey. Even as I type into my phone’s notepad app, hoping to figure out the right thing to do before it’s just me and a person sitting next to me, I’ve become acutely aware of another train journey etiquette dilemma. The person next to me on my left is peering at my screen, reading what I’m writing. What’s the right thing to do here? Continue pretending to be oblivious of her casual invasion of my privacy? Acknowledge her with a smile and continue, and let her continue reading, this time invited or permitted with the smile? Lean forward so she can count the threads of the back of my shirt? Give her a look? Glare at her? Politely, but formerly, ask her to stop it? i.e: be assertive?

What’s the proper etiquette????

With some situations it’s straightforward. A pregnant person walks onto a carriage, The rules for this are universal and well known. You get up, even though you had nothing to do with getting them pregnant. But wait. It’s not that straightforward. If there are lots of you already sitting down when they get on, who gets up? The train network helps with this. They have designated areas for pregnant, disabled, otherwise frail people, or people with little people carriers.

But what if you don’t see a badge? Here in the UK you get a badge when you get pregnant. It’s like ‘well done’ for getting knocked up. You’re preggies? Here, have a badge, you rock star. It says, Baby On-board. Anytime I see one I think, ‘What else could it be? Dragons?’ Note to self: Watch Game of Thrones and stop making up the story line yourself.

Back to a missing badge. What do you do then? If the protruding belly is on a man, I guess that one’s kinda easy: they need the exercise. Unless they are considerably old. So, protruding belly on female without badge or male who is considerably old, give up your seat.

But how do you define old? How do you gauge a person’s age in trying to decide whether or not you stand up so they can sit down? I suggest an elders system. Everybody gets a badge, baby on-board or not. A date of birth bage, so we can work out each other’s age and determine whether or not they get our seat on a train. If they are say, ten years older than you, you get up no questions asked. They’ve been paying taxes longer than you, if you’re already paying taxes and assuming they are too. Or at the very least they’ve been purifying the air you breathe longer than you. I assume that when humans breathe in, our lungs absorb most of the pollution and we breathe out slightly cleaner air and eventually die from all the accumulated toxins in the air we’ve purified.

But I digress. Back to the dilemma at hand. The approaching possibility of being next to a strange on a carriage with empty seats. And indeed, this carriage is depopulating as we go through the tourist hotspots.

You know, this is not the only dilemma I have with train journeys. It starts right from the platform. Anytime people arrive on a platform and come and stand next to me, I’m at a dilemma over what to do. Do I ignore them or do I confess to them that I too don’t know where the train doors will stop? I just got onto the platform, didn’t see anyone else already marking a spot, so I licked my finger, stuck it in the air, calculated Pi, and stopped walking when I got distracted. And if I do know where the doors will be and I’m standing there, should I be calling out to clueless passengers standing on the platform where the driver’s door will stop. ‘Hey guys, you’re way off. I know where the doors are. This is the spot. Come join me here. There’s space for us all.’

We are well into the sticks now and the carriage is well thinned out and like I feared, it’s me and the elderly man I sat next to and a sprinkling of stranglers on the far side of the carriage. Apprehension. Anxiety builds. The moment I feared has arrived. Or has it? One more stop? Wait one full minute?

What is this? He gets up and plumps himself into a seat right in front. What? It was my duty to move, not his. What does he mean by moving? Does he think I don’t know the etiquette? What is this? I am will pissed up now. I’m angry. I’m offended. My heart is pumping indignation into my veins. How dare he? How so very dare he? Then I remember. I forgot to buy deodorants after I threw the empty one away yesterday. I turn my body in the chair, I pretend to suddenly find something notice worthy in the landscape flying past, and I to try to get a whiff of my armpits without making it obvious.

Paris, then and now

So I'm searching for what this small passage, Passage de Haute Formes, looked like in the 1950's in Paris. Here's what I found.

Atmospheric, old soot stained Paris. It was a street of rag and bone sellers, 'junk men' and a Gitane or two. You can see how it still held traces of the village on the outskirts of Paris it had been.
Here's what it looks like today.

 Different, eh? This is in the 13th arrondissement where huge swathes of what were villages were built up with highrises in the 60's and 70's.

To me, it's unappealing but then again, living in a tiny house with a coal stove, no running water might have been unappealing to those who had the luxury of choice to move into a 'modern' high-rise when they were built.

 Here, a few blocks away, bits of the village remain in the Butte aux Cailles.

 The streets are cobbled and it's kept it's charm.

Cara - Tuesday

Policing British East Africa

Annamaria on Monday

First a confession:  My modus operandi when starting a new book is to research broadly, keeping story possibilities in the back of mind.  At some point, my characters start moving around in their time and place—doing and saying things.  I follow them and write down their words and their actions.  Eventually, the adventure takes shape, and I am off and running on a workable first draft. 

I was, in this way, about the begin the fourth chapter of Strange Gods when I realized that I knew nothing about how the police force operated in British East Africa.  I had a good idea who Tolliver was.  He had had an encounter with some South African drunks who were shooting up a hotel bar.  He was about to go out to the Scottish Mission to investigate the murder of Dr. Josiah Pennyman.   It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea of the historical context for such an investigation.   I sent myself back to the research salt mines.  Google quickly got me to a monograph called “Policing the Empire” by a Cambridge scholar.  Its first two footnotes referred to a memoire—A Cuckoo in Kenya—by an Anglo-Irish police officer, W. Robert Foran who served in BEA from 1905-09.  Pay dirt!  Just my research cup of tea—the recollections of someone who had feet on the ground there and then.   And of course, my precious New York Public Library had a copy.  I dug right in.  I got to know Foran and his lifestyle.

But I did not to give my Justin Tolliver Foran’s rather devil-may-care, jolly attitude toward law enforcement by a colonial power.   Based on what I gleaned from Foran’s story, I imagined what life for a man with Tolliver's attitudes would be like once he joined the police.  I gave my particular policeman a deep-seated regard for justice.  This, I imagined, would not coincide with the motivations of his superiors in the government.  It was all intuitive for me, a way of creating an atmosphere that served my story.

That scenario served well in that first of the series and in the following two books.  Then, just over a month ago, preparing to crawl my way into Vera and Tolliver 4, I found a new research source—a 1994 paper by a sociologist that wasn’t on the Internet when I started work on the series back in 2013: “Law Enforcement in British Colonial Africa.”  The paper explained to me how right I was about the difference between Tolliver’s idea of policing and what his King’s empire builders would require of him.

Here is what this new information confirmed for me:  When it came to law enforcement, in the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Centuries, the British had two models: One for their island home and another for the “possessions.”

The Home police, the Metropolitan Police Force established in 1829 in London, became the pattern for almost all towns and cities in the British Isles.  These policemen were civilians whose job it was to enforce the law, prevent crime, and keep the peace.  They lived in the communities where they worked, were accountable for their own actions, and never under the direct command of the governmentally powerful.  They were unarmed.

In the territories of the Empire, the model was based on the Royal Irish Constabulary.   This police force was established in 1836 to put down disturbances that had arisen in British-occupied Ireland.  Unlike their Metropolitan distant cousins, these men were a semi-military, armed force.  They were commanded by their superiors, whom they were required to obey.  They lived in barracks, rather than the communities they policed.  Their main function was to support the ends of their government as it took control of new territory—to aid in Britain’s conquest, to support the economic and political goals of the British government. They upheld what passed for British Law only when it suited them.

In fact, outside of areas where the British had political or economic interests, there was no British “law enforcement” in BEA.

This approach to policing was not limited to BEA.  It was well established in India before the British entered East Africa.  Once the Protectorate of BEA was formed, they then found it convenient to import officers from service in India, to use the Indian Code of Law, and to bring in lesser police officials from the Raj.  This happened to such an extent that in BEA, the police records were kept in Urdu!

Now I know what “really” happened.  When Tolliver joined the force, he was imagining joining a Metropolitan Police-style organization.  But he found himself in an African incarnation of the Royal Irish Constabulary.  And he was just where I needed him to be: a man at odds with his surroundings.

Surprised by Unexpected Joy*

-- Susan, every other Sunday.

*Given the state of the world, we need all the unexpected joy we can find, anywhere we can find it.

I woke up on the morning of July 10, 2017 -- the last full day of my research-and-graduation-celebration trip to Japan with my son -- with plans to shoot some last-minute research photos at Sensoji, Tokyo's oldest Buddhist temple.

Incense burning before a memorial stone at Sensoji.

I'd already visited the temple once, on the first full day of our trip, but it had rained:

Rain on Nakamise Street - with the temple gate in the background.

Which made shooting research images (both at Sensoji and at neighboring Asakusa Shrine) challenging:

Shrine guardian in the rain.

Since my son had plans with friends, I hopped the Ginza Line subway and emerged in the shopping street near Sensoji. People thronged the streets, packed even more tightly than I anticipated. Sensoji is a popular tourist spot, as well as a functioning Buddhist temple, but I hadn't expected such a crowd.

The reason for all the people became apparent as I reached the gate: unbeknownst to me, I'd arrived on a festival day:

Yay! IT'S A FESTIVAL!

Since I'd never experienced a Japanese shrine or temple festival, I was beyond thrilled. (For this, I was even willing to overcome my usual distaste for crowds.)

Food vendors lined the pathways all around the temple grounds, selling a variety of festival treats.

Slushy drinks, Fried Chicken, and CHOCO BANANA on a stick.

He's selling giant crab legs. Seriously. I'm not kidding.

Other stalls sold beautiful ground cherry pod plants and stalks, as well as hand-painted glass lanterns.

Ground cherry pod, aka "Chinese Lantern Plant"

The scent of plants and the tinkling of lanterns filled the air, along with a pleasantly cooling mist from spritzers hanging above the stalls.

Plants or pods, the choice is up to you.

Asakusa Jinja, a Shinto shrine that sits adjacent to the worship hall at Sensoji, was also celebrating.

Entrance to Asakusa Jinja

Tanabata trees lined the approach to the shrine, in recognition of the July festival commemorating the once-a-year heavenly meeting of the weaver and the cowherd.

People write wishes on colored paper and tie them to the tanabata tree.

A vendor just inside the shrine was selling one of the coolest festival drinks in Tokyo right now: a flavored slush composed of shaved ice, sparkling water and flavored syrup, served in a plastic lightbulb and adorned with a smaller, LED light-up lightbulb toy.

Japanese slushy drink! (Not too sweet.)

The day was hot, and I was thirsty, so I bought one--in the name of research.

The grape one was so tasty I went back for a lemon one later on.

While I sat in the shade, enjoying my treat, a Japanese woman approached me and said, "You're so lucky! You're here today!"

"Thank you!" I said, "It was a surprise - I didn't realize today was a festival."

Her grin got even bigger. "You didn't know! So lucky! Today is the day of 46,000 prayers. Do you know this festival?"

When I admitted ignorance, she explained:

"We believe that if you pray at Sensoji on July 10, it's the same as saying 46,000 prayers. Also, today is also the ground cherry plant festival, so you get two matsuri (festivals) in one! You really didn't know?"

I shook my head. "I didn't. This is my last day in Japan, and I wanted to spend it at Sensoji."

She clapped her hands in delight. "You are so lucky. Make sure to say a prayer today. It will count 46,000 times."

I promised I would, and thanked her, and she headed off to the worship hall.

Although I'd only planned to spend a couple of hours at the shrine, I scratched the rest of my plans and spent the entire day enjoying festival food, shooting photos, watching people, and reveling in the presence of hundreds of happy people enjoying a day at the festival.

The hozomon gate, as seen from the worship hall veranda.

Children laughed and ran around. Teenagers ate iced sodas, fries, and takoyaki (deep-fried octopus balls - a festival favorite). Adults of all ages strolled the grounds, bought ground cherry plants, and admired the tinkling lanterns that hung everywhere.

Ground cherry pods on display.

I saw people of many races (though admittedly, most were Japanese), both tourists and natives, Buddhists and people who doubtless belonged to other religions yet had come to see this lovely and important holy place.

Everyone loves a matsuri.

I didn't see a single unhappy face the entire day, and I don't know when I last saw such a large group of people enjoying themselves so much.

Festival booths with the Tokyo Skytree in the background.

Eventually I had to leave to meet my son for our final dinner in Tokyo and a trip to the Owl Cafe, but before I did, I said a prayer, as the Japanese woman suggested.

More accurately, I said 46,000 prayers, all the same: that everyone in the world could experience the kind of unexpected, unadulterated joy I had that day.

An Updated Zilly View of Mykonos

Jeff--Saturday

Four years ago I offered a view of Mykonos in August, captured by my partner in Crime, Barbara Zilly.  Back then her focus was on pencils and pastels, plus stealing away for a few hours from her portraits of children and dogs to visit her special places of inspiration with her camera.  But then she discovered oils!   Above and below are some of her more recent pencil drawings of the canine persuasion (plus one cat and kid), followed by examples of her oils inspired by the images of Mykonos.

Now onto photos of Barbara's favorite island places...followed by some of her oils.  By the way, I photographed these oils secretly, solely to share her talent with you.  And I did so at great personal risk, for Lord knows what will happen when she learns what I've done.  

Photos...

Oil...

Photos....

Oil...

Photos…

Oil...

My favorite oil of our favorite place...

And last--but not least--what Barbara's working on back in NYC...

—Jeff

To Ben Cleuch and beyond....

This week I have been out and about driving across the country to a place called Tillicoultry, deep in the shadows of Ben Cleuch. It turned out to be one of those beautiful events, it was as if the entire village had turned out to see me.  I don't think a lot goes on In Tillicoultry. The Sava centre shut at 6pm and my event was on at  7.

There were people standing at the back and sitting on the stairs, and there was that most marvellous of sights; a big pile of books turning into a small pile of books as people bought them. It was also pleasing to see a few teenagers there, who also went on to buy books. In Scotland, school leavers had just found out the previous week how they got on in their big exams and if they were going on into the University of their choice. One girl said she was going on to do chemical engineering. 'Oh,' I said, 'Are you going to work on weapons of mass destruction.'  'Yes,' she replied, smiling sweetly.

I had elected to be interviewed by Ian Keane, who was a very charming young man with his best tie on and what I later found out was a newly rumped hair do. I judged from the conversation that his parents were in the audience and he knew the young attractive female bookseller well enough to give her a bit of the banter. To non Scots this sounds like swapping very rude insults, but it's basically being 'pals with insults' which is not the same as 'friends with benefits'. 

We had an initial chit chat about books, life the universe and somebody in the audience pointed out that Ian had been challenged to write a Mills and Boons book - big mistake, i think he realized as I turned in my seat and said..Oh really.

It was probably a drunken bet over a late night curry but of course I knew now. So I asked him how many words he had, 10,000 but that's a detailed synopsis he said - he's not started the book yet. I told him the average Mills and Boon reader might not be able to cope with that much plot. He said the book was about a shepherdess, I asked if the shepherdess had a faithful border Collie - oh shit he said, I'd better put one in. It would seem unromantic to have the shepherdess tootilling around in a quad bike.

                             
                                           an ochil

                              
                                                                  two yokels

I could now see the hatred in his eyes, I have that effect  on most men.  I asked him what the title of the novel was and he responded - twilight in the Ochils. The locals in the audience heard twilight in the ochils, we far flung Glaswegians of which there was many in the audience, burst out laughing as we heard - toilet in the yokels. So once we got that sorted out, he explained it was twilight because it was a bit like the twilight series on the tv, and the Ochils were the range of hills that go across Scotland around Stirling and Perth. Those of you who have been to Bloody Scotland have probably perched on an Ochil. 

                                
                                                  some american yokels

Crap title, I said with my usual subtlety  and then explained in a helpful way while being totally insulting, about the Brataslava effect and how you would only know what an Ochil was if you were local. I then went on with the help of the audience to expand his novel for him. As it was a Mills and Boon we should incorporate a Colin Firth type in a wet shepherd's outfit lying face down in a babbling burn ( small river !) and the shepherdess can come along and save him, although at this point the novel deviated towards the horror genre when I suggested it might be nice if Mr Firth was dead and his back covered in the hoofprints of the feral goats that are known to roam the moors. 

                                       
                                                            twilight

I don't think he thought much of my suggestion, but the audience were keen to see the film and kept adding ideas for product placement, the  casting couch and it it have enough legs to be the next Game Of Thrones.  The Feral Goats Of Ochil  doesn't have the same ring...

                                         
                                                          A toilet

. 

Afterwards, he was saying that he's actually a huge sci fi fan and I said that a good story is a good story and can be set anywhere - in any genre, in any time or place. A faraway look came into his eye and he said he has a recurring sentence that comes into his mind, and the sentence was 'the shadow of the dark son...'.
                                   
                                            some feral goats...

That's not a sentence from the novel you numpty I said, that sounds more like the title of the book!

 I considered my work done. I had signed books, made people laugh and I had totally confused someone who spoke like he might be a really good writer and could be my opposition in a couple of years time.  I don't need the competition.

nice ochils!

Time to go home and eat chocolate

Caro Ramsay  18 08 2017