Oh, to be in England

RHYS: One of the things I miss most about England is its timeless quaintness. As an ex-pat one notices the weird and wonderful quirks of Britishness more than those who live there all the time.

One of the other panelists on my cozy mystery panel last Sunday was Hannah Dennison and she feels that same nostalgia for the silliness of England. Hannah writes the Vicky Hill mysteries set in the fictitious English country village of Gipping on Plym. Vicky is a reporter, supposedly stuck with writing obituaries, but each of the books features one of those quaint and anachronistic pastimes that still abound in the English countryside.

I thought of Hannah last week when I read an article in an English newspaper about the last surviving Mud Sled Fisherman. Okay, so picture this—a long wooden sled on which the fisherman lies, propelling himself over the mud by his feet until he reaches the ocean. He then attaches nets to little posts and strings them along the water’s edge, in the hope of trapping shrimp in them. Several hours later he will propel himself back out to the nets to see what he has caught. As an efficient, twenty-first century method of conducting a business, I think we can all pretty much see that this is sadly lacking. The man’s sons have expressed no interest in following him into the business—a fact that he understands but laments. And so the craft will die with him. In future the shrimp of the Bristol Channel will have to wait to be sucked up by giant Russian factory ships, along with everything else that swims, crawls or lies in the ocean.

Fortunately not all crazy pastimes are dying in England. In fact some are thriving as Hannah has found out when she researches her books. Snail racing is still going great guns, for one thing. As is stuffing a ferret down your trousers and seeing who is man enough to endure it longest. In East Anglia, that flat area of dykes, and waterways, there is the sport of ditch jumping. The participants run at a dyke, plant a pole and vault across. If they don’t make it, they get wet and muddy.

But that is marginally better than the sport of hedge jumping, which Hannah featured in her first Vicky Hill novel. Competitors leap over all kinds of hedges ranging from privet (easy) to hawthorn (spiky). She met one man who preferred to fling himself over backward in what he called “The Crucifixion Position.”
There was an attempt at synchronized hedge jumping but it proved too destructive to hedges. And I promise I’m not making this up.

Various villages have all kinds of races. The egg and spoon race is fairly normal, as is the pancake race on Shrove Tuesday. But most dangerous so far is the tar barrel racing in which competitors sprint through the village holding aloft in one hand a barrel of burning tar and hoping that they don’t spill it all over themselves.

So you see why I love writing about the UK, even if I choose to live in the US. I prefer a life style in which things run smoothly and efficiently but sometimes I wish that the city of Phoenix Arizona would conduct the occasional snail race….