The birthday girl’s mother stood up. “Tiny Pony wants to make a little speech,” she said. And so she did.
We were at the White Horse in Putney, also known as the Sloaney Pony (pronounced Slaney Painy.) I was Simon’s date in the college friends’ corral, where they explained that though it was Cambridge, Churchill college took mostly state school kids, and was not at all posh, really. Unlike the rest of the guests. This distinction seemed important to them, and I believed them. Simon isn’t posh. He speaks with the new Tony Blair Establishment accent, full of democratic glottal stops. Our corral bonded as the yahs and brays increased down-table; we swapped compensating stories of council estate beatings and jam sandwiches.

I get infected with interest in this stuff as soon as I get to a British Airways check-in queue. I start listening and classifying, and watching others do it faster than me. Words and and accent peg you here, and they’ll always piss someone off. If you’re uncomfortable being having your origins and aspirations dissected, try an Irish accent. Thug? Posh totty? Only Dublin knows for sure.

I keep asking my friends about this obsession, sure that I’m exaggerating as usual. But maybe not. Elly tells me about her friend whose boyfriend wouldn’t take her to the May Ball, in case she might embarrass herself because she doesn’t speak properly. “She might say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘loo’ or something.” The friend reported this to Elly as proof of his consideration for her.

That class boorishness is dying. Nobody would coach Margaret Thatcher on a fake upper-class accent these days; the plummy Tories are a joke. Piers Morgan looks and sounds like a flabby young Roger Moore, but he edits Rottweiler tabloid The Sun. Little England tabloid The Daily Mail. The Daily Mirror*. The old BBC accent , which I’ve always liked, is being phased out, replaced by regional voices and the estuary English that’s becoming the new standard. No single class, identified by accent or schooling, seems to have a lock on a given industry or profession any more. Maybe classification is mostly a leisure activity now, social Tetris.

“In America, though,” they tell me when I ask about class in Britain, “they treat you like shit when you don’t have money or a flash job.”

*I’ve been annoying my English friends with my sloppy reporting. Last time I lived here, Piers Morgan was editor of The Sun. Now he edits the Daily Mirror, apparently, a fact that won’t stick in my brain even though somebody posted this in my comments a week ago. Simon writes: “Under his editorship it’s become a left-wing tabloid and a much “better” competitor to The Sun, unfortunately he has remained an odious toad.”

So there you go. I stand gratefully corrected.

Inexplicably, Canadians are into Coronation Street. I gather this from CBC radio, which reports on Coronation Street viewing parties, called “Ping Parties”.

In case you don’t know, Corrie is the longest-running soap in Britain (I think). It’s set in adenoidal Manchester, and apparently it’s grim up north. As is traditional in British soaps, most of the characters are deeply unattractive and whiny, and their lives are long strings of misery relieved only by trips to the pub, where they fight. Periodically, British gossip mags show the soap stars dolled up in “At Home” interviews, but they cannot be glamourised. For example, Gail one of the longest-running characters on Coronation Street, is a nag and looks like a camel. Far too many articles have been written about how the Americans like their escapism to be aspirational while the Brits seem most comforted by schadenfreude, but clichés stick because they’re true.

I watched Coronation Street every evening when I was at school. So did everyone else. Finish dinner, clear the dishes, bring the tray of tea and biscuits into the fire just as the elderly theme tune started at 7.30. I haven’t followed it since my Leaving Cert, though last I heard they had graduated to serial killers and scandalous affairs. When the CBC played the opening music last night, I started to fret about my Maths homework.

The most entertaining part of the Canadian absorption in Coronation Street is that they clearly can’t follow it. On last night’s show, they played a snatch of dialogue and then invited listeners to call in to tell them what they were saying.
   “I think it’s ‘goshad’,” said one presenter.
   “No, it’s ‘gooshit’,” said the other, “Though I have no idea what that means.”
Luckily, Canada has plenty of ex-pats to enlighten them. “She’ll be gutted“ the character had said. Meaning, she’ll be upset, emotionally devastated, have her insides torn asunder.

I wonder if they’d hire me as a simultaneous translator? I speak four English languages pretty well…

Further reading: Wikipedia entry on Coronation Street.

Collaborators and requests welcome.
Crack/craic
Noun/adjective. I hardly ever use this one, but it came up the other day. Ríona’s definition:

A person can also embody craic. “Oh, you’ll have to meet so-and-so, she’s great craic.” A very high compliment.

Faff
Futzing, messing around on filler activities, procrastinating. Usually indulged in before leaving the house to do something unpleasant. Often the opening salvo in a domestic battle:
“Would you ever stop faffing and get in the car!”

Feck
All-purpose, indispensable term. Milder than “fuck”, closer to “frick” but more versatile. “Well, feck you anyway. You just fecked off this morning and left me no fecking cornflakes.” Old ladies can safely say this in Ireland now. Reached its most inspired use on the lips of Father Jack in the Channel Four series Father Ted.
There’s also an old Dublin use of “feck” to mean pilfer: early in Joyce’s Portrait, boys run away from school because “they had fecked cash from the rector’s room”.

Witter
Verb. To ramble on inanely.

The Day of the Condour, or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
By Ronald de Sousa, via the wonderful wood s lot.

I am still having trouble with Canadian English. Producing it, that is. I understand it fine. It’s not even that I feel the need to pass; rather that I’m afflicted with an obsession with how people speak. Ranger Tim is patient with the elderly three-year-old who follows him around the staff kitchen.
“What do you call this? Tin-foil or aluminium foil?”
“Aluminium foil.”
“Do you ever say al-you-MIN-ee-um? Or is it always a-LOOM-in-um? “
“Always a-LOOM-in-um here.”
“Hey look! The French side of the packaging writes “aluminium”, like us!”
“That’s really exciting, Dervala. But I don’t think that’s how it is in the periodic table.”

To get me off his back, Ranger Tim has defined a useful rule:
“All terms relating to technologies newer than, say, fire, are American.” I have limited access to post-Stone-Age technology in Lake Superior Provincial Park, but it’s good preparation for a return to urban life to deduce all by myself that Canadian phones are busy, not engaged. Canadian kids get diaper rash, not nappy rash. Canadian cars have trunks and hoods, not boots and bonnets. (This last is a sad loss. Bonnets are so much cooler than hoods. Think of Emma versus Eminem.) Everything else is English-English, except that Canadians have asses not arses. Do asses count as technology? Maybe Britney’s does.

Not that it matters what words I use. No one in northern Ontario realises I’m a Paddy Without Papers. They assume I’m a displaced Newfie with a poor work ethic. Even my sister suffers this confusion, though she is less twangy than me. She has just arrived in Ottawa to start an MBA, and now sits through management lectures on ‘Sow-hwest Airloins’ by a professor from Co. Leitrim.
“So where did you do your undergrad?” she asked him during the designated suck-up period after a seminar.
“Ireland. That’s in Europe.” he said. Pause.
“Yes, but where?”
“Cork. That’s down the south.”
“I know where Cork is. I’m from Limerick.” He gaped.
“Are you sure? “

We’re learning. The Canadian “eh?” is addictive. I don’t know how I managed without this little nudge, at once wheedling for approval and inclusive. It is free of the slack-jawed tone of “huh?” and the hectoring note of “right?”. But I try not to overuse it just yet. Now that my haircut is growing in to a full mullet, no sense getting taken for an Ottawa Valley hockey player, eh?

Cultured but monoglot Americans signal furren words by swapping the ‘a’ sound for an ‘o’. So Alain Delon’s first name, which he would have said with a broad second ‘a’, becomes eh-LON. Pasta, with its lovely, pappardelle-wide Italian ‘a’, becomes poss-teh. Hasta la vista, whose every short, broad vowel should be given equal, machine-gun stress, becomes HOSS-teh law VEES-teh.

Yet they are clearly physically capable of producing the correct ‘a’ sounds, from Dad to Da-ad!.

This has sub-irritated me for years now. It’s not that I want people to let fly with exaggerated Italian pronunciation in the middle of an English sentence. This leads to righteous head-kickings in red-sauce joints. I just crusade to get them to speak American consistently.

Like me.

Back in July, I met a woman who has no sense of smell. She shook huge quantities of salt and pepper onto her salad to prod her tastebuds, but most flavors were lost on her. I couldn’t imagine being deprived of my wine-loving gluttony, but she’d never known anything different.

Barbara Kingsolver has a piece in The Poisonwood Bible where Adah returns to America after years in the Congo. She marvels at supermarkets, which have a massive, odorless arrays of food, and misses the smell assaults of her African market.

The US is terrified of smell, I think. Procter & Gamble has warned us about all the nooks that harbor body odors, and we’re careful to hunt them down with the right products. There are too many people in New York to escape smells completely—our garbage ripens on the sidewalk, and Chinatown smells of raw fish and cooking all winter long. For the most part, though, you can persuade antiseptic Americans to bond over hushed stories of the guy in the office who had B.O., or the time they rode the Paris metro.

I wonder, what’s the big deal?

My friend Mark is taking steroids for a particularly nasty sinus attack, and can now smell properly for the first time in years. The experience seems traumatic. He’s being mugged by a sense he’s ignored until now. He sends me plaintive notes about previously unremarked smells and tastes—cleaning fluid, garlic breath, Diet Coke.

“I’m particularly concerned about the cat’s ass,” he says.

I realize that compared to him, I’ve been living in the olfactory equivalent of Pepys’ London, all chamber pots and reeking fish. I kind of like it. Nostalgie de la boue.

Could we launch a serious threat to P & G by offering sinus cauterization as a cosmetic procedure for the sensitive? No more need for Shake ‘n’ Vac, scented tampons, or Diptyque candles at $45 a pop.

On second thoughts, the economy might collapse altogether.

When I first moved to Manhattan, almost everyone I knew was between 25 and 30. The school you’d been to seemed much more important than your Old Country. In fact, some of the new arrivals seemed to regard Kentucky or Michigan as the Old Country, and the extreme cases thought that Harvard was.

Carroll Gardens is different still, despite all the chi-chi restaurants that opened for yuppies like me. Most people at Saturday’s party were Irish, Italian, or ‘half-and-half’, as Dominick says. Each side told jokes about the other. Matt, my Santa Claus neighbor, says:

“The Irish people and the Italian people, that can be a real beautiful mix for a marriage.”

Everyone wanted to know what part of Ireland I was from. Matt told me that his friend, Damian, who was killed in the Trade Towers, was one of nine kids of a family from Donegal. They all grew up in Inwood in the ’70s, when it was still an Irish neighborhood. Matt’s from the Bronx, but his family had a summer house in the Catskills next to all these Inwood families. Four Green Fields, they called it. Matt’s father would put on a brogue when talking with the rest of the Four Green Fields men, and the kids would tease him for it. Matt was a year or two younger than Damian and was dying to hang out with the bigger boys.

I realized I’d read a huge New York Times feature about Damian and Inwood a few weeks back. Sonuvagun, If Isn’t Dominion. The article isn’t online any more, but I remember that the whole family was crazy for Gaelic football. Damian was the youngest boy, and his father used to put him down to bed doing commentary on an imaginary match where the brothers all played on the same team.
“And Michael passes the ball to Sean…and Sean passes the ball to Eugene…and Eugene heads it over to Paul….”
The ball always ended up with Damian, and he always scored the winning goal. Lucky kid. He was golden, Matt says.

On the walk home from Max’s reading last night, we stopped off at a playground in Park Slope. I’d been tempted by the swings here two Saturdays before. These are cool municipal swings, not like the truncated little set in our back garden when we were growing up. Long, solid chains, wide seats, and smooth tarmac underneath. I knew these swings would let me be a safety-harnessed Tarzan, but I didn’t want to be near the bored, jostling 14 year olds who claimed them that day.

At 1.30 last night, though, they were mine. At first, I felt exhilarated. Then I couldn’t go much higher and I started to realize I was going nowhere. Back and forth, back and forth, an endless revving up for nothing. Drunkenly, I tried to calculate how drunk I was, which made me nervous. I imagined what would happen if I let go at the top of an arc. There were butterflies in my stomach as the swing dipped each time.

Someone said that a fear of heights is really a fear of our impulse to jump, and it’s true.