Vignettes

Small observations:

1. Arriving for supper at Brown’s restaurant, which is on King’s Parade just opposite King’s College. I look over at the bar and I see a group of about eight students, all wearing suits and formal dresses, and they have the academic robes on–the kind you see at graduation ceremonies. But there is no graduation ceremony this time of year. I inquired: it turns out that at many of the colleges, academic robes must be worn to two or so evening dinners each week called “formal hall”. And when students go out after formal hall for drinks at the bar, they leave the robes on. It’s apparently quite common.

2. A friend took me to a very out of the way pub called St. Radegund’s, tiny with a distinctive wedge shape because it’s on a corner. Near Jesus College. One patron had his large English Sheepdog sitting on the floor.

3. At a fairly working class fish and chips place in Ely (it’s called Petrou) I noticed everyone had green stuff, something like guacamole, on their french fries. So I thought, do as the locals do, and asked for it too. I kind of wish I hadn’t. I’ve since learned it’s called “mashed peas” and that’s exactly what it was.

There’s another story about mashed peas that says a lot about the current election season here in Britain. Gordon Brown, current prime minister of Labour, has fairly low poll numbers but is gaining on his challenger, David Cameron of the Tories. Cameron’s problem is that he is very upper class (Eton, Oxford) and not very good at hiding it, which is a problem because the Tories are historically associated with wealth and privilege whereas Labour is the party of everyone else. And you can’t win an election if only rich people vote for you. Anyway, when I described my experience with mashed peas to a local, I was told a story about David Cameron: not long ago, he went to a local fish and chips place, attempting to show he was just one of the guys. He failed miserably when he said  “And I’ll have some of that guacamole on my chips.” (Of course, I was told this story by a Labour voter.)

Correction: It wasn’t David Cameron, it was Peter Mandelson. This story is even more complicated for a non-U.K. reader than the incorrect one above. Mandelson is solid labour, but is “new labour” (trust me you don’t want a long blog about new and old labour) and actually from a working class background. He is known for cozying up to rich folks and generally acting upper class, for a couple of decades denying his working class roots. He was visiting a town up north (the home of industrial labor in the U.K.) and is said to have asked for “avocado” on his chips. Thus displaying his rejection of his working class roots and his wholesale adoption of upper class attitudes, so the story goes.

A quick Google search suggests that this story is probably false anyway, even though I swear every person I’ve told about my Ely Petrou experience immediately tells me about Mandelson, it could be an urban myth, which would make it even more telling about British political culture:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=101;t=000327

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