Where Am I? Top or Bottom?
WEDNESDAY:
A beerless bar might,
and a gearless car might,
but I can't go on
without my Marmite.
Sorry -- just reminding myself to stop at the shop because I'm out of Marmite. Lunch is a leftover Co-Op salmon fish cake sandwich on a fresh breadcake from my local bakery. The fishcake is quite good, with lots of fresh salmon mixed with smoked salmon, and it's held in with low-fat cream cheese and has a garnish of lettuce and red pepper. My fruit cup contains excellent strawberry and nectarine slices. I do love the summer fruits.
I could easily write this week about how I'm mystified as to why so many patronising personalities end up working in university libraries, but I'm not going to.
FRIDAY: Today's lunch is late and therefore in danger of being devoured instantly. It's a bit of a challenge to eat, as it's basil-marinated tofu, cream cheese, and chopped red pepper and spring onion on most of a long skinny baguette, cut at various angles so it will fit into my square plastic container. So today's lunch is a bit precarious.
One of the things Brits tend to assume about Americans -- aside from the erroneous assumption that 95 percent of the population are massively obese right-wing Christians -- is that all of the cities are built on grids. It's true that many of the roads of the newer cities are arranged this way, especially when the geography is flat and boring. But there's usually quite a bit of variation from horizontal streets crossing vertical avenues, especially when the landscape is hilly and/or marked with rivers or lakes. And the capitol of Washington, DC, like some of the world's oldest cities, was built on a series of spokes and hubs. I grew up in a city where the Pacific Ocean was to the south and the entire city completely surrounded a hill which was its own city, so this could have led to me being geographically disorientated later in life. Of course I was the type who would get lost driving the perfect grid of inland Orange County in search of Disneyland simply because every intersection looked exactly like every other intersection. For a British comparison try finding your way around the cloned roundabouts in the Edinburgh suburb of Livingston and you'll understand.
Regardless of this I still become extreme confused navigating the streets of Sheffield because I'm used to thinking in terms of North, South, East, and West, not to mention being aware of street names. Whereas in America one will give directions by saying something like "go down 3 blocks, turn left at the signal onto Elm Street, then go 2 blocks and turn right onto 34th Way, and it's the 3rd house on the right", somebody in the UK might say "Go down the main road until you come to the second set of lights, then make the second turning and keep on past the Red Lion until you come to a junction and make the third turning and keep on up the hill until you come to some shops on the left, and it's just opposite the Co-Op." So what's the name of the street you want? Who knows? It doesn't matter -- only taxi drivers are required to know the names of streets. When I spent a year in Sheffield delivering pizza and home improvement fliers door to door, I got to know the streets in the western half of central Sheffield like the back of my hand. As a result, because of my Knowledge, everybody in my neighbourhood knew that anybody who was searching for a certain street by name should consult me.
Another thing that confuses me are the terms "top" and "bottom", as in "the top of Fargate" or "the bottom of the Moor". It's been explained to me that these terms refer to the elevation of the street, which makes sense in the case of where I live, because my "top" half of the street is up the hill from the main drag, whereas my friends who live on the other side of the main drag live on the "bottom" part of the same street because it's down the hill. But this is all fine and good because I live on the slope of a hill. I still can't figure out why "the top of Fargate", for instance, is called this because I can't distinguish any notable elevation change when one walks from one end of Fargate to the other, and I'm not in the habit of carrying a pocket altimeter or even a spirit level with me.
As to which way is North, South, East, or West, on a sunny day I can make a good educated guess; but when the sky is evenly tinted with grey I can only really guess that a particular 180-degree direction from my particular standpoint has at least a bit of North in it, or South or whatever.
I suppose, so I don't seem like such a disorientated foreigner, I should start carrying a pocket compass as well as a spirit level…
