The Brochure

More Reasons To Love Cambridge

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This was what I saw on my walk from our house to downtown on October 30:

Jesus Green panorama

Click for the full size image. Then sigh with delight and possibly seethe with jealousy if you don’t live somewhere with this sort of natural spectacle on the edge of downtown.

Jesus Green autumn trees

Click to enlarge.

This is the view from my doctor’s lobby:

buildings outside office

These buildings predate pretty much all of modern medicine.

docwindow2

Of course if you look down, it appears they have a pigeon horror feature:

nets and spikes

Nets and spikes. Methinks this is not a good spot for Audubon Society meetings.

But I am not a pigeon, so I like the place.

In England…Horses Get Traffic Lights

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I’ve been very busy with travels and a small cake competition entry for the last week or so, so I haven’t had time to finish any of the lengthy posts I’ve started writing for this blog.

I have, however, been amassing a collection of odd/funny things I see as we travel around, so I’m starting a series of quick posts called “In England…” in which I will share these photos, sometimes deliberately misinterpreted for comedic effect, or sometimes posted as-is for general amusement. Usually a mixture of both.

Here are some pedestrian crossing signals near the Wellington Arch in London. Note the absence of an actual human pedestrian…

red horse light

Whoa!

green horse light

Giddyap! Also: self-driving bicycles. All humans must be mounted on horses, as shown in The Brochure. Centaurs allowed with appropriate licensing.

Circle Jerks

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It’s a well-known fact that the British love their roundabouts and that most Americans don’t know how to use them. There’s one by the Costco in South Austin and the number of people who simply don’t understand the yielding procedure makes it a miracle every time we get out of there unscathed.

Because I do have some experience with them I thought I could probably deal with roundabouts while we’re over here, although granted not in those first few days when I was ridiculously exhausted and still coming to terms with the other-side-of-the-road thing.

That’s why Corran drove from Cambridge to Milton Keynes so we could go to IKEA and get some much-needed furniture and home items. See, he grew up and learned to drive in Australia, which drives on the same side of the road as the UK and also has plenty of roundabouts. So he figured he’d be just fine.

Yeah.

He was fatigued too so the first few roundabouts on the route were kind of hairy, especially since the GPS on his phone kept snarking at him to take the nth exit but it wasn’t always clear where it started the counting, so more than once we took the wrong exit.

(Sidenote: it’s funny that my car’s GPS back in the US was default set to an irate British lady who constantly gives me passive-aggressive scolding in the form of “ROUTE RECALCULATION” whereas the default voice on Corran’s phone here in the UK is a mildly snarky American lady who wreaks her vengeance upon us by firing out her commands and road numbers so fast that it’d take someone with a PhD in math to figure out what she’s saying except Corran has a PhD in math and still kept going off on the wrong exits.)

Anyway, we were plodding along well enough until we came to this piece of work:

triple roundabout sign

No, that’s not an alien reproductive diagram, it’s a traffic sign. Now imagine you’re passing this sign for the first time in your life at highway speed after having flown across the ocean the day before. O.o

Corran and I actually screamed. As in, a real, “AAAUUGGGHHHH!” type scream. In unison. Nothing brings a marriage together like shared terror.

Here’s what this torture device looks like on a map:

triple roundabout map

Corran is particularly furious that one of those only goes to a short offshoot road. I see the whole thing as a war on people who have to drive tiered cakes anywhere.

Worse, none of the folks who live around here even knew what Corran and I were talking about when we referred to the horrific triple roundabout near Milton Keynes. It was hard to Google because we couldn’t remember the names from the sign (again, we were screaming in aghast dismay when we should have been reading the sign, which is probably kind of like what happens to people who see signs from gods and probably why all of those people are too loopy to fit into polite society ever again, and now I’m thinking that “loopy like a triple roundabout” should be a new vaguely insulting descriptor for people who have lost their minds due to divine interference and/or British roads). And when I Googled various terms about scary roundabouts, this monstrosity is what kept coming up:

Swindon magic roundabout

Someone built this shit. On purpose. (Image via BBC)

That’s the so-called Magic Roundabout of Swindon and the very name gives the game away: this was clearly designed to fuck with foreigners and despite it having been built in 1972, they knew one day it’d be part of the general British brochure that children here go to schools to learn magic and you need a god-damned flying car to survive both the Whomping Willow and this swirling miasma of The Traffic Engineer Who Shall Not Be Named.

O.o

Introduction To The Loo

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Let’s go on a magical journey of imagination, shall we?

Imagine you’re a mom to an eight year old and a one year old, and you’re going to go from the USA to England for a year where you’ll be homeschooling the eight year old at myriad museums and historical sites while trying to prevent the one year old from licking the displays. You need to pack up everything you own – and did I mention you and your husband are both hopeless packrats? – from your Austin, TX home into storage, and you’re behind because the eight year old hasn’t been getting her own packing done and the one year old has decided sleep is for the weak.

Now imagine it’s the day of the flight to England. You haven’t packed everything, the air conditioning has been going out most of this week in 41°C/105°F weather, and you’re in the position of deciding what stuff you love enough to make it in the last car run to the storage unit or to be shoved into the garden shed before rushing to the airport. You’ve had less than two hours sleep per night for a week and most of that has been on a broken, lopsided air mattress beside the baby’s crib. Oh, and all of the dust you’ve kicked up has necessitated being on allergy meds that knock you out so you’re completely loopy and you’ve upped the ante to declare that lungs are for the weak.

Now imagine you’re on the flight – which at least is direct since you paid an extra $300 per person to not have to transfer through Newark, NJ in the middle of the night with a baby – and while everyone else has gone to sleep, including the baby, you can’t sleep because your brain is madly going through what you left at home for the cleaners to throw out and you’re wondering just how much you can suck up to your friend with whom you left a key to cram some more stuff into the shed for you.

Now imagine you get to Heathrow, your husband gets the rental car, you all pile in, and you’re driving through the countryside trying to spot the castles and other romantic buildings you’re sure England must be stuffed with because that’s how it looks in all of the brochures, but mostly you just see a highway that is freaking you out because it’s on the wrong side of the road. You drift off a bit, but your brain is still wondering if it was worth it to sacrifice the vacuum back in Austin, not because it was a particularly great vacuum but it will cost a few hundred dollars to replace and the budget is already blown by the discovery of more mold in the front hall closet despite the $4000 you spent two years ago supposedly fixing the mold problem for good. So even though you drift off, you’re not really sleeping so much as experimenting with fun new ways to get neck cramps.

Now imagine you finally get to the Cambridge house you’re renting – which you’ve only seen in a couple of photos from an ad listing – and the landlord is showing you around, speaking what seems like a thousand words a minute because you’re utterly shattered from fatigue and stress and he doesn’t even have the decency to be closed-captioned like all the British people are when you watch Downton Abbey, and the baby is running shrieking through the house because THERE ARE SO MANY NEW THINGS TO LICK, and there’s something about putting salt and rinse aid into the dishwasher and the eight year old is stomping on the loud floor and the car is parked illegally outside and then you turn and see this:

monkey loo

The toilet sees you too.

And you want to ask about the monkey toilet, because it’s a god-damned monkey toilet and there are just so many questions, but you can’t because you have to run after the one year old and the landlord is going upstairs to talk about the weird electric shower and you haven’t slept and you have strange rashes popping up all over your body from all of the stress but there’s a god-damned monkey toilet.

So you go off and do some shopping so the baby has a safe place to sleep and there’s some basic food in the house but every time you come back into the house and go to the kitchen you have to pass the door that leads to the god-damned monkey toilet.

Then the eight year old announces, “I LIKE TO PEE IN THE MONKEY’S FACE.”

And in that instant you know deep in your heart – in that certain way that bypasses all neurological space because your neurons aren’t really functioning properly anymore anyway – that one day there will be a knock at the door and it will be Jane Goodall come to beat the living crap out of you.

So, naturally, you post that to the internet.

Thankfully, none of your friends bother to point out that Jane Goodall works with apes, not monkeys, because then you’d have to punch them (your friends, not the apes or monkeys, because apes and monkeys are really fucking strong and you don’t want to pick a fight with them, especially when you already know at some point you’re going to be answering for the part of the monkey toilet that has the hole blasted through the monkey face which you’ll be punching with your ass for the next year) because you can’t name an actual monkey researcher and besides, Jane Goodall is sweet and adorable so the idea of her maniacally wielding a machete through your house because of a toilet you didn’t even choose is awesome.

Plus, your friends are too busy to be pedantic at you about specific fields of research because they’re laughing at your exhausted rambling and sending you private messages about visiting you so you they too can rack up points in the coming Ultimate Zombie Dian Fossey Death Match between hordes of primates coming to wreak vengeance upon you for daring to shit through a monkey face toilet seat use the monkey loo.

Meanwhile as the first few days of your England adventure pass, you still can’t sleep because you keep mentally going through the Austin house wondering what you’ve lost, sending your poor friend driving down all the way from Pfucking Pflugerville to rescue items for you, and you keep finding the weirdest shit everywhere in this country you always thought of as an ancestral motherland, so somewhere amidst the fear and the fury and the fucking monkey toilet you announce, “I AM GOING TO START A NEW BLOG AND NAME IT AFTER THE LOO.”

And suddenly, it all makes sense. So here it is.