Through an open window I can see that the circus has come to town, planted itself on the top of a grassy knoll, where I stood a week ago in awe of the city spires, drenched in dusk-light. Walking past it now, in the chill of early spring, I don’t see the city spires, but hear the music. Whimsical; accordions and whistles. The big-domed tents and the splashes of red-and-yellow and the grass, eerily bright at this time of night. The twinkle of lights. I can’t see any people; are they inside the tents? Are they ghosts? How has this series of structures, this thing which is to me more an idea than a reality, come to be so suddenly on this grassy knoll? I hear the familiar squeak of my bicycle wheels; I fail to understand the apparition.

And what, anyway, do I actually know about circuses? Nothing really. Once I read a book in which a girl and her brother, wounded in combat, limping, dour, soured by years in the trenches, visit the circus. Once I knew a girl who objected to circuses because of the animals. She didn’t say why and I didn’t ask. Once my parents went to see the Circ du Soleil, the circus in the sun, the circus made of human bodies, with some friends. They’re things I know only from the outside, circuses.

Coming down the hill that I cycled up hours earlier, my fingers turn to ten fat icicles, it feels. I no longer know when I’m squeezing my brakes. I arrive home and it hurts just to turn the lock in the door. The city is indecisive; is she playful, or cold and somber? Is she warm or is she still rapt in the throes of winter? Does she–and do we, by extension–miss her students, in this time of their absence, or is she reveling without them, a feather set free upon an April wind?

Impossible to tell, tonight.

❧

I think I’ve been dropped into the middle of a circus. We’re making turkey pie. Without a bottom, because it’s hard to make a pie “without a soggy bottom, and we don’t want soggy bottoms.”

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, “Glory be to God,” and, “Jesus is the truth, allelulia!” Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, “and what have you done for me today?” and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: “Nothing.”

And she would say back, “Nothing, exactly. You’ve done nothing for me, but I’m giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love.” Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

“Oh yeah,” said the Man when I returned home, feeling I’d been suitably guilted for the day. “That’s standard C of E. That’s not really considered religious.”
“Have we really done nothing to deserve God’s love?” I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I’m not even sure what I believe about God. “And how on earth is that not religious?”

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it’s pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don’t look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn’t written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn’t, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn’t seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious–just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don’t think anyone would have blinked–or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words “Christ our saviour” means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation’s most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots–”why the milk?” I wanted to know; “in case Santa wants a choice,” the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen’s speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: “And they say I’m naive to believe anything from a person in pants…”

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we’re very, very happy, and we’re together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

“Here,” the Man has just said to me. “Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I’ve just made,” and waved a spoon at me. I think it’s time for me to rejoin the circus.

❧

This being the first and only write-up on last night’s presidential debate that I’ve read so far, I’m coming from a distinctly uninformed standpoint here. But never mind that. There are only three points which I wish to call attention to, and I don’t think any of them requires a higher degree of credibility than I have:

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain’s almost-decision to “suspend campaigning” in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country’s plights than his own campaign. But it’s a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don’t leave until someone’s been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

“Later, McCain’s voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama’s statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and we say, ‘No, you’re not’?” the senator from Arizona said.”

Oh, I know what’ll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, “gut-based” electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he’s absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships–however tremulous–is something we clearly haven’t tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders–however terrible they might be–can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate…

3) Also from the Post: “The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war.” I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier’s mother: “But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything — promise me one thing, that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.”

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier’s mother: “She asked me, ‘Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I’m going through?’”

I couldn’t help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes’ play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It’s not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it’s about how it effects the women left behind, and it’s painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war–a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is “not in vain”. Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

“I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place,” says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes’ play. The candidates are in the “this place” of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where “future” and “possibility” exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

❧

A few weeks ago, I experienced my very first St. Giles’ Fair. Surely this must be some kind of secret Oxford induction: in the dead-quiet of early September, when the leaves are on the cusp of changing and a hush has come over even the busiest streets, suddenly the flame of festivity erupts on one of the city’s most charming tree-and-college-lined roads. In my research, I read that, “since the nineteenth century, St. Giles’ Fair has been held on the Monday and Tuesday following the first Sunday after St Giles’ Day (1 September)”—a fittingly circuitous formula for a circus-esque display.

Here’s what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

“It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles’ and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell’s right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles’. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles’ the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one.”

It isn’t so very different today, fundamentally: “Beyond St. Giles’ the University is silent and dark…”.

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: “A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter.”

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn’t need to anyway: it’s a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today’s young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don’t know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can’t help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn’t. There’s doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election–McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

❧

The bathroom at the hotel was clearly made for old people.  The mirror was so dark I looked like I’d been sunbathing all month instead of wrapped up in scarves and coats; the walls were a pink you imagine the innards of some especially coiffed-and-bowed toy poodle to be.  The hotel itself was perched on the edge of the world; from the dining room, where I drank sweet sherry (filthy), dry sherry (slightly less filthy), and champagne (bubbly), all you could see was the cliffs crumbling into a murky brown sea, which heaved against the rocks below like someone had upset the bathwater.  A dark patch on the horizon looked like a fogbank, or maybe some imagined promise of land.  

❧