The OTHER English Potter

Last Sunday involved a trip around the Lake District near Lancaster. It's beautiful countryside, full of green hills and sheep which, for some reason are all spray painted (either it's so ranchers can mark their own stock, or the ASBO problem is as bad as they say it is). Unfortunately, it rained a lot while we were visiting, but what else is new? Part of our excursion involved taking a boat cruise on Windermere Lake, the largest lake in Great Britain. Needless to say, the water was choppy and the topside of the boat very wet, but I did see a lot of mist-covered hills and great scenery.

Among the famous residents of the Lake District were the poet William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, author of the "Peter Rabbit" children's stories. Apparently she used the profits from her book sales to help preserve the area, and thank God for that, because otherwise the countryside would look like this.

Classes started Monday. I'm happy with my choices overall, though I will have to wait and see if they stand up to the academic rigo(u)r of Beloit. Instead of four hours a week like at the aforementioned Wisconsin college, Lancaster classes meet two hours a week, usually divided into one seminar and one lecture. I'm taking two English classes ("Longer Fiction," a Creative Writing class, and "Women Writers of Britain and America"). They require a lot of reading (which I should probably get started on), and in my Longer Fiction class I have to pound out 4,000 words of a "novel" by the end of the term--not a 4,000 word novel, just 4,000 words OF it. My other two classes are a "Linguistics - Historical Background to Modern English" and a PoliSci course entitled "Post-Authoritarian Transition in Greece, Italy, and Spain." Fun stuff! In my Linguistics class, for example, I learned that the word "cause" as a verb is almost universally used in a negative context. For example:

"Jack Bauer will CAUSE pain on a subject by torturing him."
"Tony Almeida will CAUSE havoc when he disrupts the nation's air traffic system."

You will almost never hear the word "cause" followed by "happiness" or "joy," and certainly not in the context of Jack Bauer.

I've been very busy otherwise. I'm hanging out with American students a lot and need to get to know some British people. I've found Brits tend to congregate in places called "pubs," where one uses "pounds" to pay for "beer," which is then consumed while watching "football." So far removed from Wisconsin! I tried to watch rugby, but after 20 minutes of what looked like a giant huddle in the middle of the field, with no scoring or commercials to interrupt said huddle, I grew bored with it. The rest of my time is usually occupied with foraging for food, though I consider this to be emulating the Germanic tribes Linguistics has taught me my language came from.

On Saturday, some friends and I toured Lancaster Castle, which is still used as a prison. It was quite impressive, as some parts of it are 800 years old. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside it since it's a working courthouse. I'm looking forward to seeing more castles when I take a £20 trip to Edinburgh on the 31st.

Cheers!