BRASS MONKEYS

It’s been chilly today. I hope that’s not English understatement. I suppose if it were, I ought to have said ‘it’s not exactly been a summer’s day’ which, despite what foreigners think (and, I might point out, the logic of those words indicates) actually means, ‘it’s been cold enough to freeze your socks to your ankles’.

We were talking about that yesterday at lunch in Oxford. I hadn’t realised that Americans use the word ‘quite’ to mean ‘very. If you tell an American that their presentation was quite good, they might assume you loved it. If a British person tells you it was quite good, it means they expected it to be garbage and you surpassed their expectation by floating a couple of points above ‘acceptable’. Well done you.

“It’s the difference between our cultural way of viewing the world,” said I, unwrapping a chicken shawarma wrap from the Lebanese Bakery. “Brits often start with the glass half-empty and expect everything good that happens to be a bonus.”

Sorry about that, Rest-Of-The-World. In our defence, most of us don’t even know we’re doing it. If you ask us how we are and we say ‘oh not too bad’ it really doesn’t mean that we’re a hair’s breadth away from terrible. It means that we’re okay despite having expected not to be. Or, at best, just ‘middle of the road’.

Thinking about it, I ought to have told them to watch Winnie The Pooh for deeper understanding.

Anyway, it’s cold enough to freeze my socks to my ankles. The brass monkeys are gone, and the cannon balls are tumbling about all over the permafrost. I’ve not even been outside and I’ve been freezing.

Well, I de-iced Sammy’s car for her before she went to work this morning. She was amused to find me huddled in the driving seat when she finally emerged, and I explained I’d finished scraping, and was keeping warm.

“Chilly?” she said.

“Not too bad,” I replied.