Stoke-on-Trent Goes Green!

As many of you know, I spent a good hunk of my spring/summer as a fallow at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent in England. The nearest town to the self-contained university is Stoke-on-Trent. I'm pleased to report that Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the country's "10:10" pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010 and thus in a way to become Britain's first "Green City."

Fu@k That Hurts Less!

Researchers at Keele University, where I spent the month of May as a fellow at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies, have developed a study indicating that swearing is not only fun and popular in crowds, it also might help to alleviate pain. Hey, don't swear at me -- it's science you're mad at (and that just made you feel better).

Back From Keele

I'm back from my two days of travel by rail, by road, by tube, and by air. It is now 4:09 England time, which is the clock to which my body is still attuned, and I could not sleep at all last night in the Holiday Inn Heathrow M4 J4, which, oddly enough, is not the same as the Holiday Inn Heathrow, and which i am sure causes nearly daily confusion among weary travelers not much in the mood for such silliness.

It is good to be back in Texas. Had Mexican food for dinner. After a month of rainy dampness, i enjoy the heat, but it's draining me. Sleep will feel nice.

Keele Diary #21

In the next ten minutes I'll lock the door to the office. And a long day of travel, involving two trains, what should be a precarious ride on the tube, and a bus, will begin after a bit of a debriefing with the executive assistant in charge of the larger research center to which the Bruce Centre is attached.

It has been a great trip. Last night I painstakingly made sure to download everything I had worked on at my office computer from my flash drive to my laptop, a process that is essential lest some of the work get lost if I work from the wrong version. I packed up and watched the Champions League final, a somewhat anti-climactic 2-0 Barcelona win. This morning I had intended to come to the office early, but whether it's because I grew up poor, am cheaper than I'd like to admit, or am a glutton, I decided to have a bit of a cook up of all of the perishable food I had left. Which was not too much, but was enough to leave me pretty stuffed -- a couple of eggs, four bangers, several glasses of milk, three glasses of juice, and, of course, cheese.

I'll miss Keele. It is far enough off the beaten path that no one just ends up here. Which means that I may not be back for some time, though I'd like to assume that I'll come back someday. It's been a wonderful month. A productive month (I worked on some 20 different documents this month, though a few were tied to my presentations here). A month of opportunity. I'll pay for it with what will seem like an immensely long day, but then the reward will be that tomorrow I'll board a plane bound for Texas, bound for home.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University, and particularly the help and support of Axel Shafer, the center director. Many individuals came to my talks, welcomed me into their classrooms, took me out for coffee or meals, and generally made me feel like I was part of Keele. I will never forget that. And I will miss it.

Keele Diary #20

I am wrapping up my final full day at Keele. Tomorrow I'll pop in for a few hours in the morning, will deal with some paperwork and lose ends, and will head toward what should be a trying day of jumping from train to train to train to bus in order to get to my hotel near Heathrow.

It's been a wonderful 24 hours. A dear college friend, an American expat now living down in Cornwall, came up. She stayed at new friends' she had met through her sister in law and they kindly came and picked me up yesterday evening. They are, in the local parlance, posh, with a gorgeous house in Crewe, just a few miles from Keele. They overfed us and plied us with good wine (and port, and scotch . . . much of it with, need I say it, amazing cheese) and wonderful conversation. More importantly, I was able to catch up with Gillian. Then today she came to campus with her two children. It was great having them here because I did some things on campus I had not yet tried, including playing a cutthroat game of hide and seek in the stunning nature reserve behind massive, imposing, impressive Keele Hall. There was tree climbing and grass throwing (I was the big victim of the newly mowed projectiles) and running and silliness and tree climbing. There was a late English breakfast. And there was lots of reconnecting with an old friend I get to see too infrequently.

Now I am simply trying to get as much done as possible before giving in o the inevitable reality that time has run short here at Keele. I am saying my gradual goodbyes and am lamenting tasks left unfinished, goals left unmet, opportunities squandered, but also celebrating tangible production in the form of newly printed pages and newly saved files and freshly minted experiences. Tonight I'll watch Manchester United take on Barcelona for the Euro Cup Finals. I will pack. I will sleep in Keele for the last time, at least on this trip. And I will awake with London awaiting my arrival.

Keele Diary #19

In my waning days at Keele, as I await a visit from an old college friend who is coming up to visit from Cornwall, my thoughts naturally turn to . . . cheese.

Because I'm not a dunderheaded asswit like Sean Hannity (and his ilk), discussions about countries being better than one another, and blindly jingoistic discussions about the United States being the greatest most awesome and fantastic and free and bestest country in the whole wide world hold little interest to me. Such preening simply re-enforces what the rest of the world thinks about Americans without contributing anything useful to our understanding of America and without recognizing that America's demonstrable greatness sill leaves us with a country riddled with flaws and shortcomings.

America is best understood as a country always in the process of becoming. One need not embrace a Whiggish interpretation of history to believe that the future can be better than the present, especially when it comes to the United States fulfilling ideals that even on paper have not always been especially virtuous (3/5 compromise, anyone?). I love my country. But that love is not blind, nor does it exist without an awareness that mine is not the only country worth loving. (And I suppose I am something of a country polygamist in any case; I love England and South Africa and Ireland and have had flings with several more in between, and if I'd have had a bit more time and a bit more money I'd have given in to Norway's and France's come hither looks a bit earlier in the month. Though I do always return to the United States in the end.)

Which is why I am thinking of cheese. Because I love cheese. Love love love love love it. Cheese makes just about everything better and makes almost nothing worse. And cheese in the UK and Ireland (and from what I understand almost all of Western Europe at the minimum) is a gazillion times better than the cheese in the United States.

"But dcat," I can hear you saying, "I can get excellent cheese in the United States if I go to the right places."

And this is true, sort of, though our regulation both of food generally and of foreign foodstuffs in particular means that actually it's not entirely true from both a quality and an availability perspective. And more to the point, good cheese in the United States is the domain of the affluent. If you are willing to spend $10 in the right kind of specialty shop you can get decent cheese, but in general, even that is likely to pale compared to the blocks of cheese that I can get for under £2 (the exchange rate can be volatile, but for now about $3.50) by randomly grabbing blindly whatever is available on the shelf at the on-campus grocery store, which no one confuses with an especially great grocer's. For real selection I would have to go into town where a fat man's bounty of cheese awaits. Still, just about any cheese I pick off the shelf here is going to be better than just about any cheese I pull off the shelf at a grocery store in the United States.

The same goes for chocolate. But I like cheese better and as both a consumer and someone who likes to cook, am on more solid ground discussing cheese. The cheese here is really freaking good.

So eat it, Hannity, you insufferable douchenozzle.

Keele Diary #18

If there is one thing for which this part of England is rightly famous, it is for its "potteries," which involve both the creation of just what the word indicates - pottery - but also china, crystal, and other fine glass and earthenware. The most famous of these potteries is Wedgwood, which was based right down the road from Keele. The Potteries were the source of much of the region's commerce, and while it created an artisan class in the region, it also served, as the Potteries became industrialized and geared toward mass production, to create a working class that too often was actually an underclass. Lung problems in particular have always been rife in the Potteries, which is a word that has come to describe working-class parts of the region, and to this day, life spans (and education levels, and a whole host of other social maladies) in the Potteries is markedly worse than elsewhere.

Yet whatever their mixed record for society (Josiah Wedgwood also was an ardent anti-slavery activist and was active in a host of what we might call progressive social causes) the products that came from Wedgwood are undeniably beautiful. I spent much of the afternoon -- the first absolutely beautiful day of my trip, warm and sunny and clear -- at Wedgwood yesterday with Axel Schafer, the director of the Bruce Centre and the closest thing I have to a host or sponsor here. We had lunch at Wedgwood, then went to the shop where I took care of the gifts that will allow me safe passage back in to to my home, and then spent a long time in the brand new museum facility, which houses thousands and thousands of examples of the craftsmanship that has defined Wedgwood products for 250 years.

From Wedgwood (after stopping in briefly to watch a local cricket match) we went on to a massive, lovely public garden. Flanked by a lake, as well as by an upscale shopping district that one must traverse in order to gain access to the gardens -- canny, that -- the area (Trentham, I believe) is a pretty good example of what was once upscale public amusement -- think of it as Disney for the Victorian set -- but that has increasingly become accessible to the masses. We did a great deal of walking, perambulating around the perimeter of the lake, as well as throughout the gardens along grassy footpaths and gravel paths, pausing to read the descriptions of the development of the park, going to an elevated stand to overlook the whole tableaux, checking out the merging of old architecture -- an ancient banquet hall exposed to the elements with the new craftsmanship of the garden layout.

From there it was off to the Sneyd Arms for a meal -- I had fish and chips -- and an ale, and then home, tired from the walking and happy for the sun's revitalization. Four days are left in my latest England adventure, and just three in Keele, with today my last full day to work before a friend rolls in for a couple of days, and then Thursday I tie off loose ends and drag myself and my bulky bags, which will be no lighter after a month here, to London and the multiple trains and tubes that will lead me to a hotel, to Heathrow, and eventually on to Texas.

Oh, and Happy Memorial Day. To any veterans who might be reading: Thank you for your sacrifice, your bravery, and the honor you do to our country.

Keele Diary #17

I am plowing away at the office on a Saturday afternoon. It is quiet here in the Chancellor's Building, and while it took me a couple of hours to hit my stride, I have gotten solid work done this afternoon.

I have a little extra jump in my step because in addition to working on my book on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, I have also been working on a project on Massive Resistance to the Integration of Ole Miss that I have dabbled with off and on for several years. Indeed, it has its roots in my MA thesis at UNC-Charlotte, and even before that the idea took form as a seminar paper at Williams. In recent years I had envisioned the project as a series of journal articles, and indeed one of these, an article on the role of football in the Ole Miss crisis, came out last week in the latest Sport History Review. But all along I thought the project might make for a short book. As I have been working on the project these last few weeks, the disparate sections started to congeal, and increasingly I felt that indeed a book was waiting to peek out of this larger project.

Well, yesterday I contacted a publisher, and it looks like we are going to see if this is a workable project. I am a little nervous because a respected senior historian has been working on what is supposed to be the defining book on Ole Miss and race for going on two decades. And after competing with really big-name authors with both Bleeding Red and Freedom's Main Line (SHAMELESS!), one would think I would have learned my lesson. But for now I am moving forward. We'll send this one out and see what the press' internal reviewers think.

It's another crisp day at Keele, though I have to admit we've seen relatively little rain. I actually even have been able to wear my strappy sandals today, though admittedly that is as much about wishful thinking as about the facts on the ground. Tomorrow will be another quiet one, though in the afternoon I will be going to explore some of the local area's points of pride. In the meantime, it's time for dinner. My recognition of the lack of rain usually results in a downpour, so i think it might be best for me to scamper out of here while the sun is still shining. I think a pub dinner is calling my name.

Keele Diary #16

Well, I guess today is a social day on campus here at Keele. I was invited to coffee by one of the senior historians whose classes I sat in on, and who chaired my research seminar, and when we got there we met a gaggle of other members of the faculty, which got me a lunch invitation for next week. I just got back from visiting with another of the professors, the head of the Bruce Centre, who has been in Germany for the last fortnight. We made plans for him to show me some of the local sights that I still have not gotten to. That will also give me the chance to buy a nice gift that will allow me back into my house back at home.

When I got back form Oxford I was in a bit of doldrums, I must admit. But suddenly just a few days later I realize that I am a short-timer here at Keele. One week from today I will be on an American Airlines plane bound for the United States. (Just as a courtesy -- if you are flying internationally, I'd avoid American. It is a terrible, terrible international airline. And I have flown a lot of different airlines, so I do have a broad basis for comparison. Come to think of it, I'd avoid American domestically as well, but given that my choices on the domestic front flying from Midland-Odessa tend to be Southwest or American first and foremost, I just have to live with American's awful, awful, bad, terribleness. Have I mentioned the awfulness?) Given that my calendar is beginning to fill up, my guess is that the next few days will fly by fairly quickly.

With a week to go, here are seven things I am very much looking forward to:

1) Seeing Mrs. dcat. These long trips were a lot easier when I was single, as there was no one to miss back home. Damn her and her ways!
2) My shower. I am really seriously sick of taking baths every morning.
3) Wearing shorts and a t-shirt. They say here that rainy Mays equal great summers. Good for them. I want to see some sun. To hell with the UK summer!
4) Mexican food (4a) My kitchen. I am going to cook a fifteen course meal (give or take) my first day back. I've been able to do some decent cooking in my flat, but ingredients are of necessity limited, the space is tiny, and my tools are fairly shoddy.
5)TV. Or not just tv, but my tv, and especially sports plus my accumulated tivo fare plus bucketloads of digital cable channels.
6) Different clothes. I get sick of the same suitcase load of options, even if I packed reasonably thoroughly enough.
7) My bed. Queen size, nice pillows, a good mattress. Oh -- and a warm body. (See #1).

Oh -- did I mention that it's rainy again today? Did I really need to?

Keele Diary #15

Well, I got about half of a nice day. By nice I mean blue skies and about 60 degrees or so. But the clouds are increasingly streaked with smudges of gray and the wind is shifting from breezy to blustery. That means the rains are coming. And the skies just opened. Glorious. Rain is one of those abiding English cliches, but this May has been absurd. I think it may well have rained more in the nearly three weeks that I have been here than it did in an entire summer in Oxford in 2005. Well, maybe not quite. But the larger point stands -- it's raining an absurd amount.

As my checking account begins to get sorted -- it usually takes a day or two for charges from here to register, more for the inevitable fees that accompany some transactions, including the multiple fees attached to an ATM withdrawal -- it seems clear that I probably should not risk a big trip this weekend. I have a ton of traveling still ahead this summer, am a short-timer with at least one trip in England next week before heading to London and the trip home. And I would like to maximize my Keele time. So all of that indicates that the sensible thing to do would be to stay home. Of course I am not exactly renowned for always doing the sensible thing, so do not be shocked if the next time you hear from me I am bound for Oslo or Vienna or something.

Got the new glasses. They are expensive but fine. For those who know me, they are a bit chunkier than my old pair, a slightly more Buddy Holly or Elvis Costello look. Mrs. dcat probably won't be too thrilled -- she prefers a slightly more understated look. Methinks she'll be happy enough to have me back, however fleetingly, that she'll overlook my brazen eyewear-related fashion choice.

Keele Diary #14

I am fully willing to embrace the rest of the world's major team sports. Based on many years in South Africa, the UK and elsewhere, I have come legitimately to love rugby, to very much like and be intrigued by cricket, and I even have developed a liking for soccer, a sport I once disdained. Sports have a certain universality to them. Anyone who loves American sports would love cricket, soccer, and rugby had they grown up elsewhere.

Nonetheless, when abroad I miss American sports and will go to great lengths to see baseball, football, basketball, and even hockey if it is televised anywhere. Late last night one of the British networks that I can access in my flat (I could probably see every game of all of my sorts were I to own a satellite dish or full cable package) played the live feed of the Nuggets-Lakers game, which I was able to watch until halftime rolled aound at 3 am, and even then I went to bed to avoid seeing the lowlights of the C's-Magic series.

But there is an interesting approach to presenting American sports here in the UK. While they pull in American feeds, either live or tape delayed, they have a British studio show. The same guy does all of the shows for the big three American sports, or at least the weekly games of the week. He's an affable enough fellow and certainly likes and knows the game well. Then he has a sidekick. And the sidekick fits one of two models: He is either an American player drawn from something like the 29th tier of former players -- a guy you've never heard of, or whose four-game cup of coffee with the Reds got him his stint (as former star) -- or else he is a British athlete who played one of the sports with a comparable level of accomplishment. And again, these people are generally fine, know the game, did play the game, and they tend to be good at bringing the games to an audience that might not know it all that well, though something tells me that the huge percentage of the community watching the late-late-late night programming may come from a knowledgeable expat community.

But again, all well and good, and done far better than we do rugby or cricket, and probably not much better than we do soccer.

But then here is the kicker. When they show their highlights packages, rather than simply crib from Sportscenter or from TNT/ABC, the British highlights are put together with what I can only assume is some American expat in his 20s, and the quality is laughably bad, like the substitute local news sports reader for some rural market. He's way too loud and gratingly enthusiastic for the highlights, tries to be hip and colloquial, has lousy timing, and is generally a complete amateur goofball. And I do not mean by the standards of professional broadcasting.

You know how the lowest rung of argumentation is when someone says "who are you to criticize? Could you do that?" It's a dumb argument because it means no one can pass judgment on anything except those in their own professional areas of expertise and that no one thus can have any opinion but to be an accepting automoton. nonetheless, even using that crude measuring stick my answer is: Absolutely. I would do a much, much better job of narrating the sports highlights than this guy. I have a modest but real background in broadcasting sports on the radio, I know the games, I know how to modulate my voice, and I know better than to refer to a dunk as a "flushjob" on two consecutive highlights. Pretty much every time I am here I am tempted to figure out who produces these shows and to add my services -- I have written quite a bit about sports, not many people here could plausibly claim to know all three games better than I do, and I also understand British sporting culture.

In any case, it's still raining off and on here. I. Am. So. Sick. Of. Rain.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, British politics are in quite a state.

Keele Diary #13

It's yet another rainy day at Keele, though by and large I have managed to avoid the raindrops. Indeed on my walk over it seemed that it might even end up as quite a nice day, which would have been perfectly apt as I wore a t-shirt under a long-sleeved t-shirt under a long-sleeved collared pullover under my jacket. By the time I got to my office I was sweating like a Yankees fan at a MENSA meeting.

I just returned to my office after a trip to the Student Union, where I discovered that my Paris trip is likely not going to happen, and where I stumbled upon arguably the worst chicken sandwich in the history of chicken sandwiches. But by adding a huge packet of chips I ended up paying only £3, which is not bad. I mean as far as costs for a big packet of hot chips and an awful chicken sandwich.

I can see out my office window that the weather has turned again. When I walked to the union the sky still had a great deal of blue popping out from the clouds, but it's pretty well completely enveloped by gray clouds now and it has started to rain. An hour or two ago it poured torrentially, just as it did yesterday when I was walking form one side of campus to another. It appears that the sky is opening up again now.

In case any of you are curious, you can get a history of Keele here, the university home page is here, the History Department here, the American Studies Department here, the David Bruce Centre for American Studies here, and links to pictures of campus here. I have not yet taken my camera out of its case to get some shots of campus, but that might be a goal in my now apparently Frenchless weekend, assuming I can get some sort of break in the rain.

Keele Diary #12

I am back in Keele after a fun-filled weekend seeing old friends and making new ones in Oxford. I'll dispense with the play-by-play, which I suspect would amuse no one but myself and just stick to a few observations about Oxford and being back at Keele.

One of the interesting aspects of train travel is how much of the hidden world you see. By their very nature train tracks cut a swath through a country, but they usually try to do so in ways that are unobtrusive to most (which is to say, to the upper-middle and upper classes. So one ends up seeing a great deal of hustle and bustle in places like garages, or the loading docks of warehouses, or the parking lots of office buildings the shiny facades of which are presented to the public. Train tracks overlook fences and reveal the mundane. Yet there are aspects of the mundane that we rarely see.

Partially it is a function of the country's scale, but train travel in Britain is great. It is convenient, and if not exactly cheap, it is also not exactly expensive. Trains are frequent -- one can leave Stoke-on-Trent station every hour at seven past en route to Oxford. Coming back there are two trains an hour, largely because the Cross Country Rail route to Stoke is one that passes through Birmingham and Manchester. If I end up going to Paris this weekend, I'll almost certainly end up going via train for at least part of the route.

As I say, Oxford was great. Caught up with RoJo right away and stayed at his family's North Oxford home. Managed to round up a couple of the Armitage Shanks each night along with some other friends of theirs and sat around talking and joking and arguing. Saturday afternoon involved a grand ramble through vast Port Meadow, which though I did not really realize that a meadow could be such a thing, is quite famous. Four of us, and three big, rambunctious dogs, walked for miles and miles along a river bank, passing through docile bovines and regal equines, through muddy bogs and near a nature preserve. We earned our pies and ale that night, much of which we enjoyed at the Gardener's Arms, one of the most preferred pubs of the Armitage Shanks, alongside The Lamb and Flag (drinks on Friday evening) and The Turf (lunch on Sunday) and a few others.

But while I am happy to have gotten to Oxford, I may not go to Paris, which I hoped to accomplish this weekend. I managed to fix the glasses situation of Friday morning with superglue and the repair job held and does not look too ridiculous, save for the fact that the result is noticably crooked and that it left an indelible smear of superglue on the corner of my left lens. It's precarious, and at some point will break again. So I headed on down to Newcastle (not the Newcastle way up North with the famous Ale and the football team that is likely to be relegated after this coming week's Premier League conclusion, but a smaller one that nonetheless provides the closest market town to Keele, because lord knows that England has run out of names for places) to an optometrist. But of course my eye insurance does not carry here, and things in the UK can be more pricey. Plus, I went to the aged shop of a colleague rather than to the massive chain store, and supporting locals is great, but it's not cheap. In any case, in two days, and some £350 later (trust me for those disinclined to figure out the exchange rate -- it's a huge amount of cash) I'll have new glasses that will look much like my old glasses. I will, I imagine, feel akin to how I always do after a costly car repair -- I spend a bunch of money to get back my car as it was status quo ante. The necessity of the transaction does not make it particularly pleasurable. Keele has a university travel center, so hopefully they have some acumen on reasonably priced trips across the way to France. Otherwise, that trip will have to wait for another time.

Part of my need for new glasses and unwillingness to roll the dice on them lasting out the trip is that within a day or two of my return to Texas I have to turn around and head to New York. I am being interviewed for a documentary on the Freedom Rides and do not want to roll in to my close-up looking like Professor Frink.

Today for lunch I was invited by a retired senior professor in the history department to a quaint out of the way pub in one of the nearby villages. Bothomley is one of seemingly countless little villages in the area. Many have nice, ancient homes, most have one little pub that serves as the center of community life, though some of those pubs are dying as the housing market for those lovely homes become the domain of rich folks buying a holiday house. This pub -- I believe it is the White Horse -- has the requisite character and serves a lunch that draws people from all around. We got there by noon to beat the rush, and while we were early enough to be the first to order, within minutes the two tiny rooms were bustling with conversation and orders from the bar and the clicking of forks on plates. I ordered oatcakes, a regional specialty, that can best be described as an oat pancake or crepe folded around cheese and onions and in this case (there was some discussion as to what constitutes a true oatcake) tomatoes, beans, and bacon (British version). It was tasty and filling. We were also accompanied by an elderly cardiologist who was one of professor Adams' contemporaries. The conversation was lively and wonderful, breaking all laws of subjects that are supposed to be taboo (politics and religion were fair game) and ranging far and wide. It was a wonderful afternoon and helped me to fight off some mid-trip doldrums that crashed over me last night upon my return.

I'm back and with less than two weeks to go now. My time is open and I hope to get a ton of writing and revising done in my remaining time here. If only the damp, raw, rainy weather would pass. That's not great for the mood. Suffice it to say one of the many things I am looking forward to upon returning to Texas is stepping into glorious, unremitting heat. Which I will enjoy for a few minutes before wistfully saying "boy, it was nice and cool at Keele."

Keele Diary #11

Breaking one's glasses sucks.

Breaking one's glasses abroad is nearly intolerable.

Breaking one's glasses on a day when one is supposed to catch a train to Oxford makes one wonder if one is being punished for previous sins.

Breaking one's glasses when one qualifies as blind as a bat sans glasses is fate's cruel way of playing a joke.

Keele Diary #10

When I am abroad, and especially when I am living abroad, I walk a lot more than I do at home. I would suspect that the same is the case for most Americans abroad. The main reason is quite simple: At home I live in a car culture, and I have a car. I live relatively close to campus, and on rare occasions do walk to school, but rarely, at least in part because time is a finite commodity, because for much of the year weather is not exactly a friend to the light-skinned paramulator, because Odessa is not the world's most pedestrian friendly city, and because, well, I am selfish and lazy and so clearly hate the environment.

When I am abroad, I don't have a car. If I had a car, I would drive it. But also, when I am abroad, I tend to live on on near university campuses, where even if I did have a car, my parking spot at my residence would almost certainly be about as good a spot as I could locate. But also, in most places in the world, and England and Keele certainly qualify, there is simply more of a walking culture. On campus, the default mechanism is walking, and one would come up with a reason not to. At home, the default mechanism is driving, and one comes up with reasons to walk.

And I do not mind. I enjoy walking, even though I am not the biggest fan in the world of hiking (not because of the walking, but because of the pointlessness, mostly). But there have been times in my life when even hiking took on a utilitarian bent. When I lived in South Africa in 1997 hiking became another way to deeply immerse myself in the country, and I had friends who hiked, and we'd camp and have a wonderful time. I suppose I could recapture that in the United States, and in the right context and with the right people, I am certain I would. But I also think that in 1997 I simply walked everywhere. It became the norm. If I left town, I went with a good friend who had a car, and certainly did not reject rides as they came. But I also thought nothing of walking 2-3 miles to a friend's or girlfriend's house if a ride was not available, something almost unimaginable in the US.

These days my walks cover a fairly familiar path. I leave my flat, which is probably several hundred yards or so from the middle of campus. I go down to the news agent at the student union and pick up The Guardian and The Independent (yes, I still stubbornly cling to news print even though I also subscribe to numerous newspapers online and well know the direction of the newspaper industry's fortunes). From there I head somewhat back in the other direction to come to my office. In the evening I might walk home, but usually do so via the grocer's in the same general area as the news agent, and I might walk to the pub. I certainly walked more when I was at Oxford in 2005, or in Grahamstown in South Africa whenever I return there. But in both cases those were simply functions of scale -- Oxford is bigger than Keele, and the town is more integrated into the university; Rhodes University is part of Grahamstown, adjacent to the main part of town.

I'll go home for two weeks and will walk less, or when I walk it will be purely as recreational endeavor, as Mrs. dcat and I like to go for walks, oftentimes on the big loop around campus. But that will be walking to walk, as opposed to walking as a modus vivendi, as it is in so much of the rest of the world, and as it is for me here.

Keele Diary #9

Let's see, in the last 24 hours I've:

Discovered the postgrad pub here that everyone raves about. Well, not discovered, it was already there. But I found it.

Walking home (sober) I stepped off the sidewalk to let three students pass. But the sidewalk was on a slope, and the sidewalk is flanked by a thin strip of concrete that protrudes an inch or so above the surface. The ground on the slope was muddy and slippery, I wiped out, and smashed my shins directly on the concrete trim. My biggest problem at first was saving face, which became impossible when the very sweet students kept trying to help me, and I just wanted to get away. Then I discovered, once my shame faded that a contusion that size of a cricket ball (culturally assimilated!) has instantly sprung up on my leg.

They show The Wire at 11:25 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights on BBC 2. They are in the midst of season two, which is probably my least favorite of the five seasons but is still among the greatest television seasons ever put on the screen. I was ready to go to bed when it was done, but I noticed that NBA basketball was coming up. I assumed it was a highlights show of some sort. Nope -- Celtics-Magic Game 5 live! I was up all night. Great win for the guys in green, coming from a double digit deficit to take a 3-2 series lead.

Still got up early to come to campus to participate in the last meeting of the Southern History seminar. I talked a bit about school integration, focusing on Ole Miss, a topic on which I am working on a project of undetermined outcome.

Had lunch with several faculty and graduate students before my research presentation, which I thought went quite well. I was happy with it anyway, and we had great conversation afterward and I have several great ideas to carry me forward.

Tonight Wigan Athletic Club is nearly the last line of defense between Manchester United and another Premier League title (ManU may still need a tie this weekend if they do win). Given that Manchester is about 40 minutes away from Keele, I expect a heavily ManU crowd to gather at the student union, so I might have to go check it out, as a live Premier League game appears not to be in the cards. Plus I have a soft spot for plucky Wigan, which was promoted to the Premier League when I was in Oxford in 2005.

Keele Diary #8

Thoughts on higher education gathered while pondering the fact that England has a magazine called Carpworld, that there is apparently so much competition in the genre that Carpworld advertises itself as "The Original and Still the Best," and that the fellow standing in line ahead of me at the news agent was scooping up his copy. There is also The Racing Pigeon, a magazine that apparently is so dominant in its genre that it can advertise itself as "The Only Independent Pigeon Weekly." Who am I to doubt such a grand and self-serving claim? It ain't raging if it's true.

One major similarity between academic culture in the United States and in the UK is the enveloping sense of pessimism about academic life. The list of complaints is remarkably similar in both cultures despite the separation of the Atlantic. And the criticisms have credence. I will list just a handful: Students are apathetic/ill-prepared/worse than they once were/entitled/lazy. Administrators are daft/invasive/clueless/capricious/annoying/ignorant and insensitive to the needs of professors/departments/programs. Politicians intervene in the world of higher education without any real clue as to how things work and with ideological blinders firmly in place. We are too reliant upon time consuming assessments and metrics that do not actually tell us anything useful. Academic fads and fashions that tend to be imposed from above shift without warning. Technology leaves us in a state of flux on issues ranging from research (our own and our students -- the Wikipedia problem in the case of the latter), copyright, and library acquisitions. The effort to rigidify research outputs does not serve research or learning. The over-reliance upon student teaching evaluations re-enforces the consumer model and shackles professors and in turn hinders good teaching. The list goes on.

Read Times Higher Education, the weekly magazine for higher education, and one quickly realizes that with the exception of configuration and formatting and the vast and impenetrable gap between English and English and one could be reading the Chronicle of Higher Education in terms of many of the lamentations and concerns and debates. And yet my colleagues both here and at home should take a longer view. I am in the midst of reading three books about higher education. One is a collection of essays from academics in the humanities and social sciences calling for a radicalized and more politically engaged professoriate. Another of the books comes from a respected historian lamenting the state of the academy at least in part for the opposite reasons from his colleagues in the collected essays. And the third book wants to remind a skeptical profession of the utility of that most beleaguered and endangered species: the classroom lecture. But here is where we should perhaps take solace, step back, realize that the sky is not falling, and understand that higher education is always in crisis. The three books? The radical historian Theodore Roszak's collection The Dissenting Academy, published for the first time in 1967; historian of the Soviet Union Adam Ulam's The Fall of the American University (1972), and British education specialist Donald Bligh's What's The Use of Lectures (1971). I am not arguing that we should be sanguine about some of the very real threats we face. But I am willing to make the case that we overstate our dire sraits both here in the UK and back at home. Universities are remarkably adaptable. And one thing we should realize is that invasive administrators, clueless (and also invasive) politicians, disappointing students, and transformations in technology (inter alia) have always been with us. But so too have committed and sensitive administrators, wise and understanding politicians, and clever and dedicated students, and we have always adjusted to the new technologies. I, for one, do not lament the rise of the electronic library catalogue.

Vincent Vega had it right in this case: It's the little differences. And in academic culture there are lots of little differences between the US and the UK. But on most of the big things, including our fears and complaints, we are all part of very similar basic cultures of higher education. And thirty years from now we will probably be able to read a whole host of books from academics lamenting academic life in 2009 even as a host of such books and articles are being published at the time. Twas always thus, and always thus will be. As with most aspects of life, when we look back in the not-so-distant past and look for a golden age, there is one discovery to be made: there never was a golden age.

Keele Diary #7

Week two begins at Keele. It will be a busy week for me, but with an attainable carrot at the end of the stick. On Wednesday I will be siting in on the Southern history seminar again, this time talking about the desegregation of education. I've done some work on Brown v. Board and on the Ole Miss integration crisis, among other germane topics, so I hope I'll have something to contribute.

Then that afternoon, Weednesday May 13th, I give my research presentation, "'Digging in For a Long Fight': Bus Boycotts, White Supremacy, and Black resistance in the US and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s." That will take place at 2:30 in the David Bruce Centre Seminar Room (CBB 1.030). If you happen to be in the general vicinity of the University of Keele, you can see me present a talk about what amounts to the first three chapters of my next book.

Thursday I am leading a seminar on the American West for the director of the Bruce Centre, who is out of town and offered me the chance to take his class for one of its sessions. I have two hours, and we'll mostly talk about regional identity and what it means. I have no particular expertise on the West, but I do feel as if I know a bit about regionalism in the United States and how regional identity can be contested.

My reward for work well done (or, for that matter, for work done) will be a trip down to Oxford where there will be a no doubt debauched reunion of the Armitage Shanks. I look forward to returning to Oxford, to seeing good friends, and to closing down all manner of pubs and bars. Until then, though, I have writing to do.

Keele Diary #6

After working into the early evening yesterday, I decided to go to the Sneyd Arms Pub for dinner and to have some drinks. The Sneyd (pronounced "Sneed") Arms is a quintessential British village pub. I brought a couple of sections of the newspaper, positioned myself at a table not far from the television with the sports highlights, ordered an ale, and commenced to reading, watching the highlights of the games (Stoke City beat Hull 2-1 yesterday, all but assuring that the local lads will not have to fear relegation this year) and people watching. I ate a fine coronation chicken, which is basically a curry, with chips coated in cheese, and over the course of several hours several fine Abbot Ales.

The people watching was equally good. A high percentage of the patrons were clearly locals, drawn either from the surrounding village (I think it is Keele Village, but I am not certain) or else from the university community. There were slightly soused women in funny hats all dressed up and just returned from an ascot. There were men in tweed and herringbone who seemed frozen in another era, mid-century mannered Englishmen out for a pint, perhaps back from a fox hunt (the area screams fox hunting), saying things like "the man who raised me was of the traditional sort. He said what he meant and he meant what he said." (I normally hate reconstructed dialogue, but I liked that one so much I actually punched it into my Blackberry at the time.) There were young lovers and older couples and groups celebrating birthdays. There were people so pale they seemed one step removed from albinism. Men shouted at the football matches using words like "bugger" and "bloody." And while the law now allows pubs to stay open later than it once did, last call is still at 11:00 in the Sneyd Arms.

I do not want to fetishize an imagined English tradition nor to reduce the night to a set piece. The pub has its share of spiky haired young men speaking loudly to impress the young women with their very modern decollotage, the television is connected to satellite, and while the menu has abundant traditional English fare it also offers nachos and fajitas and Chinese food and burgers. But there is unquestionably a traditional, rural, local vibe to the Sneyd Arms that makes it appealing and that connects it to past generations of students and locals and the occasional visitor, tucked away in a corner, reading the books section of The Guardian and whiling away the hours with pints of bitter.

Keele Diary #5

As much as I travel, and as many times as I have had long-term commitments in faraway lands, such as the opportunity afforded me here at Keele, the reality is that all of my experience does not change the fact that sometimes travel is a lonely business. I am a pretty social person, and tend to be able to make friends wherever I travel. But it does not happen instantaneously nor does it happen automatically. As a consequence, the first weekend, which this one is for me, tends to be the most difficult, something that might come as a surprise to even my close friends.

I just put in a pretty good week of work, and while I am at the office now and have been for a few hours, I do not necessarily want to come in first thing in he morning and work all day. I brought some dvd's, including a couple of tv series, just to make sure that I could kill down time and, frankly, to allow me to stave off boredom early in the trip. Season two of Hill Street Blues has served me well the last 24 hours or so when campus quieted down (well, more on this in a moment) and left me to my own devices. And here I should be plain -- I am toying with a weekend trip to Paris while I am here, and Thunderstick spent much of Thursday encouraging me to take off this weekend. It pains me to say it, but he was probably right.

In any case, I opted for a mellow night in the flat last night after deciding not to try my social fortunes at one of the on-campus pubs, a graduate pub that apparently is run by a member of CAMRA (the Coalition for Real Ales) and is supposed to be quite good. It was too late to slip in for a quiet pint (I was in the office until about ten last night). But also outside of a very raucous student union I would estimate that a couple of hundred or more students were lined up to get inside of what promised to be a chaotic undergraduate experience. I envied them even as I acknowledged that I have always hated those jam packed nights. I decided at that point to avoid the masses and head toward home. I could have hit the quiet pub past my flat, but in the end opted for a quiet night at home. I stayed up too late, throwing my carefully cultivated sleep schedule off, which is oftentimes more of a key to staving off loneliness than you might imagine. If one is up when everyone is asleep and asleep when most people are up, it is not good for the mindset.

In any case, I promised myself to go out a bit earlier this evening, before the undergraduate maelstrom, and having gotten a reasonable amount of work done these last few hours I intend to fulfill that promise. Ideally by this time next weekend, the loneliness will have abated both through knowing more people and by having more of a comfort zone with this new place where I find myself. Of course by this time next weekend I'll be amidst the legendary Armitage Shanks in my old stomping grounds in Oxford (might the Manor Bar come into play? I suspect that it might) so I'll have somewhat alleviated my social anxieties by reverting to a familiar world.