woobiquity

lv. Of emergency exits

While running an errand earlier, I passed one of London's newish bendy buses. A sign on one of the windows said "EMERGENCY EXIT. BREAK GLASS." While I pondered what on earth a person trapped on a crowded, smoke-filled bus would use to shatter a half-inch-thick piece of glass (a high heel shoe? a wheelchair?) I noticed that all of the windows had emergency exit signs.

On the one hand, there's something almost transcendentalist about this loud, labelistic gesture on the part of some bureaucrat at Transport for London. See that window? That's not really a window. It's an escape! An epiphany! On the other hand... sometimes ingenuity and idiocy are not so far apart.

liv. Of your words writ small, medium or large

Courtesy of LetterJames, yet another harmlessly addictive website. Of course, I would never do this for real. When I was about eight years old, I wrote my full name in the fake Christmas snow on the side of the Winn Dixie meat counter, and the horrified look on my mother's face has never left me.

liii. 'In my house there are many rooms'

Correction. Were many rooms. This abandoned, post-war housing estate next to Greenwich rail station is being demolished to make way for some curvaceous modern penthouses. Two young women and their estate agent stood by the site today, trying to imagine the glory of their future flat, even as the jurassic head of a cutter-crusher peeked through the backs of the former homes, looking more the calculated menace than anything Spielberg could have dreamed up.

When the glass fronts came off a couple of weeks ago, all was revealed: stacked rooms painted in bright reds, blues and yellows; anything to say "this is mine, I live here." A teenager's posters flapped soggy in the early-autumn wind.

We like to think of our homes as fortresses or safe havens, but all it would take is some demolition madman following his morbid curiosity, and bam!: there you'd be, spread out in your tattered underwear, eating tuna from the tin, the cozy burnt umber on your walls not looking nearly as reassuring in the cold light of day.

lii. Of one word after another

Whatever did we do with ourselves before the internet came along to fill our lives with such addictive nothingness? Wordcount is a pristine and oddly engrossing example. It’s a sliding scale of over 86,000 words, ranked according to how frequently they appear in English usage.

Are you surprised that we use the word ‘Microsoft’ more often than ‘wisdom’, and almost twice as often as ‘ethics’? Go figure. ‘Love’ is 10 times more popular than ‘hate’, which bodes well even if Wordcount is based on a British-compiled sample of written documents – two factors that could well mask what’s really in our hearts, and for that matter explain why an American verbal tick like ‘dude’ ranks low, right beside ‘ursodeoxycholic’ (which just means bile).

Put a few words side by side and some seemingly deep meanings are bound to jump out at us (uh, duh! Horoscopes?). Here there’s a kind of pidgin poetry talking. Which would be the only kind of poetry I’m capable of myself, if you believe this: Jonathan: unfortunate poems attributed. (Grrr.)

Meanwhile, the only poet I know personally gets this: Peter: serious throughout (which is kind of funny considering the name his friends call him by gets this: Pete: stem upright pump).

Ok. Somebody stop me! Clearly I am putting too much thought into this, considering the rest of you idle anonymous came, saw, and all you wanted to know was whether ‘fuck’ was in the database.

li. Of everything, but rotten tom-ah-toes

I’ve been thinking about that old song “You say tom-ay-to, I say tom-ah-to…” Robert, a voice coach I used to know, liked to tell the story of the female student of his who, unfamiliar with the song and asked to sight read it at an audition sang: “You say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ah-to…” the whole way through, while Robert watched, silently and no doubt about to split, like one that’s been left on the vine too long.

Since that happened at least a decade ago, before the specialist foods craze really took off in British supermarkets (butter from cows that graze only on a particular Alpine knoll? Taste the difference, baby!), it’s safe to say that at that point in her life, our peachy chanteuse had probably never tasted a genuine tom-ay-to – as opposed to its styrofoam British cousin, the tom-ah-to. In fact, she may not have to this day.

They just don’t grow here in this damp, northern climate. Of course, hardly anything sold in the supermarkets here does. British supermarkets are the best in the world (empire-sized irony:) because they bring the world to Britain. It’s just that a few good things in the world refuse to be transported.

The garden tomato is a prime example. I’m talking about those wonderfully deformed, melon-sized, “heirloom” varieties grown under open sunshine and ripened on the vine before the vine is cut; the kind that haven’t been genetically modified to bounce when dropped at 20 feet. The kind that, tragically, even promising specimens bought at Borough Market could not begin to compare to.

I know, I know. I’m hysterical! Obsessed! Tomato mad! Worse still, after eight years on this side of the Atlantic, I barely know which way to pronounce the word. Tam-ay-to! tom-ah-to!… let’s call the whole thing off! (Now I’m scaring me.)