Fudo City

This is Nicola White, my favourite mudlark. (Yes, I have a favourite mudlark. I also have other mudlarks, who, while not my favourite mudlark, are also brilliant. If you don't have a favourite mudlark, what are you even doing?)

Ordinarily I unspool a mudlark video here and there for a bit of exotic foreign beachcombing. Because the seaweed is always greener on the far side of the planet. And let me tell you, us New Worlders are missing out; what Nicola finds in the Thames – midtown London, mind you – is better than anything I'll find in the North Pacific, ever.

But that's just the inescapable luck of the draw. Consider, for example, that I'd rather not dig clams there. Some things you got, some things you ain't. (Second Noble Truth, with a worldly-dharma chaser.)

But this one drove me mad. I'm talking physical pain. Because this time, my girl Nicola outed me as a bad monk, a self-righteous Buddhist, and a very strange man.

It starts about 1:40 – the video opens at that mark when you click on it – where, if you look carefully at the mud... you'll see a washer.

An old, rusty, well-abused washer.

The sort that makes a first-class fudo.

And boy, does that trigger my greed! You can see it right there. It's within reach. The camera places you right behind the hand. "It's right there! Just right! No, don't pan away!"

But that happens a lot in mudlarking videos. What is less common, happens next.

Another one. Just as good and just as near.

Then another. And another.

I counted at least half a dozen before Nicola wandered on, for a total of about a minute and a half of torment. And God knows how many other rings lie just out of frame.

Needless to say, she walks right past all of them. Because she's after, like, actual stuff. Interesting stuff. Thought-provoking stuff she can use in her artwork. (That's what Nicola is: an artist.)

So she doesn't need a pack of rusty washers.

She's probably got enough of those to hold the duration.

But if you're a fudo maker, that dreggy hardware shines, if only metaphorically, right off the gloomy muck. (Looking remarkably like ours, come to that. Amazing how similar the UK is to the North Coast.)

I'm telling you, that's powerful iron. Those guys contain enough disdain for suffering, each one, to make Mara incontinent for days.*

And I could reach out and take them, if my arms were 5,000 miles longer.

You're killing me here, Nicola.

*MaraisnotrealpleasedonotascribesufferingoreviltoasupernaturalbeingcalledMaraMaraisjustallegoryfordelusionformoreinformationpleasesitzazen.

Thanksgiving Recipe

"Gratitude to squelch my anger, and tenacity to overcome the obstacles."

Henry Winkler's recipe for success. Note that the first one is bodhisattva awareness.



(Photo of Yorkshire coble "Gratitude" ["There's Gratitude for you!"] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

In Which Marley Carries the Day

I've been a huge Dickens fanboy since a Christmas in high school when I decided to read his most famous story. You know, from an actual book. The kind with no battery.

That was the initial infection. By the end of my undergraduate years I'd read every novel, travelogue, and short story Dickens ever wrote. Followed, in the throes of detox, by several biographies and critical essays, including Orwell's succinct and brilliant analysis of Dickens' place in British culture.

But since those student days I've wanted to write a sequel – more properly, a conclusion – to his most famous work. Because the man left A Christmas Carol unfinished.

In it, as you will recall, bitter old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts – or one ghost and three bodhisattvas – who convince him to lay off being a bitter old miser. (Note that in so doing, Dickens invents psychoanalysis fifty years before the fact. Further proof of his visionary genius.)

The story closes on that catharsis, as Scrooge becomes slightly foolish and a lot nicer to those in his circle, and, we're assured, faithfully keeps Christmas to the end of his days.

And there Charles Dickens abandons his greatest novel, leaving us with nothing more than this uplifting but ultimately anæmic introduction.

And they call Edwin Drood a tragedy!

Because what Dickens takes to his own grave is the story of how Scrooge's overdue rejection of the scarcity model went on to raise a swelling wave of economic and social development, the force of which was still carrying, not just Tim Cratchit, but indeed Tim's great-grandchildren, generations thence.

The belief that greed and stinginess are good business was coin of the realm in Dickens' day, as it remains in ours. But there's no evidence that this pat excuse for egotism is exact.

Fact is, having this reality abruptly kicked up his backside by his business partner and three unrelenting enforcers, my man Ben (who was, lest we forget, uncommon sharp) re-entered the world on the day after New Year's and started ploughing wealth into the neighbourhood: creating infrastructure, developing resources, improving standards, and generating something vastly more valuable than simple jobs: opportunity.

And that's not all. He also straight-up turned Queen's Evidence, plying his legendary flint and synoptic command of commercial law to defend the exploited from the predators he used to ride with. Soon those former homies just stood down when they learned Scrooge and Marley Ltd had the account; you don't win against those odds. Because S&M (you thought that name was a coincidence?) will bulldog you on every point until you never even recoup your losses, let alone profit.

And the ironic part is that Scrooge actually got richer for all of this. Probably a lot richer. Because a lot of competent people who'd only served to keep him in gruel prior to that haunted Christmas Eve were paying their rent and thinking bigger.

If the Ghosts of Christmas had thought it through, they would have added some economics to that field trip through his life. Asked him how his amiable and generous old employer Feziwig got so prosperous; shown him what a waste of earning potential were all those ruined present lives; and especially, how rich he totally wasn't by the hour of his death. Scrooge dies in the same crappy flat, surrounded by the same paltry rubbish. If he'd made more money, it hadn't accomplished anything. Not even for him.

In the end, it's just a total waste to have a guy like Scrooge simply stand down.

Because if it's true that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging, it is as well that in that moment you find yourself standing beside (or beneath) a pile of soil, holding a shovel.

My thoughts this holiday season; may they be worth the penny.

Wishing us every one the happiest of Yules, and a fruitful new year.


(1915 Arthur Rankham illustration of Jacob Marley auditing Scrooge ["Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"] courtesy of William Pearl and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Christmas in Oxfordshire

(Photo by friend and fellow Blogger blogger Bill Nicholls. One of several brilliant morning captures of his home county that he posted last Wednesday.

England shares the same Christmas vibe as my own North Pacific homeland: more grey than white, more frost than snow, but timeless and deeply compelling if you were raised on it.

This scene is also my Yuletide desktop this year. With the holiday lights app blinking around the edges, it looks like home to me.)

Real Men Drink Tea

(This is one of my most popular bylines. It's a bit dated now; anybody else remember that "Coffee Achievers" ad campaign, wherein the coffee industry tried to flog their product as health food? But the sentiments remain mine, and I still get kind words about it from time to time. For any friends who missed it, and those who have asked for a valid URL, here it is.)

For a nation whose birthing cry was an act of vandalism protesting the high price of tea, Americans are strangely ambivalent on the subject today. While working-class guys in India, Japan and the UK belt down tea by the thermos-capful with nary a qualm, American men write it off as wimp juice. It's a historical riddle, really. The mere suggestion that tea might be unmanly would have prompted those paint-smeared, buckskin-clad Bostonians of yesteryear to heave the sceptic into the harbour like so much top-grade pekoe, yet their descendants fear the stuff like tight briefs. How did we fall so far?

It's tempting to pin the demise of the noble leaf in America on coffee. As a he-man beverage, coffee brings a lot to the party. It looks bad. It tastes bad. It smells... OK, it smells pretty good. But coffee boasts up to four times the caffeine of black tea, as well as lurid health hazards that the laid-back tea leaf can only dream of. In other words, coffee is macho. All told, it logs in slightly below blowfish and a little above football on the Pain-Indexed Virility Scale. Madison Avenue knows this, at one point hiring no less a guy-icon than the great Joe DiMaggio to hawk one of the first drip coffee machines.

But none of this explains why simple, honest tea strains under the stigma of unmanliness. Maybe signing Joltin' Joe to push caffeine was a no-brainer, but would someone tell me why Mr. Coffee's manly glass belly now reflects the dainty porcelain curves of Mrs. Tea? She's not even Ms. Tea. This alleged machine (just what does a "tea maker" do, anyway?) isn't just targeted at women, it's targeted at old women.

Not that it really makes a difference. A TV ad for bottled tea ran in heavy rotation a few summers back. The spots initially captured my attention because they featured a shouting male voice-over of the sort usually heard bellowing, "Sixty-four MONSTER TRUCKS!!! Meet Playboy's MISS AUGUST!!! BE THERE!!!" over your car radio. Unremittingly masculine... until you notice that the rebellious young tea-slammers are three unremittingly feminine supermodels. "This ain't no SIPPING TEA!!!" sneers the announcer. Apparently, being gulped is all the envelope-pushing that tea can stand.

I don't get it. Time was, men were men, and men drank tea. (When they weren't launching it into the bay, that is.) The intrepid mountain men of the Hudson's Bay Company so relied on tea to maintain their masculine mystique that they seeded the West with the Labrador tea plant, whose leaves they used to stretch or replace precious stores of black tea. That's right: rugged outdoorsmen, known to go a year between baths, collapsed in a quivering mass if a tea bog were more than a day's schlep away. Think of it as the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the latte stand. And, hold on to your boxers, brothers: now we're talking about herbal tea.

Of course, guys used to wear wigs and face powder too, habits generally frowned-upon in locker rooms today. But let's face it: for the man of action, tea beats the pants off coffee. All you need is reasonably tasty organic matter and boiling water. No fuss, no gizmos, no blackboard with x's and o's on it. Hot water. Leaves. Tea. Yet somehow, between Lewis and Clark's tea-fueled expedition to the Pacific and the Civil War, American guys stepped off the tea wagon. And we've been chumps ever since. Yankee and Rebel soldiers brewed coffee over their tiny campfires, packing the clanking paraphernalia in their marching kits and waiting, feet ice-cold in the snow, while it took its sweet time perking up. Ditto the cowboys. American soldiers in this century dipped barely-drinkable boiled coffee from a huge cauldron; the last GIs in line got half a cup of grounds. These days, soldiers fall back on MRE packets of "instant coffee-type beverage, hot."

This beats a pot of tea? Given a fistful of decent leaves and a heat source, a guy can brew the same cup of darjeeling on Mt. Everest that he enjoys in his living room. And he can drink it before he succumbs to hypothermia. Now how much would you pay?

In the end, logical arguments are really beside the point. This is ultimately an emotional issue, turning less on what men do than how we feel about it. Given that the words "I feel" frighten us even more than tea, it may be some time before American men come home to tea. But it's a shame. My own British background steeped me in "tea sense," a Pavlovian reaction to tea's aromatic khaki swirl that science has yet to confirm. But you can take my word for it. As long as tea is up, I'm all right. You say my girlfriend ran off with my record collection? I put on the kettle. Have I slogged ten miles in mud and freezing rain, with ten more yet to go? My backpacking stove heats a quart of water in two minutes. My agent called to say she could sell my manuscript on auto maintenance, if only it had a sex scene? A splash of hot water and a spot of milk restore equilibrium to an unbalanced world.

The re-hinging power of tea is real, and real men respect it. A retired US Army officer I once interviewed remembered watching Royal Air Force pilots blast enemy fighters out of the North African sky for hours on end. At the first lull, the Englishmen would land their Spitfires, leap onto the sand, and pour a hasty cup of tea. Forty years later, the American still remembered how the twentysomething flyers called each other "old man" and chatted like businessmen on an evening train. But not for long. Soon, another squadron of Messerschmitts would come snarling over the dunes. Exhausted, grimy, hungry, the RAF men dumped the lees of their cuppa in the dust and, with a quiet "Tally ho!", roared off to defy death again.

Coffee achievers, indeed.

(Text previously appeared in The Herb Tea Book, Interweave Press,1998. Photo of Pietro da Cortona's Ananias Restoring the Sight of St. Paul [NOTE BOY ON RIGHT SERVING TEA -- COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)