Cat flap or Scilly Isles? Silly question

Romeo, as a pre-teen cat in Maryland

There's turf torn up in my back garden; the consensus is that a badger did it. I quite like badgers, with their striped heads and pudgy brown bodies. I have thought of them, since we moved to England, as sort of like distant cousins of the raccoon, one of my favorite woodland creatures in the U.S.

Not anymore. This morning, the carpenter arrived to install our cat flap. This being an English house of brand-new construction, it isn't three-foot-thick stone walls holding up the roof, but it is four-inches of concrete, then about six inches of air space/insulation, then framing and board and hand-applied plaster.

Not anymore. At least not right next to the french doors leading from our living room to the deck, from which we can see a great deal of the Tamar Valley (thought not the river itself, hidden by rolling hills), the edge of Dartmoor and Brentor, where a 12th century church (St. Michael de Rupe) perches right at the peak. There is now a hole in the walls through which our cat, if he desires, can exit to have a look at the Tamar Valley and Brentor. I don't think he'd be interested in the church, being, like all cats, something of a heathen.

Badgers: There's a reason they're called badgers
But there is the badger problem. The carpenter told us badgers are nowhere near as cute as they look. They'll attack cats and dogs. Oh my. Mr. Cat--real name Romeo--is a lover, not a fighter. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe our wussycat will dash in his cat flap rather than confront a much larger fellow with fangs and racing stripes up the side of his head. Mr. Cat, having been an indoor/outdoor cat for most of his life in rural Maryland, has been an indoor cat now for about 15 months. When we lived in the flat in Tavistock, he could have gone easily out a picture window to the car park, and thence over a wall to other folk's gardens. But if he got around front, he'd have been at the mercy of cars at the top of West Street, where they flew by hoping to get a good space to park before anyone else did. Especially on Friday nights when the young people were eager to bend their elbows at a few popular music pubs. So we never let him out and he got used to it.

But since we moved into the house, he can more easily smell the fresh air. And he hears the birds chirping in the hedgerow that forms the western boundary of the garden. He'd quite like to taste an English robin, I think. When I went out to water some new plants not yet assigned a permanent place in the garden (and awaiting a sunny day for planting for my benefit), Romeo stood up on the french doors and piteously yowled. I know he wants to go out. Badly. By afternoon today, he should be able to. The wonderful carpenter is making a nice little vestibule for the cat in the wall behind the cat flap, with carpet on the bottom. I shouldn't wonder if Romeo asks for a lamp in it sometime. We've already discussed having the carpenter create a little awning, about 18 inches above the deck, over the cat flap so Romeo can sit out there and watch the rain. He loved to sit in the bark mulch behind the plants under our very wide eaves in Maryland and watch the rain. But this is a three-storey house, and the eaves are too high up to protect him.

What we do for love
Yes, it is nuts. We could have had a nice trip to the Scilly Isles for what this cat flap is costing. But this is England, where people are barmy over their pets. Do we need to pretend to be sane Americans about this? Do we need to soft-pedal our devotion to our domestic critters?

Not anymore.

UK Learning Curve: Trolley storage

If you look very closely, you can see the little gray Morrison's coin box on the handle, near the yellow flower sleeve. (Wiki Commons)

I firmly believe Yanks and Brits are separated by a common tongue. I knew this for certain recently when we attended a performance by shock comic Frankie Boyle. I loved him on Mock the Week, a long-running UK comedy show also featuring Dara O'Briain, Russell Howard, Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons. Admittedly, Boyle's Scottish accent is a bit more taxing than O'Briain's Irish (music to my ears!) and the varied UK accents of Howard, Dennis and Parsons. Hugh Dennis, in fact, enjoys excellent diction and his deadpan delivery also makes him easy to understand.

And then there are the supermarkets. There, it is not so much a common tongue that separates us, as a common artifact, a shopping cart.

Today, I went to Morrison's, the UK equivalent of Safeway. Indeed, our local Morrison's once was a Safeway, and for the first several trips here together to visit our flat, my husband would say, "Let's stop at Safeway on our way from Heathrow and at least get some bacon, eggs, bread, butter, cream, coffee and nasty, bitter, horrid thick-cut Seville marmalade for breakfast and then go out for dinner tonight."

OK. He didn't say all that about the marmalade. That's me. But it's the only jam-like substance he will eat, and he has now trained our dog to prefer bits of his toast to mine, which is smeared with much tastier and less off-putting Bonne Maman strawberry. But the dog, who is sort of the color of nasty, bitter, horrid thick-cut Seville marmalade, is a confirmed devotee of the puckery stuff. (Dogs can't pucker; maybe that's how she does it.) My reaction to it is still--some 40 years after first tasting the nasty stuff at The Cookery restaurant in Greenwich Village, NYC--a cross between blech and argh.

This is Prince Charles' organic foods company. Some of this princely food is actually quite good--but you can't get it at Morrison's. Gotta go to Waitrose, the "high-priced spread." (Wiki Commons)

Anyway, it occurred to me pretty quickly that Morrison's was not named Safeway. But we frequented a Safeway in Maryland, so I figured Simon was simply using his own international shorthand for supermarket.

Regardless, I quite like Morrison's, as I quite liked Safeway in the US in preference to other ordinary supermarkets. Our Morrison's also has trolley-parking stations within the store. What, you might ask (if you are a Yank) might those be?

Carts are called trolleys here. At Morrison's one inserts a quid coin to extract one from the kiosk outside where they are kept. When one returns the trolley, one gets one's money back. It's all done with a little coin-changer thingie on the trolley handle. The process stops those trolleys going missing, as carts so often do in the US.

Today, having had coffee in town, by the time I got done with Morrison's meat and dairy aisles, I was freezing and had need of the toilets. What to do? To get to them, I had to first check out. Once the groceries were paid for, I didn't fancy leaving them hanging about unattended. I didn't so much fear theft as that the attentive staff would restock the stuff. Then I recalled the little cabinet thingies with locker keys hanging out of them next to the in-store cafe. Aha! So, I opened one, shoved the trolley inside, noted but ignored the chain hanging down inside the cabinet, and flung the door shut. I tried to remove the key. No dice.

I tried again. Oops. Paid-for groceries held hostage! I asked for help. Nothing like asking help with something any UK preteen can operate. But the US just doesn't have clever little helpful devices like this.

When a manager who shares a name with my husband (Simon, very popular UK name) arrived, he was very kind in showing the dopey Yank how it worked.

Aha! I was supposed to connect the chain, just as I would in returning the trolley outside. Then my quid would pop out and I could then extract the key and close the door. When I returned and put the key back in and turned it, I would put the quid back into the slot on the trolley handle and the chain would release and I could leave. Then I could load the groceries into the book and return the trolley to the kiosk; when I inserted the chain into the handle, my quid would pop out again and I could pop it back into my coat pocket, repository of quids for trolleys and the ubiquitous Pay & Display car parks.

All this quid insertion and quid removal does seem like a lot of kerfuffle. On the other hand, I didn't have to worry about my groceries being nicked or restocked, and I could use the toilets in peace. I used to always worry, when shopping at Safeway in the US, what would happen if I nipped into the toilets for a quick coffee extraction. Would my cart be gone, all the unpurchased items restocked? If I left the basket totally empty and used the facilities before the trek up and down the aisles, would someone put it back and make me traipse to the other end of the store, and back outside to get another one from the cart corral?

I tell you, the few times I had to go in a Maryland Safeway, it was a case of the quickest wiz in the west. Conclusion: I like the little trolley 'safes' in Tavistock's Morrison's, because I can get relief from coffee overload--something I often suffer as I am an inveterate coffee fiend--in peace.