Miss South Carolina answers your questions about maps

I was reminded of poor, dear Lauren Caitlin by something someone (a blonde, as it happens, called Sarah) posted on Facebook, which was copied onto Lamebook:

ok just found out that south africa is a country AND its also part of africa witch makes no sense bcause how can a country be in another counry. #confused

Was it really as long ago as 2007 that Lauren Caitlin went viral? If so, without any malice towards the dear girl and just for fun, it's time to post her again, answering your questions about MAPS.



When I first posted this I was too hurried to be witty about Lauren Caitlin, but this blog is and made me smile. 

I do think she looks wonderful and now I come to think of it I would not know how to answer the question of why Americans cannot find countries on maps. What is the answer? If I were 17 and on live television it would be even more of a difficult one. 

I do think that there is far too much prejudice against beautiful girls, on the part of men and women. Being beautiful is a form of wisdom. It not only needs animal cunning but it implies a healthy attitude towards the universe. Beauty and sex appeal come from within.

There is also a strong dislike of people from the American South on the part of the  Northerners. The South is the sin-eater for Americans and is often written off as stupid, rustic and, above all, racist, racism being the unforgivable sin in modern America. This attitude is exemplified by an American who told me, 'I hate Southerners because I hate racists.' I replied that I hated racism but I didn't hate racists. 'I hate racists', he said firmly and afterwards I realised it was he who was the racist. 

On this subject, an American friend, a Yankee who studied in New Orleans, told me what a Southern friend told him, 'Southerners don't like blacks in general but love them as individuals. Northerners love blacks in general but don't like them as individuals.' 

Who knows? I was never in the USA except for a few hours in Buffalo, New York. Fortunately, blonde jokes are not yet considered racist.

Cosmopolitan Norwich

Ploughing through the innumerable supplements to the Friday edition of the Times, while I was in London last week, my eye alighted on the property section and an article headlined 'Focus on ... Norwich', which begins:

'A cosmopolitan, buzzing and beautiful city...'

Cosmopolitan? 

Norwich?

And why is cosmopolitan a term of approval? 

I hoped Norwich was still provincial. What is the point of Norwich otherwise? If East Anglia is not the provinces where is?

Perhaps nowhere is.

What would Norfolk men such as Sir Thomas Browne or George Borrow have made of a cosmopolitan Norwich? Or the poets of Eastern England like Cowper or Crabbe? Or John Betjeman or H.L. Morton?

I do not want to live in the provinces myself - I should hate to do so. I would not choose to live anywhere but the centre of a capital city, and I love living in an odd, seedy Balkan capital, but I want the provinces to be there and be provincial, the ballast in every country that keeps the boat from overturning.

The article in the Times went on, balefully, to declare that Norwich is one of the ten most important shopping destinations in England. 

Camus said, 'Modern man fornicates and reads the papers. There is nothing more to be said.' Modern man (person, sorry) in our day fornicates, shops and is cosmopolitan.  

All in all, The Times put me off the idea of going to Norwich. Private Lives comes to mind. 

I met her on a house party in Norfolk.

Very flat, Norfolk.

There's no need to be unpleasant.

That was no reflection on her, unless of course she made it flatter.

Minette Marin said in an article a while back that as we grow older we all of us find ourselves living in a foreign country. At least I really do live in a foreign country, Romania, and one that, happily, is reassuringly old-fashioned.

P.S. I looked on the net to see if Sir John Betjeman ever wrote a poem about Norwich. It seems he did not but I found instead a poem that he wrote about somewhere else in Norfolk. It is one of my favourites among his poems and I feel like quoting it here, though it has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

Oh Lord Cozens Hardy Your mausoleum is cold, The dry brown grass is brittle And frozen hard the mould And where those Grecian columns rise So white among the dark Of yew trees and of hollies in That corner of the park By Norfolk oaks surrounded Whose branches seem to talk, I know, Lord Cozens Hardy, I would not like to walk. And even in the summer,  On a bright East-Anglian day When round your Doric portico  Your children's children play There's a something in the stillness  And our waiting eyes are drawn From the butler and the footman  Bringing tea out on the lawn, From the little silver spirit lamp  That burns so blue and still, To the half-seen mausoleum  In the oak trees on the hill. But when, Lord Cozens Hardy, November stars are bright, And the King's Head Inn at Letheringsett  Is shutting for the night, The villagers have told me  That they do not like to pass Near your curious mausoleum  Moon-shadowed on the grass For fear of seeing walking  In the season of All Souls That first Lord Cozens Hardy,  The Master of the Rolls.

Romanians make good immigrants

Admitting a million Poles, even though in good manners, industry, church attendance and many other ways they put the English to shame, was certainly a mistake on the part of the UK. We know this because ministers said they expected tens of thousands to come. Still, if Britain and other Western European countries have decided that they need immigrants, and they have, they should be very grateful that the EU has a supply on hand of Eastern European would-be immigrants. Yet while the British press worry about an influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after January 1 2014, David Cameron announces that 

‘There is no limit on the number of  students who can come from India to study at British universities, no limit at all. All you need is a basic English qualification and a place at a  British university. What’s more, after you’ve left a British university, if you can get a graduate-level job there is no limit to the amount of people who can stay and work, or the time that they can stay at work.’

Romanians, like other people from the former Eastern Bloc,  are highly-educated, conservative, Christian and European. Romanians come from a Near Eastern culture, unlike the Poles, who are Catholics and Central Europeans, but they bring with them so many qualities that the British seem to produce less often than in the past. Romanian women are womanly (and very often beautiful), Romanian men are virile even if they seem very effete at first sight. Romanians are family minded, esteem education and usually believe in God. Best of all, they come from a part of the world where the 1960s never happened.

Romanians were disappointed but not in the least surprised by the noisy British reluctance to let them settle in the UK. As far as Romanians are concerned, they blame this reluctance on confusion abroad between Romanians and Roma. (Roma is the modish, EU-approved term for gypsies.) It is no use saying to Romanians that Romanian gypsies are both Romanian and Roma. ‘Romanian’ is understood here as an ethnicity not a citizenship. A Romanian man I know, for example, always says that he is Greek not Romanian, even though his family came to Romania in the t860s. Similarly, few ethnic Romanians think Romania’s Hungarians, German or Jewish minorities are Romanian. Children of mixed marriages do though.

Romanians usually have a very high opinion of England, based partly on books and films. I would expect Romanians to be disappointed by the reality of violent crime, binge drinking, feminism and innumerable rules. Romania, where people smoke in bars and say whatever they like about most things, is a much freer country these days. But no, Romanians usually love England and so they should. Things work in England and people are kind and honest, though the trusting nature of the English provokes wonder and seems naive. Britain is still a wonderful country and London is the only big city in Europe which is not a museum. The small minority of Romanians I spoke to who did not like England gave as their reason the number of non-white people there.

Beauty is a short lived tyranny

Beauty is a short lived tyranny. (Socrates)

A tyranny made perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. (Churchill)