Letters from America

Well, although I am very fortunate to be in a position whereby I can talk about 'letters' or 'e-mails' that I have recieved from US, that isn't what I want to talk about here.

Rather I'd like to give you a few quotes from a book i've been reading called 'Letters from America' written by a bloke called Alistair Cooke. Cooke was an Englishman born-and-bred (and a northern one at that), but moved to the US in his early twenties to work as a correspondent for the BBC. He liked it so much that he stayed and even became an American citizen, continuing to report back on American life for the BBC. And the excerpts that follow were made by him as an American citizen, beginning in the 1940s - the book itself goes on to 2004. Enjoy:

'One of the most irritating troubles about Americans, in violation of the best advice of the best English divines, is that they just don't believe that whatever is uncomfortable is good for the character.' This made me laugh as I am forever reminding KC that things are 'character building'. For example the British weather, or walking around this lake when it was very cold...


'The Americans, who were then in the downy youth of their nationalism, being only twenty-seven years old, had an itch to flex their muscles and get into a fight with the Champ - Great Britain, need I say. They had neither the army, the navy nor the money to fight anybody, and the British regulars landing in Maryland joined up with the British Marines stationed in Chesapeake Bay, who broke their snooze, yawned slightly and walked forty miles to Washington. There they calmy burned down the Capitol, the White House - then known as the President's Palace - and the rest of the new public buildings that in those days were all that distinguished Washington from a fishing town on a marsh. It must have been a very humiliating event, for the President and his wife had to lodge in a boarding-house, and Congress was forced to meet in the Post Office, which had (in the general boredom of the undertaking) been overlooked.' This is talking about the 1812-1814 War, something that doesen't even get taught in Britain (we are too often preoccupied by the fact that we were fighting the French at this moment in time), and again it just seemed a very amusing description of a very rare event.

I would just like to note here that Americans are great, and that I, and Mr Cooke have a real affinity with a lot of things about American life. But these two comments just made me chuckle. There you go...