taps

Elsewhere considered in the light of taps

In England they have two taps: one for the cold water and one for the hot. This is how it always was. If you run a bath you set the hot one running and then feed in the cold water while swirling your hand around in the tub to check is the temperature is right. When you have done this for a few moments you can leave it, until you come back to wash, then turning on one or the other tap for a while you get it just as you want it.

  This is stupid: you should have one tap with both streams running through it, like they do in the rest of the world: the rest of the world being the place where English taps are known to be stupid. In England itself the tap business is simply the way it is, or was when I was young: it never occurred to anyone I knew to wonder why we did it that way. It was an assumption. Here are some other assumptions they have in England:  the rule of law exists, freedom of speech exists, public spaces are public spaces, public discourse is not a monologue, the media is watching the authorities and will have the fuckers when necessary, social care will work when it needs to, there is working government at most levels and we know our rights and they cannot be violated.  All this, and more, they assume as they assume air. It may not all be true all the time and many people have no conscious awareness of most of it, but the assumption that it is so underlies the society, so that when someone writes on the Guardian message boards that Britain is a vicious police state on the verge of utter collapse, he writes it safe in the knowledge that no one will knock on his door and his salary or welfare will be paid this month as it was last month.

  Russians too have a set of assumptions, very different assumptions, but no less powerful and no more visible to those who don’t read or think much. To a foreigner they stand out like hippos in a pony show, just as to Russians the stupidity of the English tap system is so obvious as to raise valid questions concerning the sanity of the race.

Any conversation that isn’t aware of these assumptions is a conversation that is going nowhere useful and, if that conversation is happening on those Guardian message boards it is very likely going somewhere unpleasant, somewhere where numerous English people scream that Putin is a dictator, numerous other English people scream that Cameron/Blair is a dictator and the pro Kremlin human spam bot twats explain repeatedly that it is to being not right to us to say what Russia not free land. And nobody is right and nobody is wrong because yesterday was yellow and rectangular and words broken free of their moorings in reality are just noises or shapes on a page.