Jolly Hockey Sticks

For reasons which are complicated and also too dull to relate on a site as dedicated to thrills and entertainment as this one is (!), The Referee recently found himself at the Coliseum in Nassau, Long Island to witness the New York Islanders being hammered at home by the Ottawa Senators. The visitors from north of the border looked superior throughout, so much so that the Islanders were lucky to come second, as they say.

For those who have not already spotted it, I am of course talking about (ice) hockey. (Ice) hockey is known here and in Canada as "hockey", such that if one wants to refer to hockey, one has to say "field hockey". Luckily, I rarely want to refer to hockey, and therefore this additional requirement is not particularly onerous in my case.

I have nothing more to report about Islanders 2 Senators 5 that can't be derived from the score or the brief synopsis above. I do, however, want to relate some of the things I learnt about (ice) hockey that evening, a sport about which I had not previously thought or cared very much at all. Whilst not all, or indeed any, of these things might be accurate, they are at least heartfelt, and that ought to be more important.

And so, The Referee is proud to share with you, dear reader, his hard-researched 5 Things You Never Knew, And Still Don't, About (Ice) Hockey:

1. There are 250 players on each team, although each player is on the ice for an average of only about 10 seconds each. For some reason no one ever thought to build a door in the dug out, so substitutes have to fling themselves over a little wall, hoping to land on their skates rather than their rear ends.

2. All (ice) hockey players have elaborately broken noses. By this I mean that these are not common or garden broken noses, the sort of injury that could befall anyone. Oh no. These are noses so comprehensively and numerously broken that they appear to be marking out a new slalom route for the benefit of a passing downhill skier. How could I tell this from the stands?, you are wondering. Well, I was lucky enough to meet a legendary former Islander before the game. He had clearly once been a good-looking chap, before the slalom bulldozers had moved in.

3. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time. Except in the game I saw, in which no one so much as raised a question about the masculinity of his opponents. Obviously, fighting is bad, and The Referee was not in the least disappointed not to witness any. Although this to some extent restricted his ability to research the full extent of the game of (ice) hockey for your benefit, gentle reader.

4. The following point might say more about the age and constitution of The Referee than it does about the nature of (ice) hockey, but for quite a proportion of the game I couldn't actually see the puck as it skimmed at high speed across the surface of the ice. It appeared that this was not a problem shared by most of the crowd, since there was a good deal of ooh-ing and aah-ing some seconds before your correspondent had worked out what was happening. Ho, hum.

5. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time.

Just before his visit to the Nassau Coliseum, The Referee received the news that he was to be summoned to return to the Motherland, AKA the UK of Blighty, without further ado. Again, the reasons for this are much too dull for an entertainment-heavy organ such as this. Suffice to say that The Referee's US odyssey would soon be at an end.

As I left Long Island and contemplated an impending return to the green and pleasant hills of the Motherland, I allowed myself a small and appropriate celebration. "Jolly hockey sticks", I thought.

The Phantom Tollbooth

I will say again here what I have said in a number of messages on this site: The Referee does not do politics. Or rather, he does not use this site to promote any particular political perspectives. That is not about to change.

It is, however, nigh on impossible to have lived in this country over recent years without taking at least a passing fascination with the oratory style, shall we say, of the 43rd President. As you, discerning reader, will be well aware, this a well-trodden path, which is not enlightened in the least by The Referee trampling it down a bit further. However, the following alleged quote came to my attention recently and I felt that it would be remiss of me, perhaps even churlish, not to share it with you.

It is alleged by some - not necessarily The Referee, you understand - that on 1 February 2000 the august news organ that is the New York Times quoted the 43rd President as follows:

"I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth".

I don't think any of us could disagree with that.

Dames on a Plane

Everything that follows is absolutely true.

I make this point at the outset not because The Referee makes a habit of telling fictional stories on this site. He doesn't. When you live in this country, why make things up, when reality is so much more entertaining?

No. I make this point only because I want you, gentle reader, to be assured that The Referee had truthfulness and accuracy at the forefront of his mind, when recounting this tale.

The Referee often has occasion to travel to and fro between his two adopted cities, New York and London. Most of the time this journey is pleasant and uneventful. On other occasions, it is a little more memorable. The following recounts an example of the latter.

As a final preamble, I should mention that I tend towards a particular airline whenever possible because, in the humble opinion of The Referee (and he is, after all, The Referee) it is superior to any other airline making this journey. So as not to show favo(u)ritism, I will assign this airline a code name for the purposes of this message. Let's call it, say, Virgin Atlantic.

So, I was heading to London on an overnight flight from New York. I was planning to be very busy immediately on arrival and was therefore hoping for a quiet flight involving sleep and not much else.

Imagine my horror, then, when, immediately on arrival in the lounge, I noticed a group of about 25 or so New York ladies of, shall we say, a certain age, behaving in an exuberant manner and taking pictures of each other. As I sat eating a pre-flight dinner (in order to maximise the time available for sleep on the flight, you understand), all but one of the ladies in question launched into a rousing rendition of "Happy birthday to you".

I have to admit, in all honesty, that I was not thinking "How nice. I hope whoever it is has a lovely birthday". Oh no. I was thinking something much more along the lines of "Please God - I need some sleep - please don't let any of them be seated near me".

I dare say, dear reader, that you are already ahead of me.

As soon as I arrived in my section of the plane (I have to admit that it was one of the posh areas near the front) it dawned on me that every seat apart from mine was occupied by one of the ladies. Worse still, I was seated right next to the birthday girl.

To get a sense of what followed, imagine, if you will, a remake of that Hollywood classic "Snakes on a plane" starring the original cast of the St Trinian's films, and you won't be far out. Except that the ladies in this case were dripping with furs and jewellery. And - how can I put this delicately? - those who had left God's work intact were in a significant minority.

The ladies had no idea what to do with a seat belt. Some of them apparently had no idea that it was a requirement to sit down while a plane takes off. I was required to become the official photographer for a number of charming group shots, whilst the crew (ie the folk that used to be called "stewards" and "stewardesses", but now seem to be called something else) tried to wrestle them into their seats. I was told with some enthusiasm that there were another 25 ladies on another flight - perhaps I should be grateful, I pondered, that I'd only got half of them. I was told that some of them had never been to London before, and that they were off to Windsor castle - I wondered if it was strong enough to withstand the onslaught. I was asked if I was married, and, when I replied in the affirmative, the lady in question shouted "Never mind, girls, he's married!".

Although I consider myself a patient person, I thought that I might be about to lose my marbles. Just as I was starting to lose them - and at this point we had only just reached cruising altitude - a glimmer of hope emerged. One of the ladies reached into her handbag and marched around the cabin shouting "Who wants an Ambien?". (For those not intimately familiar with the world of American medical TV ads, Ambien is a popular sleeping pill.) To my great relief, she received a number of positive responses, and soon there followed a hysterical banter about who was going to take the pill first, and no, no, you take it first, and I'm not taking mine until you take yours. Five minutes later, the cabin was silent.

After enjoying blissful sleep for all of 3 or 4 hours, I was woken by sleepy chatter about the crown jewels and where they might be viewed. I decided not to chime in to assist with the answer to this question, since that would reveal that I was now awake again, hence drawing attention to myself. So instead I lay very still and listened whilst one of the ladies pointed out that one of the others was wearing some of the crown jewels, right now, on the plane. It turned out that she was not joking. The lady in question admitted that her husband had given her a necklace which he had bought from Sotheby's and which had originally been given to Victoria by Albert. I couldn't help thinking that the phrase "more money than sense" had been coined for this moment.

Imagine my relief when we finally reached Londinium and the end of my torment was in sight. I gathered my things and sneaked away as quickly and quietly as I could. As I did so, several of the ladies were engaged in trying to revive a lady for whom the Ambien had apparently been particularly effective. As I left, they had had no success.

Suddenly, the American obsession with unnecessary prescription drugs didn't seem so bad after all.

A Special Relationship: Part 2

It's possible, in all the circumstances, that the tirade encapsulated in my previous message was enough to turn off a large proportion of my American readers, horrified by my flagrant anti-Americanism. Supposing that that proportion is 50%, and supposing that American readers made up 25% of my readership, until my previous message, I have just lost something in the region of, let's say, one reader, give or take. Ho, hum.

In fact, of course, The Referee doesn't have an anti-American bone in his body. Why move to live in a country that you can't stand? Despite all the little things that annoy one about wherever it is that one lives, one tends nevertheless to form an attachment to the place. When it's the US of America, and indeed New York in particular, that attachment is not difficult to establish. Here are the top ten reasons why.

In other words, please stand to attention (although not in the sense of my previous message), put on an old recording of God Bless America at high volume, and enjoy The Referee's Bumper Top Ten Reasons to Live in the New World.

10 Trains

In the New World, trains are modern, or at least clean. There is always - and I mean always - a uniformed conductor with a nice hat who is very interested in whether or not you have (ie one has) a ticket. And - this is the best part - the trains leave and arrive when the timetable says they will. I can remember only one occasion when my train was as much as ten minutes late, and that was the day after a record-breaking two feet of snow had fallen on Central Park. British readers should note that I am not making any of this up.

9 Guitar shops

OK, I accept that this is something of a niche entry, so I'll get it over with quickly. The Referee has had occasion to visit guitar shops at both sides of the Atlantic. Visit a guitar shop in this country, any guitar shop (probably), and you will find not only guitars, but also staff who are (i) knowlegeable about their subject, (ii) polite, (iii) friendly, and (iv) not troubled by an affliction by which their knuckles drag along the ground. Those who have ever attempted to buy a guitar in the UK of Blighty will know what I mean.

8 Newspapers

Just like the homeland, the New World has two types of newspaper: the serious and the not-so serious. The less said about the latter the better. But here the former are different. They actually make an attempt to report the news without assuming that the reader is such a numbskull that he (or she!) needs to be told what to think about it. And they refer to everbody, and I mean everybody, as Mr or Ms - even bad people.

7 The Stars and Stripes

One of the definitive sights of suburban America is a neighbo(u)rhood of quaint wooden-framed houses, almost all of which have a basketball hoop at the back, and the Stars & Stripes hanging at the front. If one is a Brit - and presumably one will know, one way or the other - it's worth pausing to think what the equivalent definitive sight might be. Whatever your answer, it's a safe bet that it won't include Union Flags aka Union Jacks hanging out in front of houses. In fact, if one does see the national flag hanging outside a house in the homeland, one assumes that the occupant is an eccentric, extremist fruitcake. Worse still, one would, generally speaking, be right.

In recent years, a healthy exception to this rule has emerged, when England's finest are appearing at the finals of an important and meaningful international tournament. Following the recent Euro 2008 non-qualification debacle, this exception is not likely to apply for a while.

6 Motels

Anyone who has tried driving for any distance around the New World - and if you haven't, you should - will know the joy of deciding willy nilly that one has had enough for the day and turning unannounced into the next motel which presents itself, where one will almost always find an adequate and clean room, and sometimes breakfast as well, in exchange for a number of dollars which would probably not be sufficient to buy the coffee machine in the room. (Yes, I know that's all one sentence. Please feel free to breathe where you think it appropriate. No need to do the whole thing in one go.)

5 Holidays

All Europeans who have hung around in this part of the world for any length of time will have noticed that working Americans tend to have an average of about 5 minutes annual leave. This would be enough to make anyone miserable, not to mention unproductive, so the always-ingenious Americans have tended to mitigate the meanness of their corporations by inventing a long list of reasons to have public holidays.

To mention just a few, there's Martin Luther King's birthday (which also happens to be my mother's birthday) (hello mum), Inauguration Day (for the new President, every fourth year), President's Day (which is celebrated on Washington's birthday), Memorial Day (for those who didn't make it back from wars), Independence Day (the less said about that the better), Labo(u)r Day (which is set aside specifically so that Americans can work on their spelling), Columbus Day (which is odd in the sense that the country is actually named after another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci), Veterans' Day (for those that did make it back from wars), and Thanksgiving. On second thoughts, that's all of them. Unless you also include Christmas and New Year's (New Year's what?).

4 Thanksgiving

Notwithstanding the entry at #5 above, there is one particular holiday which constitutes a major contribution to American culture, and not just because we have celebrated it recently. Thanksgiving is not just a very welcome long weekend, but also a genuinely communal event in which friends and families fly and drive huge distances in order to be together, for no other reason than to sit around eating and drinking too much.

In theory, at least, it commemorates the arrival of English settlers in Virginia in 1619. Unless it commemorates the feast which another group of settlers enjoyed with Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621.

In practice, most Americans don't worry too much about the precise origins of the feast, at least not as much as they care about eating it.

3 Diners

Now, don't get me wrong. I am as big a fan of the fried English breakfast as the next chap, but there really is nothing like going to a traditional chrome-enhanced diner for breakfast, better still brunch. They really know how to do it. But make sure you go early in the day - by dinner time it's just another restaurant.

2 New England

For a moment, if you will allow it, dear reader, I would like to address just my fellow country-persons, and anyone else intimately acquainted with the UK of Blighty. American readers should go out into the back yard and shoot some hoops for a while, or something.

Imagine, if you will, the homeland, but with the following amendments: (i) all the coastline looks like Cornwall, only more beautiful; (ii) all the inland areas look like the Scottish Highlands, only three times as high; (iii) the open road is, well, open, rather than like a long, thin car park; and (iv) there are no chavs.

I rest my case.

1 Baseball

A serious debate is continuing over here, and I dare say over there as well, about whether the arrival of a certain D Beckham at LA Galaxy will be the catalyst which elevates Assocceration Football from minor also-ran to major player in the world of US sport(s). I can assure you that it won't.

I don't say this because I have anything against Becks (I don't), or because I think his arrival will cause any harm (it won't), but because I happen to think that sport is inextricably linked to culture.

To put it less pompously ("too late for that!" I expect you're thinking), the biggest sports are the biggest because they matter to people, and they matter to people because they come up from the streets.

Baseball is America's pastime not because somebody organised it that way, but because young kids here have for more than 100 years gone out into the street with sticks and stones and anything else that came to hand and tried to emulate Willie Mays or Reggie Jackson or Babe Ruth. As I have argued previously on this site, one can learn a lot about this country from watching baseball, which occupies a similar place in hearts here as football does in the homeland.

Whilst it may not be THE beautiful game, it is certainly A beautiful game, and the thing I will most miss about the New World when I eventually return to the old one.

So, there you have it. Certain readers will no doubt conclude that the #1 entry above confirms that I have finally lost my marbles. You know who you are. It's a fair cop.

For everyone else, should you ever feel a little twinge of anti-Americanism developing, just have a lie down and perouse this list. I guarantee you'll feel better.

A Special Relationship: Part 1

As all my regular readers (!) will be well aware, November marks the two year anniversary of The Referee sending messages from the other side. To mark this auspicious occasion, The Referee has decided to offer, at no additional charge, not one but two Top Ten lists. The purpose of these lists is to give you, dear reader, a summary of the best and worst things about being an Englishman (or Englishperson, these days!) in New York.

Coming soon, my top ten things about living in the US of America.

For now, however, I am proud to present the top ten things that drive me to distraction about this great country. In other words, please sit back and enjoy The Referee's Bumper New World Bottom Ten:

10 College sport(s)

What is the point of college sport(s), as distinct from professional sport(s)? Please don't feel the need to answer this question; it's rhetorical. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against young folks running around in the open air and enjoying themselves between college work, or indeed instead of it. But what does that have to do with anyone else? I don't know about you, but I played a good deal of five-a-side football whilst at university. No one ever turned up to watch it, not even my mother (hello mum). Why on earth would I expect crowds, TV cameras and cheerleaders? I wouldn't. Bonkers.

9 Stairs

There are a lot of places in the great city of New York where there are flights of stairs right next to escalators. Grand Central Terminal, to give the station its official name, has many of these. The interesting thing about this scenario is that it presents the traveller with a choice: stairs or escalator? What do New Yorkers choose? I'll tell you. On the basis of my highly scientific research into this issue, which involves looking around when I get off the train in the morning, I can tell you that New Yorkers choose the escalator, at a rate of at least 90%. I sometimes wonder what percentage of that 90% are the proud owners of expensive gym memberships. In New York, the chances are that many are, perhaps most. To those people, I say simply this: try the stairs - it's free!

8 Boxing Day

For a country that prides itself on celebrating Christmas with style, Christmas is not celebrated with much style over here. In particular, as soon as Christmas day is over, it's over. Mention the phrase "Boxing Day" to most Americans and you will get a blank look (unlike Canadians, who observe it with some enthusiasm). So Americans are deprived of not only the best and laziest day of the year, but also that great British tradition of taking all week off work, eating far too much and watching old films on TV until next year.

7 The word "program(me)"

This might seem an obscure one to those who have not spent much time in the New World, but bear with me. Those who have done so will know, if they search the deep recesses of their consciousness, that Americans use the word "program(me)" all the time. About anything. Leave aside for now the fact that the locals here run out of enthusiasm for spelling this word just before reaching the penultimate letter. Everything here is a program(me). My elder son plays in a soccer program(me); my younger son eats pizza for school lunch once a week, and that is a pizza program(me); my wife teaches an art program(me). If I stand up and walk around the room for a while, I am quite convinced that I could legitimately say that I was executing my personal circulation program(me).

6 Halloween

What is the point of halloween? For a start, it is decidedly odd to make such a fuss about All Hallows Eve, when hardly anyone marks the day that follows it, AKA All Saints day. That aside, why encourage children to dress up in stupid costumes, act obnoxiously and eat too much "candy"? Most of them do all those things with no encouragement at all.

5 Live radio football commentary

One of the greatest joys of my life - and I mean this sincerely - is listening to live football commentary on BBC Radio Five Live. Don't ask me to explain this. You will either understand it, or you won't.

I appreciate that this is a point about not living in the UK, rather than living in the US of America as such. But, for whatever reason, whilst it is possible to listen to most BBC radio output online, try listening to live football commentary from outside the UK of Blighty and you will get only an automated message saying something about "contractual obligations".

I have often wondered what precisely is in the contract in question to prevent those of us living overseas from listening. Presumably it says something along the lines of "In no circumstances should live commentary of Hereford v Scunthorpe in the first round of the Carling Cup be broadcast in Turkmenistan, in order that the rights may be sold separately to the National Turkmenistan Broadcasting Corporation, for local transmission to the numerous Scunthorpe fans in that part of the world". The problem with that, of course, is that there are not too many Scunthorpe fans in Turkmenistan, so local broadcasters are not interested, so there is no local transmission, so it's not possible to listen.

I have heard it said that people living overseas can't expect to have access to all BBC output because we don't pay the licence fee. In fact, we can't pay the licence fee. I expect I'm talking for a large number of ex-pat footie fans when I say that I would gladly pay the equivalent of the licence fee just to get access to football commentary on Five Live. So, come on BBC, take my money!

4 Medicine

After two years living here, I still cannot begin to fathom the American approach to all things medicine. Something close to half of all the commercials on TV here are for drugs: to treat hair loss, erectile disfunction (whatever that is) (simmer down, ladies!), "stubborn belly fat" (this is true), insomnia, and countless other ailments. But none of this is available over the counter. So almost all these commercials end with the phrase: "Ask your doctor if "Stand To Attention!" is right for you".

Then, presumably, when you next go to see your doctor (which, for the average American, is in the next five minutes) you are supposed to say "So doctor, do you think "Stand To Attention!" is right for me?". And the doctor says, "Well, the last patient I gave it to is still standing to attention three months later. But, yes, I'm sure it will be fine. Here's a prescription for the next 20 years". And then the doctor receives a fat cheque from Erections R Us, the makers of Stand To Attention!, and everyone is happy.

3 Tea

I have written before on this site about the difficulties of getting a half decent cup of tea in the New World. Well, despite two years of personal intervention on my part in terms of introducing numerous Americans to the concept of a teapot and suggesting that they fill it with something that one can actually taste, the situation at the national level is just as dire as it was. It remains the case that, in most beverage-serving establishments in this country, a request for tea is likely to be met with a cup of hot water presented alongside a Liptons yellow label tea bag. If you're lucky, your Liptons yellow label will be delivered on its own saucer. Perhaps The Referee is losing his touch.

2 The suburbanisation of the Beautiful Game

Here's what (association) football means to me, and has meant to me since I was first taken along to a non-league game at the age of six (hello dad). Long shorts, mud, rain, cold tea, meat pies, old blokes in flat caps and no teeth shouting helpful advice to the referee relating to his eyesight and his parentage. It means total commitment to one's team, the belief against all the evidence that they are the greatest team in the world, and a hatred almost as passionate directed towards any visiting team.

But what does (association) football mean (if anything) for the average American? Well, it probably means something more along the lines of clapping politely as a gaggle of 7-year-old girls skip happily around an elementary school playing field in the leafy suburbs, whilst sitting on a folding deck chair and shouting encouraging but incomprehensible phrases such as "Way to hustle!", whatever that means.

At least "The referee's a wa**er!" is grammatically correct.

1 Disney World

Consider for a moment, if you will, all the worst bits of the Big Country: excess, self-centredness, obsession with money, a lack of awareness of the rest of the world, a rather annoying over-confidence, etc. Then imagine that all those worst bits were somehow fashioned in plastic, covered in melted cheese and dropped in a field in the middle of Florida. Then imagine that you had to part with thousands of dollars in order to hang around in this field for a few days. Then imagine that, to your horror, your children thought this was a really good idea and lobbied you to do it all over again. Well, kids, it's not going to happen. Get over it. I am never going there ever again. Period. Whatever that means.

So, there you have it. I hope you feel better for having read my Bottom Ten. I certainly feel better for having written it.

American readers need not despair. I love your country really. Top Ten coming soon.