Madcap Detective

Things are proceeding nicely in my plans to become a madcap old English Lady. I have plenty of time. I won’t be old for a long time.

It seems like murder is an essential element in genteel English society, especially for old ladies.

I have found really helpful tutorials on Acorn TV, which specializes in British Television shows.

I have watched all of the Miss Marple adaptations and have moved on to the Poirot and Tommy and Tuppance series.

So if I decide I want the life of a detective, what kind should or could I become?

They represent three different style of British detecting. You would never confuse them with the French Maigret or the Italian Montalbano.

Poirot is a Belgian expat living in London who never lets anyone forget he is most definitely not French. Apparently Belgium adores him for this. He is a true genius at detection with tons and tons of little gray cells. He is totally full of himself and possibly the most fastidious dresser in TV or fiction including Beau Brummell. He is also a bona fide obsessive compulsive. As far as emulating him I can readily see I tend to mislay things and don't have nearly enough gray cells.  Besides I don’t want to work quite that hard at my wardrobe.

Then we have Miss Marple who is also a genius but rather self-effacing about it. I could do the self-effacing part rather well but not the genius. She pulls off a really English thing of being kindly and cynical at the same time.  She is also a schmoozer – not an English term but I think it describes her and definitely not me. There is also the fact that her clothes are just awful! Frumpy describes her wardrobe choices. Where does she get the strange little hats and the ancient shawls? The sensible shoes might work but all that knitting would be beyond me.

Now Tommy and Tuppance are just the ticket role model wise. They are smart dressers, love to have fun and don't seem particularly intelligent. Time after time they just bumble their way into solving murders while making bad jokes and wearing lovely clothes.

I could do that.

Perspective

It’s one of things I am embarrassed to admit, but when I first moved to New York in 1966, I regularly took the bus from 108^th St. to 116^th St.

My excuse was that I had two babies under the age of two and was a full time graduate student and totally exhausted.

But even that doesn’t quite convincingly absolve me. Anyone who knows just how close that is can see it was really odd. I wasted 15 cents on bus fare for one thing.

What really does explain my laziness is the fact that I grew up in the Midwest, in a brand new housing development in the 1950s.

Walking in such a neighborhood was an uncomfortable excursion into the unknown. First of all, there weren’t always sidewalks. The streets curved and swooped and swerved and played back on themselves. Frequently they would become what were called courts, aka dead ends.

Add to this the fact that all the houses in a given development looked pretty much alike. There wasn't a whole lot to look at: different colored shutters and front doors and two or three shades of brick were all that distinguished one house from another. Otherwise they all blended into each other.

And – this is a big one, maybe the biggest – there were almost no trees. My neighborhood had been farmland and divested of trees a long time ago. A few survived here and there, just like the isolated farmhouses, which had been preserved as artifacts of how pretty houses used to be. New trees were planted, but these fragile little things were few and far between and looked like they were fighting for survival.

I used to whine and complain about being sent on an errand to the nearest shopping center. The walk was either freezing cold in the winter with no wind breaks of any type, or scorchingly hot in the Midwestern summer with few trees and of course little shade. I would stupidly run from tiny tree to tiny tree to feel a moment of shade. Breezes? None in the summer, gales from the artic in the winter.

Not long ago, I walked that same walk from my old home to that shopping center and found it comparatively short and pleasant. Those baby trees were now grown up and doing their job. The houses had developed personality and seemed much more interesting.

The distance is about a half mile, the same as the distance from 108^th to 116th St.

It’s just a matter of perspective.