Out of the frying pan and into the Shire--

The thing about Seattle is, they tell you it rains there all the time. They learn it as kids and they grow up and travel the world and perpetrate this as platitude wherever they go. And one day—my guess would be the early nineties, what with the Portland/Seattle grunge axis—there came a tipping-point when the burden of bearing this fact shifted from Washingtonian to outsider. No longer did the former offer it in response to the query: What’s it like there? Instead, it was the New Yorker or the Chicagoan or the Suburbanite who proffered it in conversation, called up from the same socially distributed databank of small-talk potpourri as gems like: Wasn’t Mark Twain’s real name Samuel Clemens? Or, Now, is it true that they circumcise their women? So, the outsider asks, almost by reflex: Rains all the time, eh? And the Seattlite responds: Sure does. The thing about Seattle is, it isn’t true. The winters can get dreary enough, for certain, but I’ll be goddamned if the other nine months of the year aren’t somewhere between San Francisco and Shangri-La. They tell you, you see, to keep you away. Having sent forth Starbucks into the world to keep their coffers filled, they laugh and sing and skip around in nothing but fig leaves, in the resplendency of the Pacific Northwest.

The thing about Oxford is, it really does rain all the time.