They aim to smile at 80 per cent of the customers arriving, but from the floor, not by the door, tensed like a turkey vulture .Next, I slalomed gracelessly through a choke of Japanese and rucksacks to Bond Street. But M&S is so English: foreigners pile there in droves to buy their slacks and bath salts; dreamy expats require the sending of M&S food parcels and bras in Jiffy bags; and we all buy our knickers there. Will we be able to cope with intrusive enquires into the state of our health?Although we are traditionally left to cope alone in England’s shops, there have been sightings of nodders and smilers poised in doorways, security guards trained to crank up a grin, and overheard choruses of best-friendliness from the shop floor.Are we becoming like New York’s Upper East Side, then? There, the customer, usually white, is ushered into a perfumed refrigerator by a greeter, almost inevitably black. How are you?” Yet how can they tolerate the overt fakeness, the waspy irritation that constitutes the entire charade?
Now Marks & Spencer, that majestic flagship of the British High Street, has announced that it is to introduce “people greeters” as part of its forthcoming overhaul. Porcupine spines rear out of my back; I answer with my shoulder; I shrivel and bolt, mentally summoning a small explosive or an extremely surly minder of my own
An American would automatically drawl back: “I’m good. “Hi, how are you today?” intones a shop-greeter with dead gaze and am-dram delivery What in heavens am I supposed to do? I am English. Mr Getschow should now simply adopt the 19th-century Princeton custom of making newcomers stand on the street corner and regale bystanders with the reciting of Greek..
In 1887, Yale claimed it “practically dead and buried”; five years on, it “led to the death of an unfortunate young student named Rustin”. The OED is hazy on haze – perhaps from Northern dialect and the French haser, to frighten. That is, initiated – with a builder’s level across the buttocks, for which the court gave damages. Many a fashion model might wonder what a computer analyst has that he hasn’t. On joining Phillips Getschaw, he was hazed by the firm’s tautologous “chief executive officer”, Kurt Getschow. The judge would, of course, have to treat the welfare of the child as paramount..
FRANKLIN SMITH of Wisconsin has found that his bottom is worth $1m. Moreover, the agreement recorded in the contact order was not an undertaking, but a recital, and could not be enforced by committal, nor was it specifically enforceable.It was well established, however, that the court had a discretion not to hear a party who was in contempt of court, and similar considerations could apply where, as in the present case, a husband had agreed in the face of the court to take a particular course of action and his agreement to do so was recorded in the order of the court.Whilst there was no jurisdiction to require the husband to co-operate in obtaining a Get, it would be open to the judge hearing his application for contact to decline to do so unless and until he honoured the agreement recorded in the contact order. An agreement made prior to marriage which contemplated the steps which the parties would take in the event of divorce or separation was perceived as being contrary to public policy because it undermined the concept of marriage as a lifelong union. The agreement between the parties in the present case could not, therefore, be specifically enforced against the husband.Even if the agreement were divided up and the individual clauses looked at separately, the fundamental proposition that each was part of an agreement entered into before marriage to regulate the parties’ affairs in the event of a divorce could not be avoided, and the public policy argument, therefore, continued to apply.Further, there was no power in any of the statutory provisions governing the present case to compel the parties to implement an arbitration clause, nor was there any statutory power currently in force to compel them to attend mediation meetings. The wife asserted that the husband was in breach of his covenants under the agreement, and further that he had failed to comply with the terms of an order of the court made after a conciliation appointment in relation to his application for contact with the child of the marriage, to which his agreement that he would progress the obtaining of the Get expeditiously was a recital.Mr Justice Wall said that the attitude of the English courts to antenuptial agreements, as opposed to antenuptial settlements, had always been that they were not enforceable.
A consent order was made whereby each party’s claim against the other for ancillary relief was dismissed.The husband had taken no steps to apply to the Beth Din for a Get, and the wife issued a summons seeking that the husband should promptly take and co-operate in the necessary steps to progress the obtaining of a Get; that he should attend the London Beth Din for consideration of the grant of a Get; and that he should comply with all procedural requirements and rules of the London Beth Din.The husband asserted that the court had no jurisdiction to grant the relief sought, and applied to strike out the summons in limine. They had entered into an antenuptial agreement, which provided that in the event of any matrimonial dispute the parties would attend the London Beth Din for mediation, and that if any dispute were not so resolved, they would refer the dispute to the London Beth Din for arbitration.The wife petitioned for divorce under the provisions of s 1(2)(b) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 and obtained a decree absolute. They have almost as hard a road ahead; there are still hundreds of garment sweatshops in the New York area alone.It’s anybody’s guess on what screen they now project their hopes and fears – television perhaps? Or computer video games? Yet it is hard to believe they are as vibrant, as rough and frightening and enchanting, as what new Americans encountered on the shores of Brooklyn a hundred years ago.Kevin Baker is the author of `Dreamland’ (Granta, 22 July, pounds 15.99). 9 July 1999
N v N
Family Division (Mr Justice Wall) 1 July 1999WHILST AN Orthodox Jewish wife, following the obtaining of a decree absolute, could neither enforce provisions in an antenuptial agreement requiring the parties to submit to mediation or arbitration by the Beth Din in the event of a marital dispute, nor enforce the husband’s agreement, made by way of recital to a contact order, to expedite the obtaining of a Jewish bill of divorce, the court had a discretion to refuse to hear the husband’s contact application until he had complied with his agreement.The court dismissed the wife’s summons requiring the husband to co-operate in the obtaining of a Jewish bill of divorce, or Get.The husband and wife were Orthodox Jews.
Parts of New York’s Lower East Side that were a Irish and German slum in 1850, a Russian-Jewish ghetto in 1900, are now crowded with immigrants from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere. The world is new (well, new enough).They are coming to New York still, from all over to the world – sometimes to the very same neighbourhoods. In Dreamland (my book) it is 1911, when people are streaming to America from all over the globe – a million or so Jews, Italians, Paddies, Bohemians, Africans, Germans, Swedes. They are the cosmic sewer catches of our time, and they allow us to stop, slow down the flickering film to a human speed, look at that old building, this mysterious sign still lingering unobserved among the jostling and oblivious crowds. Or rather, it is in New York that we see the true nature of what has happened to the past in America, for in fact the past has not disappeared at all, it has just been moving too fast and become all jumbled up together.America’s existence has simply coincided with the sudden acceleration of time, so that all things speed by us too fast for us to catch more than a glimpse of them; so that our endless recapitulations of this century, that millennium, become no more than a wad of random images – hula hoops, flappers dancing the Charleston, the Great War, Muhammad Ali, Vietnam, Elvis, the Bomb? – that fall apart in our hands.But New York is a great city, and things tend to fetch up in great cities. A world where people pay money to watch premature infants struggle for life in incubators, where they sleep on fire escapes, buy cracked eggs for a penny a dozen, step warily around gangsters dressed like Mexican bandits on the streets of New York.
