Two questions for the U.K.

[mme_hardy]

 The OMT for Doctor Who is "watching from behind the couch".   In every American house I remember, the couch/sofa/davenport is firmly against the wall.  A child who wanted to watch from there would first have to push it forward several inches.   Are British houses differently arranged, or is this just an image?

We were watching QI last night, and the panel were marvelling about American drivers' custom of stopping* when they heard a siren.  (My family: "We don't stop!  We pull over and stop!")   What do Britons do when they hear a siren?  As my daughter exclaimed in outrage, "What is a siren FOR, then?"

* Some of them**.  If they don't have anywhere important to get to.
** When I first moved to the New South, drivers always pulled over -- in both directions -- when a funeral went by.   Ambulances were much more hit and miss.   

Comments

[recessional]

Canadians pull over, too; not just customary, it's actually the law. (How many people OBEY it, mind, depends on local driving culture....)

[mme_hardy]

Oh, it's the law here, too. Just like the speed limit, and at least as widely observed.

[perennialanna]

Sirens? Look around, assess, make space. This may involve stopping, but equally may not (this is what I was taught in driving lessons earlier this year).

Behind the sofa - I've always lived in very small houses where sofas are against the wall (actually, usually bookshelves, but this is not usual), but in larger houses they may be arranged around a coffee table, so that some are more towards middle of the room, or have a tall light behind them, or even a console table. When I was a child I used to crawl behind the sofa (it sloped backwards, so that only the top actually touched the shelves) into the cave-like space there to read books I wasn't sure I was supposed to have. I always assumed then that behind the sofa meant in that cave, peering round the side rather than over the top.

[mme_hardy]

Hee! I used to read under the grand piano. (It was in a side room, and only the keyboard area was visible from the living room.)

[kore]

....I DID TOO. It was such a nice cozy space. I used to lurk under there as my mother practiced.

[legionseagle]

The sofas we've got at present are pressed back against the wall, but my general impression is that where space permits they are quite likely to be arranged away from the wall, around the hearthrug; not least because it makes it easier to vacuum behind them.

Also, if you've got a dining table in the same room, the sofa can be used to delineate the boundary between living room and dining space.

WRT sirens, what perennialanna said.

[sollers]

Also go for look around, assess, get out of the way (this may include driving very quickly past a traffic island)

The house where I grew up was small, but the armchairs and sofas were clustered around the fire. Originally it was a coal fire, but even when we changed to gas we wanted to be as close to the fire as possible. Also there needed to be space behind the sofa to get to the upright piano.

Aha!

[mme_hardy]

You've put your finger on the divergence. I think it's all about the housing stock. Central heating, either steam or hot air, was an expectation rather than a luxury in middle-class American homes by the early 20th century. (Maybe even earlier; I'm not a historian.) By 1963, most American houses with a television would also have central heat; fireplaces were and are decorative elements, not sources of warmth. The TV might very well be in a different room from the fireplace, if the house had a fireplace at all. I remember fireplaces being called out as decorative features (and extra-cost options) in new home construction, and worthy of mention in for-sale ads.

"The TV"; how old I am. We've got two, but the children mostly watch TV shows (old again!) on their computers in their rooms, reserving the living-room TV for video games.

I remember how weird I found it to visit my grandmother's house (1920s build, I think) in Texas; her gas furnace sat out in the living area, and the bathroom had an exposed gas heater with little ceramic points over which flames flickered. Frightened and fascinated me, that did.

Re: Aha!

[sollers]

The gas heater sounds like our source of hot water at the time - it was in the kitchen; in my early childhood we didn't have a bathroom but we did have a bath in the kitchen (with fold-up work surfaces over it).

There were fireplaces in both the downstairs rooms; the living room fire was always lit in winter, but the front room only on special occasions. Upstairs there were portable gas and electric heaters; there were fireplaces in the bedrooms, but we no longer lit fires there.

Being able to have coal fires, even though they meant so much work, was, I think, an emotive thing for my mother. In the horrible winter of early 1947, when I was less than six months old, lack of coal and general fuel shortages meant that she was living in one room of said house with a single bar electric fire. This was so stressful that she temporarily took me back to Swansea (where I had been born) to stay with her mother, who being in South Wales was more able to get coal, and stayed there till the summer when she took me back to London and my father.

Incidentally, I still don't have central heating; I don't like it. Even if it's a gas fire, I like to have a fire to, er, focus on. And radiators take up wall space that could be better filld with bookshelves.

Re: Aha!

[perennialanna]

One of the best things about this house is that the radiators are all under windows. In our last house they were helpfully in the middle of blank walls, which really restricted where bookshelves could go.

The last house did still have a fireplace in one of the bedrooms, but the chimney was blocked (not very well, draughts and occasional chunks of brick came down it).

Both houses are the smallest version of late Victorian terrace, two-up two-down with kitchen and bathroom in later extensions at the back.

Re: Aha!

[mme_hardy]

Would there originally have been a separate kitchen? Lots of rural houses in the U.S. had a separate kitchen building. There were two purposes: you had a "summer kitchen" so you could cook without heating up the house, and if you used it year-round a kitchen fire wouldn't burn down the house.

Obvs. the second rationale doesn't apply to a Victorian terrace house.

Re: Aha!

[perennialanna]

No, what is now the dining room at the back of the house would have been the kitchen. The room at the front wasn't used unless you really had to, it was kept for best. All life took place in the kitchen.

In this house you come through the front door to a very narrow hallway (30", I was measuring for a rug the other day). Two doors off that, nearer one to the front room (our living room, television and most of the bookshelves) and one at the foot of the stairs to the dining room. A lot of these houses have had those two rooms knocked into one to make more space. Kitchen leads off the dining room, and is down one step.

I was re-reading Howard Spring's Fame is the Spur this week, and it struck me that our house is the same size as two significant houses in the book, one in Manchester in the 1880s and one in the Rhondda from 1890 to 1935 or so, both described as tiny. Houses are one of the things Howard Spring is very good at (also automatic Bechdel pass, the book is absolutely full of women talking about and getting active in politics).

Re: Aha!

[legionseagle]

My bedroom as a child (while my sister was still at home but after it became sensible for us to share a bedroom, so I got the smallest bedroom) had a gas heater on the wall, which was difficult to light because the switch, which you had to turn and press in, was stiff, but when it sparked the gas flame leaped up and you could put your eye to the little glass window and see the flame.

I was in the process of explaining that the house I grew up in didn't have central heating, before remembering this flat doesn't, either (our storage heaters gave up the ghost and it seemed simpler to bring in small portable heaters than replace them)

Re: Aha!

[mme_hardy]

What's a storage heater?

My grandmother's bathroom heater had only a metal framework (sort of like a rhino grill) in front of it, and you had to light it with a match. I was terrified and fascinated of it.

Does your flat have any fireplaces?

Re: Aha!

[legionseagle]

No. Fireplaces don't get built into new-build flats (there was a ghastly fake one, but we removed it) and I suspect we're in a smokeless zone, anyway.

A storage heater is a (not terribly efficient) thing with heat retaining bricks inside, which is heated during the night when electricity rates are low, and which then radiates that heat during the day.

Re: Aha!

[mme_hardy]

We invariably have Spare The Air days on any day you'd actually want a fire. If we ever do the hypothetical kitchen/living room remodel, I want to pipe gas to the fireplace; the era of woodsmoke on the Peninsula is over. (And good for the asthmatics; I'm not saying this is a bad thing.)

[perennialanna]

Apart from dual carriageways and motorways, British roads are generally going to be a lot narrower and bendier than North American roads. So just stopping, or even pulling over and stopping, may well cause problems rather than solve them.

As a pedestrian I stand well back from the crossing/edge of the pavement, with my arms very firmly around whichever children are walking rather than being pushed, to make it absolutely clear that we're not moving anywhere. We live nearly between the police station and the hospital, and just down the road from the fire station, so sirens are frequent.

[mme_hardy]

Ohhh. That makes good sense, too. I keep being reminded of the oddity of living in a (comparatively) newly-constructed country.

[perennialanna]

My mother grew up in the far west of Cornwall, where some of the hedges that define road boundaries are Iron Age if not earlier. Hedges in this case means massive stone walls, filled with earth, broad enough to walk along the top if it wasn't for the trees growing in them.

The road are wide enough for one small car, although there are passing places. You get very good at reversing (and the Cornish fire brigade have special narrow fire engines).

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

In Canada, drivers are required, as soon as it's safe to do so, to pull over to the shoulder and come to a stop to let emergency vehicles pass by un-impeded. If unable to pull to the shoulder, you're supposed to "make a lane" and halt your vehicle: this might require pulling over to the middle of the road if you must, you're supposed to head to the right (outside) of the road.

Stiff penalties are in place for getting in the way of an emergency vehicle.

The siren isn't necessarily the important part -- if the vehicle has its lights flashing, you're supposed to still pull over and stop. The siren is for added warning to surrounding vehicles.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

In the U.S. most of the rules are as you describe, at least in the states where I've taken a test.

Pulling over/making a lane is legally required but often disregarded in practice. Lights mean "pay attention", lights + sirens mean "get out of the way". There are complicated rules about oncoming sirens; if it's a divided road with concrete, you don't have to pull over, but there are some kinds of multi-lane roads I disremember where you don't. (Two lanes with a passing lane, maybe?) I just pull over anytime there isn't a barrier.

[shaggydogstail.livejournal.com]

Sofas are usually against a wall unless you have a "lounge-diner" type arrangement with the dining table behind the sofa. Even so, watching from "behind the sofa" was never really meant to be taken literally.

As my daughter exclaimed in outrage, "What is a siren FOR, then?"

It's to let you know there's an emergency vehicle nearby so you can get out of the way if needed. Equally confused what else it could be better used for, really.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

In theory, over here it means "It is necessary to pull over and stop". It was the way QI presented stopping as an odd American custom that seemed strange to us.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Check out the Dreamwidth comments for a different POV on "behind the sofa"; like everything worth knowing, the answer turns out to be "It depends..."

[shaggydogstail.livejournal.com]

Hee, I had a sort-of-cave space behind a sloping sofa once, and had totally forgotten about it! I didn't watch DW behind it, though, mostly just used it as a space to hide my sister's toys. And, um, my sister.

[seraangel.livejournal.com]

In Australia here. Depends on if you're driving or at a set of lights. If you're driving, you simply change lanes and let them past. If you're at a set of lights, you change lanes if you can, or you pull off to the shoulder. (Sometimes the Ambulance/Police/Fire Engine will use the breakdown lane to get past people as well.