The last time that I was in London was ten years ago, and my principal memory is the dire sore throat that the smog inflicted on my delicate ear, nose and throat system. (The ailment vanished the instant I left London for Bristol.) Aside from that, I recall that plays were better, cheaper and more numerous than in New York (or a fortiori anywhere else in America), that the restaurants belied my prejudices about English cooking, and that prices were the same as in the U.S., except in pounds rather than dollars.
This time I have a place to record impressions contemporaneously. While I forswear any intention of writing a vacation narrative (the itinerary in the extended entry will interest only my mother), here are a few notes:
To get politics out of the way first, the Underground closures occasioned by the 7/7 attack and the 7/21 squib are inconvenient, but I doubt that this degree of terrorism will bring Britain to its knees. The best indicator is not the gripes about how British participation in freeing Iraq “caused” the bombings; it is the public reaction to the Metropolitan Police’s “shoot-to-kill” policy. (Let me note, BTW, Clinton Taylor’s top-notch “Prometheus, Deterred”, which tells why the Police are right.) By that measure elite public opinion here is in better condition than in the United States. Our policy of “torturing” the Gitmo prisoners with excessive food, pretty girls and boring tropical weather is roundly condemned by our media. Their U.K. counterparts mostly shrugged when the first shoot-to-killee turned out to be an unarmed, probably innocent Brazilian (innocent of terrorism, that is; his aversion to law enforcement personnel hints that he was guilty of something). That sang-froid perhaps stems from a long colonial history and early reading of Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”). Whatever the cause, America badly needs the same realistic attitude toward our enemies.
Reading about “Londonistan” doesn’t match seeing it. In principle, I’m not bothered by a plethora of women in dark, all-enveloping garb. If that distinctive clothing were evidence only of rejection of modernity, as it is among the Amish and the chasidim, I would be tempted to mild applause, for modernity breeds many evils. Those evils are not, however, a sufficient excuse for violence, and doubly not an excuse for violence without a realizable goal. More and more, I incline to the view that the Islamofascist brand of terrorism is motivated by sheer nihilism, its religious veneer a fraud. If per impossible the Caliphate were restored and the Western nations paid head tax to Mecca, would the terror abate, or would al-Qa’eda and its ilk simply unveil new demands pursued by the same means? I’m confident that I know the answer.
The U.K. price situation hasn’t changed, leading me to puzzle over how average Englishmen, with two-thirds of an average American’s income (and higher taxes, too), scrape along. Some prices are grotesque. Yesterday I took my dirty laundry to a laundromat, where the washers charged £3 ($5.21), £4 ($6.95) or £5 ($8.69) a cycle and dryers were 20p. (35¢) a minute. The one exception to the general rule was U.S.-branded household goods. I saw shampoo that I had heard of priced only a few pence above a drug store chain’s house brand.
A week in England reinforces one’s fondness for the dollar bill. It’s a good thing that the English are comparatively poor, because, if they had lots of money, they couldn’t lift it. The one nice thing about the solid one and two pound coins is the engraved mottos around the edges, a relic of the age when coins were made of gold and coin clipping worried the Exchequer.
One of the most striking contrasts between the two sides of the Atlantic, from a tourist’s point of view, is the degree of accommodation to foreigners. My first day in Britain, I discovered that the electrical adaptor that I’d brought along was defective. Within ten minutes, I located a shop that sold me a replacement. How long would it take, I wonder, be for a Briton in Chicago to find a place that sold U.K.-to-U.S. adaptors? Another indicator: Many crosswalks are painted “Look Right” or “Look Left”. In the U.S. we just assume that everybody knows which way the cars come from. And then there are the ubiquitous foreign exchange shops, though that is an ambivalently useful service; their rates are noticeably less favorable than an ATM’s.
Speaking of ATM’s, they don’t charge fees. The corollary is that there are not two or three on every block. In the U.S., machines scattered so thinly would sprout block-long lines. Here hardly anyone seems to use them. I’ve yet to see more than two people in a queue.
I expected plenty of traffic in London. The city is famous for congestion, isn’t it? What I didn’t expect was that even light traffic would be so noisy. Cornwell Road during a non-rush hour was as loud as the Kennedy. An Englishwoman whom I asked blamed the road surfacing, though I’m fairly sure that noise standards for mufflers must be more lenient here. In any case, the phenomenon has a virtue: When one looks the wrong way, despite the crosswalk warnings, it’s nonetheless easy to hear approaching cars. Back home, they can sneak up on you.
British newspapers complain incessantly about the deterioration of rail service since the breakup of the government monopoly. If only Amtrak could deteriorate to this extent! I’m composing this entry on the Virgin Trains run from London to Glasgow. When I arrived at Euston Station with more luggage than I could manhandle, a porter with a motor cart appeared, whisked me to the platform and loaded my bags onto the train, which was enough to endear VT to me forever. Admittedly, the train is now running late – seven minutes late. On an American railroad, that’s called “early”. It’s also a remarkable fact, though I don’t benefit personally from it, that the first class food carts give out Scrumpy Jack Cider free of charge.
The air quality evidently has improved. In 1995 my sore throat arrived within hours. In 2005 it barely got a foothold in a full week.
For Mother’s benefit: Sunday, July 24th: Arrived in London at 6:00 a.m., which was, according to my internal clock, about time to go to bed. The rest of the day was lost to jet lag.
Monday: Wandered around London. The original plan had been to visit Stratford-upon-Avon today, but train service is disrupted – not by terrorists but by a tunnel collapse a few weeks ago.
Tuesday: Visited York and spent a long time exploring York Minster. I also liked the low budget Disney imitation at the Jorvik Viking Center, though it may dissatisfy fastidious tastes.
Wednesday: Traveled to the obscure village of Wincanton, Somerset, to visit The Cunning Artificer, a shop devoted to Discworld-related merchandise. The proprietor, Bernard Pearson, is a leading sculptor of Discworld figurines. He and his wife served tea, chatted about future projects and gave me a souvenir coaster. Those fans who don’t already know will be sorry to hear that Bernard plans to retire from sculpting after the release of his model of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office; arthritis is beginning to affect his hands, and he wants “to leave at the top of my game”. Having seen a prototype, I think that he’s going out as spectacularly mutatis mutandis as Michael Jordan.
Thursday: Visited Southampton to look at the QE2’s dockyard and walk along the city walls (the longest surviving stretch of medieval fortifications in England). Curiously, the maritime and archeological museums were overrun with foreign school children: French, Italian and Irish if my ears picked out their speech accurately. They all looked, however, like kids in Chicago, save for wearing their jeans even more distastefully low on the hips. Every t-shirt that I noticed was written in English, which may be the surest sign of the linguistic wave of the future.
Friday: Took a boat up the Thames to Hampton Court Palace. The cruise is pleasant but doesn’t leave enough hours to see the palace properly. I was able to make it through the Kitchens, Henry VIII’s apartments, Queen Caroline’s apartments, the Maze and some of the Gardens before closing time.
Saturday: Visited Oxford, saw many sites and noted that Christ Church College now apparently thinks that its leading claim to distinction is its connection with the Harry Potter movies. There were lots of kids goggling at the Great Hall. I also dropped in at Merton College, Magdalen College and the Ashmolean Museum (partly closed for renovation, but that was fine, as there was still more than I could see without exhausting my time and my legs).
Sunday: Attended liturgy at the Cathedral of the Dormition, which happily was within walking distance of my hotel. After that came my laundromat adventure described above. The evening was devoted to preparing for the next stage of the journey, which will take me to Glasgow and this year’s World Science Fiction Convention.
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