Back from the British Isles with plenty to say, and because I’m a licensed journalist and certified expert you should feel free to ignore it all.
It’s like living in a big museum. Cities of any size at all have horizons spiked with cathedral spires, statues of heroic victors and memorials to fallen heroes. Each is more grand, proud and stately than anywhere I’ve ever been, and I’ve been to Modesto, Ogden and Cleveland. (Also: Rome, Ravenna, Florence and Dresden.)
The countryside is tiny villages of houses made from rocks and thatched roofs, ancient churches, and emerald hills dotted with cows and sheep. We went to the Cotswolds, where quaint plus cute equals a word not yet found in the dictionary.
Edinburgh, in Scotland, might be the most amazing spectacle of all. Cobbled streets, castle walls still standing solid after 1500 years built from rocks three times the size of your refrigerator, and with stained and leaded glass in bright brilliant colors that, if new, might rival HD TV.
In Edinburgh, as well as London, York, Windsor, Bath and everywhere else, modern hotels are built from another ancient building’s hollowed out remains. Exteriors are of huge craggy rocks with a dozen turrets, thick iron poles holding banners aloft, yet interiors are no different than a modern hotel in San Jose, right down to wall-to-wall carpet and Jack Daniel’s at the bar.
Reasonable adaptations, given that even those resistant to historical updates still want heated rooms, electric lights, comfy mattresses, tiny bottles of shampoo in bathrooms, elevators, and a roof that doesn’t leak.
Random observations:
1) We spent three weeks abroad, beginning in London among vast herds of police officers due to huge crowds filling streets and sidewalks for the Queen’s Last Ride.
Then Edinburgh, York, Bath, Windsor, etc. In all that time in all those cities we never saw a police officer nor a police car. Or heard a siren.
The cops can’t all be on vacation at once can they? There can’t be zero crime among all those Brits, can there?
2) Everyone abroad, as travel writers and other semi-honest journalists always say, is friendly, cheerful, and speak clear, understandable, BBC-style English. The exception? The Scots. They all sound as if they’re gargling vowels and spitting up punctuation.
3) Anyone who tells you it’s easy to adapt to Brits driving on the wrong side of the road is lying. It’s fiendishly difficult, and that’s without ever taking the wheel.
To be a pedestrian is to tempt fate and the gods of chance at a level just shy of Russian Roulette. Here’s why: You’ve spent an entire lifetime, decades and decades, hardwired to the sensible USA pedestrian traffic system.
If you think you’ll shed all that training and experience, and quickly learn to first look right when crossing a street, you’re wrong. You’ll also be in a hospital within 24 hours. Or the morgue.
4) Oldtimers like me are surprised to find beers like Bud Lite and Coors in pubs and markets, and that draft beers, even Guinness, are now served cold. Not long ago that would have been unthinkable if not illegal.
It’s a bad bargain to capitulate to the whims of Generation Bud, but there we are. Locals have also switched from tea to coffee as the go-to beverage; Coca Cola is everywhere. So is vaping. Homeless are too few to count.
5) Every hotel has one of those round (convex?) mirrors mounted on the bathroom wall that magnifies your face to look like craters on the moon. It will remind you of the good old days of Clearasil and razor nicks, and give a peek at your exciting future of skin cancer, plastic surgery and frightening small children.
6) City roads and streets are crowded, messy and filled with peril. Country lanes might be even more hazardous.
Your bus driver will say the narrow lane we’re hurtling down was built by Romans (when dinosaurs roamed the land). But these “roads” were to accommodate Roman chariots the size of today’s riding lawnmowers.
Locals call these skinny paved strips “Prayer Roads” because drivers constantly pray no one’s coming around the next bend. In a bus that’s already too wide for a road the size of your driveway, an approaching car is tricky.
But if another bus approaches it’s terrifying, and helps explain why the British have outlawed vehicles having more than one coat of paint.
7) There’s a pub on every block and down most alleys. Closest to our hotel in Bath is The Westlake, with a chiseled block above the door: “Eftablifhed 1677.” Inside, I had a pint of ABK Hell, from a brewery built in 1308.
(The author of these weekly musings is truly Among His People, with his father’s Hine (English) and his mother’s Weyburne (Scottish). TWK has no ancestors willing to claim him.
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