Rue Britania (Well… parts of it, anyway)

One of the joys of travel is getting to reconnect with pals scattered across the landscape, and whenever I get to Europe I try to make a loop to connect with my friends in the UK. (I often try for pals in Spain and Germany, but the UK is the most consistent mainstay of these dumdum trips.) Last August, I made it back to visit pals in London, Bristol, and Glasgow (with a bonus just-Pat loop in Scotland) and was genuinely surprised at how much I had… soured on England? Deets on the non-Scottish leg of this trip post-jump! 

No video for this leg of the trip, btw (the rule is: if you have an adorable toddler and I come to visit, I WILL cut a video together that includes your kid being a big sweetie, but it WILL remain unlisted and saved for Only Approved Pals’ Sharing) and only limited photos as I’m working from the road right now (Sicily: rainier than anybody expected! Details in 2028!). 

Here’s the WWI flying ace, parked in a canal in London, ok, fine, PARTS of England were nice.

So what’s up with England? I think weirdly the tone was set by my careening through London with just enough time to catch the literal last ticket possible to see Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s searing play that, a decade on, feels powerfully prescient of the Brexit forces of racism, stupidity, and selfishness masked by the absolute thinnest veneer of folklore and politeness. (The play is a helluva thing, though I don’t know how it would work without Rylance’s massively complicated and powerful performance - Mackenzie Crook also in great form when I saw it!)

That play got at a sense of curdling in the culture that I either hadn’t noticed on earlier trips or had become more pronounced in the wake of the COVID shutdowns. There was a sense of slightly standoffish rudeness interpersonally - and not just to me. My friend Kate related a story of boarding an overcrowded train with her daughter in a pram and finding literally everyone except a fellow mother pointedly averting their eyes rather than offering to help her. There’s a real sense that England has caught America’s disease of self-centered sociopathy, and I can’t say that it helped to find pockets of the very specific British brand of transphobia (grounded largely in utterly false claims about treatment of pre-puberty trans folk). It was a pretty ugly scene, glimpsed in snippets of conversation, micro-moments of encounters on the streets, and the media culture.

Fortunately, this was offset by my friends, who are all very special and wonderful people without whom I would mostly be trying to work out how to go as quickly as possible from Paris Gare du Nord to Glasgow Central stations. I got to spend a few days in Bristol with Kate, Stu and my goddaughter, enjoying the usual round of sprawling conversation and delightful wandering, and got to meet up with my friend Em and her husband Ray (one of the pandemic-era marriages that had to be celebrated in a million little catchings-up after the fact). Throw in a visit to London, which I still adore - primarily for its robust diversity and the way it foregrounds cultural activity even though you know there’s an awful lot of banking money flooding through town - and I had myself plenty enough of a good time. 

Bristol, it should be said, is also Neat, thanks to its art scene and its proximity to people I enjoy seeing regularly. Plus you can look at the TRAIN in the HARBOR.

Oh, one last London thing, though. In the same way that I’d visited Paris three times before getting myself to the Louvre (preferring the Pompidou Centre and generally not loving Obligation Tourism) I’d long put off the British Museum even knowing that its collection was impressive. I finally made it last summer, and I: hated it? Yes: it’s an impressive collection, but the ethical stench is really hard to get past. I felt that particularly keenly having started this trip in Greece, where the Parthenon Museum was explicitly built as a “we can now house the Elgin Marbles you stole from us; now that we’ve knocked down that excuse, please return them” maneuver… Needless to say, the British Museum has ignored this request, largely because once they admit that their collection is almost entirely the product of plunder, theft, and violent conquest, they’ll have a very large and empty convention center where a museum used to stand. Well… tough? My feeling is, Great Britain benefitted for centuries from these thefts, and if they have no contingency plan for what to do when it’s time to give back the loot, that’s just tough beans. (In general, if you want a museum you can feel good about, hit up the British Library, whose artifacts are all actually FROM Britain, and demonstrate the actual value it’s contributed to the world rather than stolen from it.) That the museum does no work whatsoever to address the controversy or tell the story of how these works of antiquity from across the Mediterranean ended up here just added to the noxious feeling I had in the place. It’s free, so you don’t have to feel you’re financially supporting the place, but that’s almost literally the only upside. So I guess that’s my big London recommendation: skip the British Museum forever. Go have a roti curry instead.

Okay! Enough grumbling about England! Up next, whenever I get around to it: Scotland! Where the precipitous decline in my feelings toward England are balanced by a commensurate crescendo of affection for their superior Scottish neighbors up north! Positivity ahoy! 

Ok fine THREE good things in England.