Monday, May 27, 2013

London

A week in London.  Mercure Hotel right up next to Paddington Train Station on Praed Street with every kind of vehicular noise imaginable, yet never a sound penetrated our tiny little attic room on the top (5th) floor.  Heaven!  So much traffic, so many traffic jams, Trafalgar Square in a taxi trying to get to the Aldwych Theater, slow motion for twenty-five minutes, but never once was there the sound of a horn beeped in frustration from any cabbie, never did the cabdrivers, for that matter, depart from their genial, mannered, knowledgeable control of the cab. The streets of central London so crowded with people I was fearful, partly because they were all so young, so determinedly moving so fast, Saturday night by the fountain in Piccadilly so many wildly crazy drunken young men, soccer match just finished and much celebrating, oh, how I was fearful, and amazed to see dear old ladies looking not unlike Our Gracious Queen, same handbag, same hairdo, placidly walking along amidst the hurly burly.  Wonderful to be in a country where you do not have every other person packing a pistol.  Americans most generally remark on the marked decline in public anger, tension, hostility that marks the far more placid English scene.  It is more like the America of my childhood.  More foreign languages in central London than I have heard anywhere else including Manhattan.  The tube is crowded, the platforms are crowded, masses of people moving up and down on the escalators, racing along through the very claustrophobic tunnels that link the underground systems one to another. Trains come in rapid succession; buses move in their own dedicated lanes.  Except for traffic jams people are moved along efficiently and swiftly.  BBC Television News: reportage by persons who obviously had some training in what they were talking about, gruesome horror story news, the very staple of American TV, at a minimum and at that not repeated ad nauseam.  The debate on gay marriage in the Commons carried live in snippets interspersed with so many interesting intelligent observations by concerned parties of every stripe. It always seems so odd this fear of two persons of the same sex getting married.  What is going to happen?  What has happened?  Nothing.  But the debates were good.   Oh, Lord, how extraordinary to find intelligence and learning privileged in the public sphere!  Wonderful restaurants and oh were they expensive!  But then everything in England is expensive, and my friends tell me the salaries in no way match the cost of living.  The restaurants where the serving staff is salaried and therefore not trying to be our friend, unobtrusive, deft, and such a melange of nationalities.  Friends claim that it is hard to get native born Brits to do any work, and one must seek the immigrants.  That was what my son found when he was the executive chef in a London restaurant in the 1980's.  Lots of complaining about the ease with which layabouts can stay on the dole for decades.  The English peaches and cream complexions, boys and girls in their early teens, oh, Lord, how can people be so beautiful.  Was it Augustine who said sunt angeli isti Angli ("they are angels these English".)?  Or something like that.  I probably have the Latin wrong, but, hey, I am retired, and jet lagged, and don't give a damn, and my husband Richard is in another room (he would not tolerate such sloppiness).   Marvelous theater, the crispness of the acting remarkable, so many young persons in the audience.  Somehow I feel that persons my age can't take all the stairs, the crowds, and so stay home.  Of course, maybe I am still in Sarasota mode and expect every second person to have a walker or an oxygen cannister and tubes in the nose.  We lunched and dined with wonderful friends, always in some ways a wistful experience as time is indeed marching along very briskly, taking out one or two at every round of the calendar year.

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