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winterbadgerIn response to my remarks about wishing I could move to the UK, my FB-friend the estimable MM Bennetts opined that maybe I didn't quite know the place well enough, suggesting a rather lengthy list of reasons I might not really want it as much as I think I would. That deserved a more thorough and sturdy reply than I could put in FB (plus I wanted to be sure I could find it again :). So here it is.
One of great-grandfathers lived in the UK for many years and had a British family (allegedly after his American wife had died, though knowing him, who can be sure?) So I have a boatload of English cousins (or half-cousins, or something). One of my sisters' daughters married a very nice chap who works at the LSE; they and their lovely son live in London. Besides my family, I have a good many friends who live in the UK (Brits, Septics, and even a Hun and a Pole). I've also met a number of nice men and women from the UK over here in the Land of the Golden Mountain. I've "dated" (mostly by email and Skype, but sometimes IRL) four very nice Scots women (though, sadly, I haven't managed to make any of those relationships stick).
My UK goggles are only very slightly rose-tinted. I lived in London as an undergrad myself (only for six months, but in 1985, which--short of 1946--was one of Britain's least cromulent nadirs, the horrid depths of Thatcherism). I have spent more of my holidays in the last ten years in the UK than I have spent in the US and Canada. Hell, I was even *married* in the UK--in a chapel in a castle, with a bagpiper, followed by a lavish meal at a deluxe restaurant and an evening of pubbing rounded out by a trip to the chippy. All in all the best wedding I've ever been to, though the marriage didn't last.
I've endured living in shared bedsits converted from Edwardian rowhouse bedrooms or attics into grotty little flats (in one, our downstairs neighbour was *ahem* a lady of the evening and our "kitchen" was a converted closet). I've dealt with the eccentric timing of food and drinks service (a friend and I once drove 10+ miles to find a place that would serve us lunch because we had the reckless abandon to wait until after 1pm to look for food). I've driven on motorways (and experienced the joys of commuter tailbacks), and somewhat smaller roads (like the time I suddenly had to change plans at 60mph in the middle of heavy traffic on the A82 when it became apparent that the bridge I had planned to cross was a toll bridge and I was out of cash; only to find out later that it wasn't a toll bridge any more, but no one had bothered to take down the signs), right down to single-track roads in the Highlands (and the locals' unnerving habit of driving at high speed with just enough time to swerve suddenly into passing places and wave cheerily at the other motorist passing inches away from their windscreen). We won't even talk about the early morning drive around the north end of Loch Lomond, where the same A82 turns into a one-lane path with stone wall on one side and steep drop into the loch on the other--and the huge Tesco goods lorry ahead of me came around a curve to find an intercity bus coming the other way...) But spend a week driving Washington's Beltway at all hours of the day and night, with its combination of drivers who sit in the fast lane, damned if they will go 1 mph over the speed limit, and those who swing in and out of traffic at 80mph trying to emulate the racers of Tokyo Drift, and if your hair doesn't turn white I will buy you a pint.
I became so inured to the stink and grime of the London Transport trains and busses that I missed it when I went away. The drunks and derelicts that litter British cities are no more heartrendingly sad, grubby, and foul-mouthed than ours here in America. There's a fair bit of litter about in British cities (the fish dinners carefull displayed on Glasgow pavements spring to mind, all half-eaten but some discarded before consumption and some... after...), but Washington DC and Boston are well up in the rubbish sweepstakes. Mother's Pride? I give you Wonderbread, plastic foam through and through. I've had a few dodgy kebabs, but nothing like the scary grey hot dogs of RFK Stadium that always look, in March, as if they may have been left over from last October. Poor history teaching? A quarter of American students polled thought Christopher Columbus lived in the 18th century; some thought Adolf Hitler was the Kaiser, while others thought he was perhaps a businessman. Chavs? Please. They wouldn't last ten minutes with a bunch of American rednecks; after a short exposure to NASCAR, Budweiser, the Tea Party, country music, and WWE, they would be whimpering for mummy.
No, I think I have a fairly good idea of Britain's shortcomings. Some of them are frustrating. Some of them are baffling. Some of them, in their own way, are even charming. But no place else can you find the same curious, sometimes dangerous, but always fascinating mixture of cultures you do in British cities. Nowhere in America can you find the architecture of London or Edinburgh, cathedrals like Winchester's and Ely's, Glasgow's and Salisbury's. Nowhere can you find the sort of amazingly wonderful people you do in Britain, from my great-aunt the retired GP, who *lectured* me for being bitten by one of her friends' horrid little dogs to the retired Glasgow cabbie who heard I was thinking of moving to Scotland from the US and was so amazed and pleased that a Yank would like his country so much that he shoved me in his Jaguar and drove me across town to his favourite pub to introduce me to all his friends. Nowhere has quite the same countryside, whether it's the leafy lanes of Warwickshire that my first wife and I walked in warm and balmy darkness when we accidentally got off our bus (the last one of the night) too soon. Or the fells and tarns of the Lake District. Or the gentle woods of Perthshire, with cows in nearby fields lowing calmly. Or the near-moonscape wildness of Sutherland that you see from the train going up over the moors from Helmsdale through Kildonan and Achentoul and Forsinard and Dorrery to Thurso. That train route reminds me of the lovely man I met on it, a Yorkshireman who has the same feeling for Scotland I do and comes up to it every holiday. Who told me a wonderful tale of the trip he and his late wife had taken around the States back in the 1960s, when the airlines were desperate for foreign tourists and flew them all over the country from city to city, putting them up in grand hotels all for (at the time) a ridiculously low package price.
That was only one of the many lovely train journeys I've had in Britain. I've had the pleasure of flying across it (a puddle-jumper from Kirkwall in Orkney to Edinburgh Airport the last time I was there), sailing around it (a week spent going up and down Loch Linnhe and the Sound of Mull), and of course driving round it. A couple of us even went on a very short coach tour back in 2008, zooming up and down steep hill roads and around icy lochs with our indefatigable young tour conductor at the wheel, scaring half of us to death at her cornering speeds. I've spent snowy days in Kensington Gardens and rainy days walking around Skye and sunny days in a rowboat on Grasmere. I've been blown nearly off my feet in Stromness and Stenness and tipped over and over as I tried to master sea-kayaking in the Sound of Raasay.
I miss having a Way Out. I miss real pubs and real pints (though draught beer and cider have gotten miles better in the States since the 1980s) and ploughman's lunches and cheese and pickle sandwiches (admittedly, as I type there is a jar of Branston's in my fridge). I miss black cabs and red busses (even if they're not AEC Routemasters any more). I miss currency with colour and coins with real weight (even if it's all base metal with a little gilding ;-). I miss driving (and standing) on the left, and proper traffic circles that everyone knows how to use. I miss every door in sight always being closed, and impossibly thin radiators that still manage to give off far too much heat. :-) I miss pavements that people walk on, many of which are actually paved. I miss pedestrian crossings where drivers actually stop and allow pedestrians to cross.
I miss the sound of voices most of all--plummy Edinburgers and jackdaw Glaswegians and phlegmatic Fifers; lilting Yorkshire voices, drawling Mancunians, the mumbling, half-swallowed tones of the lower middle-class southerner and the clipped tones of the apiring professional Englishman (or woman), plus that Northern Irish accent I can't even think how to describe, and the countless babble of dialects and nationalities one finds in London.
I miss British ways of doing things, and the British mindset that, while sometimes very independent and self-focused, still has at root an attitude about society being more than the sum of its parts, something all of us are in together, instead of the selfish, hateful way that Americans far too often act as if there were no people in the world outside themselves (and maybe their families) about whom they should care or even think. I miss living in a country where the idea that everyone should pay for their own healthcare, and that the people who can't should just go without, would be viewed as horrific. Where very few people would be convinced by the idea that the solution to crime is simply for everyone to carry guns and shoot anyone they think is a criminal. I miss being somewhere where "socialist" is simply a descriptive term for a political viewpoint, and not an epithet of hatred to be screamed at someone.
I love the British landscape. I love British cites and towns and villages. I like (most) British people. And yes, I even love the weather. :-)
I love the UK, and Scotland especially. It makes me very sad that so much of the population sees immigrants like me as undesirables and threats to their society and culture. I hope some day that they will change their minds, and that I will find a way to live and work there, maybe even settle.
But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm not letting that stall out all the other things I could do with my life instead.
One of great-grandfathers lived in the UK for many years and had a British family (allegedly after his American wife had died, though knowing him, who can be sure?) So I have a boatload of English cousins (or half-cousins, or something). One of my sisters' daughters married a very nice chap who works at the LSE; they and their lovely son live in London. Besides my family, I have a good many friends who live in the UK (Brits, Septics, and even a Hun and a Pole). I've also met a number of nice men and women from the UK over here in the Land of the Golden Mountain. I've "dated" (mostly by email and Skype, but sometimes IRL) four very nice Scots women (though, sadly, I haven't managed to make any of those relationships stick).
My UK goggles are only very slightly rose-tinted. I lived in London as an undergrad myself (only for six months, but in 1985, which--short of 1946--was one of Britain's least cromulent nadirs, the horrid depths of Thatcherism). I have spent more of my holidays in the last ten years in the UK than I have spent in the US and Canada. Hell, I was even *married* in the UK--in a chapel in a castle, with a bagpiper, followed by a lavish meal at a deluxe restaurant and an evening of pubbing rounded out by a trip to the chippy. All in all the best wedding I've ever been to, though the marriage didn't last.
I've endured living in shared bedsits converted from Edwardian rowhouse bedrooms or attics into grotty little flats (in one, our downstairs neighbour was *ahem* a lady of the evening and our "kitchen" was a converted closet). I've dealt with the eccentric timing of food and drinks service (a friend and I once drove 10+ miles to find a place that would serve us lunch because we had the reckless abandon to wait until after 1pm to look for food). I've driven on motorways (and experienced the joys of commuter tailbacks), and somewhat smaller roads (like the time I suddenly had to change plans at 60mph in the middle of heavy traffic on the A82 when it became apparent that the bridge I had planned to cross was a toll bridge and I was out of cash; only to find out later that it wasn't a toll bridge any more, but no one had bothered to take down the signs), right down to single-track roads in the Highlands (and the locals' unnerving habit of driving at high speed with just enough time to swerve suddenly into passing places and wave cheerily at the other motorist passing inches away from their windscreen). We won't even talk about the early morning drive around the north end of Loch Lomond, where the same A82 turns into a one-lane path with stone wall on one side and steep drop into the loch on the other--and the huge Tesco goods lorry ahead of me came around a curve to find an intercity bus coming the other way...) But spend a week driving Washington's Beltway at all hours of the day and night, with its combination of drivers who sit in the fast lane, damned if they will go 1 mph over the speed limit, and those who swing in and out of traffic at 80mph trying to emulate the racers of Tokyo Drift, and if your hair doesn't turn white I will buy you a pint.
I became so inured to the stink and grime of the London Transport trains and busses that I missed it when I went away. The drunks and derelicts that litter British cities are no more heartrendingly sad, grubby, and foul-mouthed than ours here in America. There's a fair bit of litter about in British cities (the fish dinners carefull displayed on Glasgow pavements spring to mind, all half-eaten but some discarded before consumption and some... after...), but Washington DC and Boston are well up in the rubbish sweepstakes. Mother's Pride? I give you Wonderbread, plastic foam through and through. I've had a few dodgy kebabs, but nothing like the scary grey hot dogs of RFK Stadium that always look, in March, as if they may have been left over from last October. Poor history teaching? A quarter of American students polled thought Christopher Columbus lived in the 18th century; some thought Adolf Hitler was the Kaiser, while others thought he was perhaps a businessman. Chavs? Please. They wouldn't last ten minutes with a bunch of American rednecks; after a short exposure to NASCAR, Budweiser, the Tea Party, country music, and WWE, they would be whimpering for mummy.
No, I think I have a fairly good idea of Britain's shortcomings. Some of them are frustrating. Some of them are baffling. Some of them, in their own way, are even charming. But no place else can you find the same curious, sometimes dangerous, but always fascinating mixture of cultures you do in British cities. Nowhere in America can you find the architecture of London or Edinburgh, cathedrals like Winchester's and Ely's, Glasgow's and Salisbury's. Nowhere can you find the sort of amazingly wonderful people you do in Britain, from my great-aunt the retired GP, who *lectured* me for being bitten by one of her friends' horrid little dogs to the retired Glasgow cabbie who heard I was thinking of moving to Scotland from the US and was so amazed and pleased that a Yank would like his country so much that he shoved me in his Jaguar and drove me across town to his favourite pub to introduce me to all his friends. Nowhere has quite the same countryside, whether it's the leafy lanes of Warwickshire that my first wife and I walked in warm and balmy darkness when we accidentally got off our bus (the last one of the night) too soon. Or the fells and tarns of the Lake District. Or the gentle woods of Perthshire, with cows in nearby fields lowing calmly. Or the near-moonscape wildness of Sutherland that you see from the train going up over the moors from Helmsdale through Kildonan and Achentoul and Forsinard and Dorrery to Thurso. That train route reminds me of the lovely man I met on it, a Yorkshireman who has the same feeling for Scotland I do and comes up to it every holiday. Who told me a wonderful tale of the trip he and his late wife had taken around the States back in the 1960s, when the airlines were desperate for foreign tourists and flew them all over the country from city to city, putting them up in grand hotels all for (at the time) a ridiculously low package price.
That was only one of the many lovely train journeys I've had in Britain. I've had the pleasure of flying across it (a puddle-jumper from Kirkwall in Orkney to Edinburgh Airport the last time I was there), sailing around it (a week spent going up and down Loch Linnhe and the Sound of Mull), and of course driving round it. A couple of us even went on a very short coach tour back in 2008, zooming up and down steep hill roads and around icy lochs with our indefatigable young tour conductor at the wheel, scaring half of us to death at her cornering speeds. I've spent snowy days in Kensington Gardens and rainy days walking around Skye and sunny days in a rowboat on Grasmere. I've been blown nearly off my feet in Stromness and Stenness and tipped over and over as I tried to master sea-kayaking in the Sound of Raasay.
I miss having a Way Out. I miss real pubs and real pints (though draught beer and cider have gotten miles better in the States since the 1980s) and ploughman's lunches and cheese and pickle sandwiches (admittedly, as I type there is a jar of Branston's in my fridge). I miss black cabs and red busses (even if they're not AEC Routemasters any more). I miss currency with colour and coins with real weight (even if it's all base metal with a little gilding ;-). I miss driving (and standing) on the left, and proper traffic circles that everyone knows how to use. I miss every door in sight always being closed, and impossibly thin radiators that still manage to give off far too much heat. :-) I miss pavements that people walk on, many of which are actually paved. I miss pedestrian crossings where drivers actually stop and allow pedestrians to cross.
I miss the sound of voices most of all--plummy Edinburgers and jackdaw Glaswegians and phlegmatic Fifers; lilting Yorkshire voices, drawling Mancunians, the mumbling, half-swallowed tones of the lower middle-class southerner and the clipped tones of the apiring professional Englishman (or woman), plus that Northern Irish accent I can't even think how to describe, and the countless babble of dialects and nationalities one finds in London.
I miss British ways of doing things, and the British mindset that, while sometimes very independent and self-focused, still has at root an attitude about society being more than the sum of its parts, something all of us are in together, instead of the selfish, hateful way that Americans far too often act as if there were no people in the world outside themselves (and maybe their families) about whom they should care or even think. I miss living in a country where the idea that everyone should pay for their own healthcare, and that the people who can't should just go without, would be viewed as horrific. Where very few people would be convinced by the idea that the solution to crime is simply for everyone to carry guns and shoot anyone they think is a criminal. I miss being somewhere where "socialist" is simply a descriptive term for a political viewpoint, and not an epithet of hatred to be screamed at someone.
I love the British landscape. I love British cites and towns and villages. I like (most) British people. And yes, I even love the weather. :-)
I love the UK, and Scotland especially. It makes me very sad that so much of the population sees immigrants like me as undesirables and threats to their society and culture. I hope some day that they will change their minds, and that I will find a way to live and work there, maybe even settle.
But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm not letting that stall out all the other things I could do with my life instead.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 09:05 am (UTC)I love America, but the politics scare me shitless.
I'm pretty middle of the road by UK standards, which means I'm probably a raving socialist in the USA.
I love the seasons, the national parks. I love the strangers I talk to on train journeys, the people I chat to at bus stops, the wonderful charity shops, genteel tea shops, stately homes, Iron Age hill forts, folk festivals, morris dancers, state-funded schools, allotments, the Queen, acceptance of atheists as perfectly normal, the NHS, the BBC, radio 4 and walking in the countryside.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 02:42 pm (UTC)I've not yet been to France or Spain, but from everything I've read and seen about them, I can understand why they would have a special appeal.
But I'm still hoping that if we none of get our first dreams, maybe we can have our peeps commune in the northern woods instead. :-)