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ENGLAND = NIRVANA?: JEFF TAKES A HOLIDAY So the plane trip there was hell, of course: the cramped close quarters, the lunging, awkward leap to make it to the aisle past bruised knees and then to the toilet; the cold air on the face which both relieves the heated closeness and makes your nose run; the "moist toilette" unfolded three rows down which, like a perfume sample in a glossy magazine, coats the blue-tinted air with a cloying mist of noxious particles; the kinked neck from trying to sleep against the pillow (small and smooth and hard as a stone sculpted by a river); and, finally, of course, the self-conscious choreography of the first class passengers, as they, with arched eyebrow and faint but hidden smirk, stand at the division between their class and your class, survey your crampedness, your discomfort, and then, refreshed, disappear behind the curtain to unimaginable pleasures. You think, really, that just as you are not allowed in the first class compartment, they should not be allowed to peer in on economy class - unless, of course, this privilege is included in the price of the ticket. . . . and into the squat ugliness of Heathrow Airport, past bland, glassy-eyed customs officials who ritualistically stamp your passport with a faint imprint while entoning, "The purpose of your visit?", and out to the Air Bus (Air Bus: like "air guitar," merely a posturing echo of the real thing: not a true double decker, but at least it has leg space) that will take you to your hotel. This is your first view of London on the ground: flecks float through a gray sky against a backdrop of car exhaust and dull concrete parking lots. Flecks of . . . ? Snow? Ash. Flecks of ash. The sky rains ash and the air is cold and scratchy; your glasses soon become clotted with particles. The Air Bus lurches into London, which could, at first glance, be any other big city: low, hunched electronics, clothing, and jewelry stores sharing space with upcropping generic skyscrapers, red brick suburbs wedged between rail yards and car lots. Bicycle and motorcycle couriers stitch and tack their way through traffic. The cars, of course, are all on the wrong side of the road. The kids in the yards of the red brick houses play soccer, not football, and the yards contain gardens, not lawns. And, in places, older buildings peek through the spaces left by the new--tantalizing glimpses of Gothic and Victorian flourishes. The Air Bus passes a row of clean white wooden apartments, two-storied, with gold address plates, one of which reads, "Former home of Benedict Arnold, American patriot (!?) . . ." All the way in, your lungs are heavy with ash, your throat sore from the pollution. (Later, when you blow your nose, you'll discover your snot has magically turned black.) Finally, after an eternity stuck in mid-afternoon traffic, you reach the hotel: The Tavistock Hotel, an off-white building that used to be white; it seems to be in the middle of nowhere--surrounded by other off-white buildings and nary a restaurant or store in sight. Your room seems an extension of this commercial nihilism: colorless, cold, unadorned, small: a frail, thread-worn room, faded and dull and depressed, with two tiny twin beds. And I turn to Ann and Ann turns to me, and I at least am thinking: Why in God's name did we ever come here? The city seems so huge and so impersonal and the room is so small and so impersonal; it is not a room anyone would ever want to spend much time in. So we didn't. From nine in the morning until about midnight every day we were in London, we were out and about, describing an ever-widening circle as we first cautiously and then, rather joyfully and with abandon, explored a London that day by day seemed to become more colorful, more interesting, and more wonderful. It was rather as if that first hour in our hotel room we were faced with a blank canvas and it was up to us whether we would paint upon it or leave it blank; or, perhaps, take some turpentine and scour away the blankness to find a lively and complicated landscape beneath. Our main method of transportation was the underground subway--efficient, quick, safe, and inexpensive. We never had any trouble with pickpockets (except the very first time we got on the tube, when I felt a hand in my empty back pocket; I was fairly certain this wasn't a traditional British greeting, and turning, I found myself face to face with a rather startled and disheveled woman who immediately put as many miles between me and her as she could). The underground took us that very first day from our hotel in the Bloomsbury District to Covent Garden, a lively shopping area with enough local color to convince us that our hotel and hotel room were something of an aberration. After thoroughly exploring Covent Garden, becoming more confident with each step, we returned to our hotel, discovering along the way that, in fact, we weren't in the middle of nowhere: within two blocks were stores, restaurants, and, a few blocks further, the British Museum, which we visited the very next day. The British Museum was something of an endurance test: how long can one look at the baubles of the past before they all begin to blur together into one big sculpture-jewel-sarcophagus-mosaic-sword-book-thingee. We enjoyed it, but found ourselves beginning to become blasé after two hours: spare me another priceless antiquity! Most enjoyable, however, was the adjoining British library, where it made one weak in the knees to see on display the originals of manuscripts by Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Coleridge, Shelley . . . Seeing the original pages of Carroll's drawings and text for Alice Underground, I was moved almost to tears. There is something magical about coming that close to the genesis of a masterpiece. That afternoon, we explored the bookstores, used and new, along Charing Cross Road, and had the rather odd experience of being hailed in the Forbidden Planet bookstore by the novelist Kim Newman, who we had only met rather briefly three years before. The bookstores contained everything I wanted, and by the end of the first day I not only had bought all the titles on my list, but had picked up a special advance review copy of Angela Carter's collected drama works--a book that wasn't actually otherwise available until July! Alasdair Gray, M. John Harrison, rare Bulgakov--it was all there. The only works I could not find were out of print novels by Frederick Prokosch, this is a minor quibble. We followed all this up the next day with a sarcastic bus tour around London. We were the only ones on the tour bus and the guide felt safe in wonderfully catty observances about the royal family, as well as divulging some rather hilarious facts, such as the identity of the models for the huge lions in Trafalgar Square: apparently, the lion the sculptor was working from died before completion and the artist had to use dogs to finish the work . . . and, indeed, the lions do look rather dog-like. Our travels became wider still: across the Thames to the South Bank and MOMI: the Museum of the Moving Image, an absolutely fascinating history of film and television, including early moving image devices from the Victorian era that seem to me abandoned all too soon, their potential obliterated by the advent of cinema. Westminster Abbey came next--incredibly beautiful, of course, and incredibly moving too, what with Shelley and Keats buried half way up a wall, and everywhere you stepped you stepped on Matthew Arnold or T.S. Eliot or Charles Dickens, their memorial plaques tiles in the floor. The tombs were magnificent--to see Edward the Confessor's almost one thousand year-old tomb made us wonder why British tourists go in droves to St. Augustine here in Florida to see a crude 16th century fort! But the most interesting thing about Westminster Abbey was the cat. A ginger cat, affectionate and plush, sitting in the pews sunning itself. Starved from a week of cat deprivation, we spent a whole twenty or thirty minutes petting it. Ann even went back and became in effect a tour guide for the cat--telling people where it was, encouraging them to pet it. We were rather perplexed at how few people seemed to notice the cat amongst all that antiquarian stone and glass work . . . Later, in the giftshop, we found a book called "Cathedral Cats" which Ann bought for her mother. It turns out all cathedrals have cats to drive away mice. The former Westminster cat had recently been retired for biting visitors. Ann, who is a lemur fanatic, managed to find a really quizzical looking stuffed-toy lemur and a book on lemurs, all on the same day, whilst I fulfilled my fascination with hedgehogs (I'd fully expected to see hedgehogs in London, but disappointingly did not) by buying a stuffed toy hedgehog. (We left these stuffed toy offerings on our respective beds for the maid to discover, and when we came back at night the next day, they'd been tucked in to the covers.) My hedgehog purchase at a famous toy shop was fraught with humor--the clerks thought my purchase rather funny. "Not a particularly masculine gift," said one, while the other said, "No, no--now remember, Davy Crockett wore a hedgehog hat at the Alamo," at which point both of them burst out laughing. Followed by "And didn't George Washington have a hedgehog at Valley Forge?" As I was leaving, one clerk told me that when I returned to the U.S. I should tell my friends the British knew nothing about American history. Other highlights of the first week: Kew Gardens (magnificent, except for Goose-Poop Lawn), West End theatre (The Phantom of the Opera--a lot of fun; Mousetrap--not so good-at the end, they told us not to divulge who did, like I'd even bother; Ann liked it more than I did), and British cinema (Secrets and Lies--excellent; Fargo--so-so; the Brits offer salt or SUGAR with their popcorn--not butter, and they have huge screens with assigned seating in London). Next we were off to Chesterfield/Sheffield, which is two hours north of London by train. We were going to Chesterfield to visit our friends Chris Reed and Manda Thompson, the editors/publishers of BBR, probably among the top ten best-looking fiction magazines in the world and among the top twenty most interesting publishers of sf. We were also hoping to meet a more recent friend, John Gaunt, who publishes Dreams From the Stranger's Cafe, a slipstream fiction magazine which already, only in its fifth issue, is publishing some very good work. We had met Chris and Manda in Atlanta in 1994 and were eagerly looking forward to seeing them in the flesh again, and they certainly did nothing to disappoint. We were whisked from the British Rail station to their extremely nice townhouse (Aside: they have a marvelous garden of herbs and flowers and vegetables-one of the most wonderful things about England is that practically everyone seems to have a garden, and I don't mean a mowed lawn, I mean a full-fledged garden) and then out again for our first real pub experience before a road trip to the surrounding environs. At the pub, they showed me pictures of Chesterfield's famed crooked spire, built in medieval times and now warped and twisted. There are lots of fascinating stories related to its crookedness, ranging from witchcraft to a dearth of skilled craftsmen during the Plague years. After looking at it for awhile, I said, "Why don't they just fix it," which provoked gales of laughter from Manda and from Chris. I looked at them bewildered for a second until I realized I'd more or less just proposed to fix the crack in the Liberty Bell and right the Leaning Tower of Pisa... This day at least was rainy and cold--which I had hoped for as a contrast to Florida--while six out of the seven days we'd previously spent in England had been hot and sunny. The countryside, composed of rolling hills, almost-mountains, and steep valleys, was spectacular: the grass a deep, deep green, fields bounded by stone fences, the wilderness broken by little towns. They took us to another pub on top of what to us Floridians definitely qualified as a mountain for tea and coffee. They took us to some well dressings--a left over pagan ritual converted to Christianity of blessing the well water with a decoration of flowers, seeds, egg shells, fruits and vegetables that make up a scene, usually religious. These well dressings were incredibly complicated--more complicated, I think, than any float in a Rose Bowl parade, and quite ingenious at times. For example, the sheep in one scene were made out of cauliflower, a woman's face made up of cracked eggshells in another. This traditional folk art, so lovingly prepared, was a definite highlight of our trip to England. Another highlight was meeting the tall John Gaunt, who we picked up in Sheffield before driving to a pub in the countryside. He had told us he looked a bit like James Dean, but in fact looked more like John Lennon of the Beatles mixed with Hugh Grant. John, as I mentioned before, edits a magazine called Dreams From the Strangers Cafe, whilst also pursuing English and philosophy studies at Sheffield University. It was pleasure, when I asked him who he liked to read, to hear him say, "Shakespeare" rather than "Poppy Z. Brite. Neither geeky nor anti-social (a stereotype for editor-publisher types, but unfortunately usually true) he was extremely funny and clever and our only regret was not having more time to spend with him. (It was with John in the car that I called Chris "knobbyhead" in reference to a ladder accident that had left a bump on his head, only to find out that "knobbyhead" means "dickhead' in the UK, and to have John and Chris look at me in astonishment while Manda laughed.) Later, back at Chris and Manda's place, John looked on in bemusement as Ann and Chris sang the "Fish heads" song to him in an impromptu duet...Also on Monday we passed, in a field of rapeseed, a large plastic two-dimensional dolphin. When I asked Chris why there was a large plastic two-dimensional dolphin in a field of rapeseed, he told me that Chesterfield was just doing its part to save the dolphins and that there was a large dolphin farm nearby. I actually believed this story after he swore several times it was true, but later that day his grin upon another interrogation revealed he was having me on. The next day Chris and Manda took us to York, where I was to have something of a revelation. The cathedral in York, the Yorkminster, is older than Westminster and to my mind more impressive. As soon as I entered, the little hairs on my arms lifted, and it was upon seeing how the stone rose not in one column but in multiple columns that looked almost like tubes, that my mind clicked on an aspect of my sf novella Quin's Shanghai Circus which I'd been having trouble with and suddenly the adrenaline rushed in and I was in scribble mode, frantically searching for pieces of paper while all these images and characters and situations did a complicated dance in my head. I wandered through the place aimlessly for at least a half hour writing down all the incredibly rich material that the cathedral's gargoyles, stained glass, detail work, and simply its presence were generating within me. My hands were literally shaking. Within that half hour I wrote the basic outlines for all of the scenes in Quin's that simply hadn't been working before and in essence solved both the mystery of its ending and the sequencing of its middle. By the time I was done, I was happy but exhausted--and had probably almost exhausted the patience of Chris, Manda, and Ann, who had had to submit to my pleas for more paper and then wait for me to stop acting like some kind of deranged madman. But I don't think I could have gotten those ideas in any place in the United States--there simply aren't any places in the United States that old, that impressive, that unique. It was as if the entire Cathedral was just waiting to be transformed, en toto, into settings in the novella. The rest of York also intrigued me, with its ruins within ruins and its interesting shops, and I was sorry that we didn't have more than a day to spend there. That night, Chris and Manda treated us to a meal at Smith's of Sheffield, a magnificent restaurant with absolutely incredible food. We spent about three hours eating and talking, talking and eating. The chef practiced something called "New English Cuisine," which mixed more traditional English cooking with aspects of French and other European cooking styles. For appetizer, I had asparagus stalks layered within a croissant and covered with a delicious cream sauce. The main course was chicken breast on a bed of spinach, topped with cheese and bacon, and finished with another delicious sauce. Desert was chocolate parfait with slightly melted chocolate shavings and cherries. Each course was perfectly presented and absolutely delicious, and it was with great regret that I ate the last bite of my parfait. (Which brings us I suppose to the subject of food: we didn't have a single bad meal the entire time we were in England--whether it was Italian, Chinese (in China town we walked by Le Ho Fooks, the establishment made famous in Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London), Indian, or whatever, every meal we had was great. There was a tendency for almost every restaurant to offer a variant on "avocado and prawns," but I think we can overlook that...) I ate like a pig, I suppose, but since we were walking from 9:00 a.m. to 12 midnight, I managed not to gain any weight. On our last day in Chesterfield, we visited the Chatsworth estate, home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The estate consists of over 100 acres of gardens, spectacular fountains, and rolling hillside. It also features the Chatsworth mansion, which, in the sunlight, or lit from below at night, shines almost golden. The inside of the mansion features rather incredible ornamenture, as well as enough artifacts to choke the British Museum. One particular highlight is the State Music Room, which features a 17th century painting of a violin on the inner door described in the guidebook as a "trompe l'oeil" (deceives the eye). As the guidebook also says, "Even if you are close to it, it is difficult not to touch it to discover if it is real." . . . The Chatsworth gardens were every bit as magnificent-including a maze garden we all had a great deal of fun getting lost in. Perhaps the funniest part of our visit involved a pheasant. Manda had already walked over to the general area where the pheasant was standing rather oblivious. I decided to go examine the pheasant also and asked Ann how I should entice it closer, to which she replied, "Use your James Cagney voice." Anyway, I got to within 20 feet of it and as it looked me over, I spread my arms as if prepared to hug it . . . and it promptly walked right up to me. Ann said it was a very funny scene from afar-this pheasant looking up at me, me opening my arms to it, and it walking up like an old friend. While in Chesterfield/Sheffield, Chris and Manda showed us the layouts for the next issue of BBR. Not only does this issue look to be the best yet design-wise (meaning, among the very best in the world), and (even better news) the fiction seemed, from a glance at least, more to my interest than their last issue. (The magazine costs about $10 U.S. but is worth every penny--in a sumptuous perfect bound 8 x 11 format, and very thick.) Chris and Manda also run a catalog of British books and publications and we must have bought about $100-worth of incredibly neat stuff from them. Our return to London--which was girding itself for the latest installment of the soccer European Championships--was somewhat anticlimactic, as we both agreed that our three days in Chesterfield had been the highpoint in a trip that had featured a series of highpoints. Our new hotel was much nicer, and at the opposite end of London--near Hyde Park. The next few days--the last five of our trip--were good, but tinged with the knowledge that each day brought us closer to the end of our vacation. It was during this time that we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum--which practically finished off Quin's Shanghai Circus, since some of the material ensconced there gave rise to another, less intense but almost as profitable sequence of scribbling . . . For example, the incredible Cast Courts, where you can find full-scale reproductions of various and sundry ancient architecture and sculptures. These reproductions were in many cases made years ago and are now in better repair than the originals. Imagine the surrealness of entering this huge room with an enormous cross-hatched skylight and seeing ensconced within this room something like Trajan's Column (113 AD), which rises something like 150 feet and is about 50 feet thick, the stone thickly ornamented with various war-like scenes. We also did more shopping--snubbing Harrod's, which we had found the previous week to be unfriendly to shoppers (who wants to spend $1.50 just to use the toilet) but returning to the much nicer and just as famous Harvey Nichols. Ann had seen advertisements for something called the Reduced Shakespeare company and at her urgings we went to a theater which promised to perform all of Shakespeare's 37 plays in 97 minutes. The 97 minutes were perhaps the most hilarious 97 minutes I've ever had back to back as the three-man cast ran through raucous and knee-slapping versions of, among others, Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet. As an encore, they ran through Hamlet backwards, and then having thoroughly skewered Shakespeare and the plays ended with a monologue from Hamlet that, done seriously and well, reaffirmed what Shakespeare means to literature. (The program for the show was just as funny, featuring a "spiritual channeling" interview with Shakespeare which featured such gems as: Which living person do you most admire and why? "Andrew Lloyd Webber. His writing displays a degree of sophistication that I can only dream of." What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? "The inability to write a catchy tune." What is your favourite book? "The Complete Works of Me." And, How would you like to be remembered? "As the man who made Kenneth Branagh what he is today.") We also visited Oxford, which featured, as Ann put it, "severely pierced" people doing juggling acts and some magnificent gargoyles. The highpoint of Oxford for us was probably the Alice Store, which Lewis Carroll made famous. We were bookshopped out by then (believe it or not) and so the plethora of bookstores only made our eyes glaze over. On our last day-a Sunday--we visited Hyde Park's famed Speaker's Corner . . . only to find that, with one exception, everyone was just a fundamentalist Christian of some type trying to convince the masses: no true weirdoes claiming they'd been abducted by aliens or that electricity was of the devil . . . none of that. The closest to that was the one exception, a black man with a flat-top haircut and a shit-eating grin who was saying, as we walked up, "Now you know you're horny. You know you're going to be disappointed if you come all the way to London and you don't get a piece." It turned out he was preaching promiscuity, which was at least a little more interesting. And so on Monday we boarded the plane once again-our bags much, much heavier than when we arrived--for the eight hour flight home, having had the best vacation of our lives. We'd found the British not at all reserved, as advertised in the travel guides, but incredibly friendly. We'd discovered that British television (at least on the four stations in our hotel room) mostly consisted of American programming. We'd also discovered that some British people don't hang out in pubs-they hang out at American chain restaurants like TGI Friday's (seriously-almost anyone we stopped in the street to ask directions was an American!) and, some at least, have a fondness for all things American that we found simply inexplicable. Who would want to trade British culture and tradition for the kitsch crapola that masquerades as culture here?
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