We are sitting at Heathrow Airport for our flight to Iceland. We will only be there overnight before flying on to New York and a visit with my sister. I would have liked to spend some time in Iceland, but we have been gone a long time as it is, and we had to choose Iceland or my sister, which is an easy choice.
Friday was our last night on the canal. After a day of drizzling, the evening cleared so we had a nice sunset and the almost full moon rising over our bow. Some tree along the river was blooming and white cotton seeds drifted over the river like snow. It reminded me of the opening scene in Fellini’s Amarcord.
That last day was also marked by seeing some stunning birds, in particular what appeared to be an Mandarin duck with long swept back feathers on the drake’s head. Next time we come (and hopefully there will be a next time that is even longer) we will come with a book on British birds (the ones with feathers), binoculars and of course a shotgun so we can have duck for dinner.
We spent Saturday in London at the British Museum looking at a spectacular exhibit on Pompeii and Herculaneum and then saw the Rosetta Stone and a couple of rooms of looted Egyptian treasures. Then our eyes glazed over and our minds were fried, so we went to eat. And of course, this being London, we ate Indian food.
After 11 days of eating at pubs along the canal, we really needed a change of pace, not just for our palettes but for our waist lines. The pub food was actually fairly good, other than the fact that everything was served with chips (i.e., French fries.) Even the chips were served with chips. The real danger about coming back to England to spend a month or two on a narrow boat is that we would each weigh 400 pounds at the end of the trip and have to be rolled off the boat.
We spent Sunday at the Tate Modern Museum, seeing Monets, Mondrians, Pollacks, Rothkos, Picassos, Braques, etc,, etc. until our eyes glazed over and we had to eat again. This being London, of course, we had Thai.
Originally, we had hoped to see the Chagall exhibit, but I misread the poster, as the exhibit was at the Tate Liverpool. I really thought hard about taking a train up to Liverpool for the day, as I have always loved Chagall, but that was too crazy even for me. The exhibits at Tate Modern were absolutely wonderful. It was like being connected to the modern world again after a 100 years of sleep.
Monday, our last day in London, we went back to the British Museum this time to see the looted Elgin Marbles and the purloined collection of Greek art. While I am certainly on the side of the Greeks as to where Greek art belongs, the English collectors like Elgin did a real service to the world and the Geeks by conserving the art and putting into a cultural context with other achievements of human beings. The biggest threat, however, seemed to be other English collectors, who didn’t have the same financial resources as Lord Elgin, so instead of transporting the entire statue, would simply cut off the head and take that.
The biggest difficulty with our museum jag is that one can only see so much at one time with any sense of appreciation. Toni spoke with a Spanish woman who was living in London. She and her husband decided that they could only really see one room (say the Etruscan collection) at a time., so they had been methodically going through the museum one exhibit at a time for over a year and still had not seen everything. This really speaks to the cultural density of England and the rest of Europe.
We are now on an Icelandair flight winging our way to New York and a visit to my sister who lives near Rochester. The biggest surprise in England was just how nice and kind people have been to us on our trip. Given my problems with my back, I am now using a walker when I have to walk any distance or stand up for a long time looking at exhibits. After almost killing myself last year with a regular walker which is designed primarily for indoor use, I purchased a Swedish walker that allows me to travel over all types of terrain and run down small children. It works very well but is a problem when I am confronted by stairs. The sight of my walker was like a magnet to the Brits with almost every person running over to help us manage the walker and our luggage. It was very impressive.
But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. The English are just as screwed up as we are. In conversations with the locals, there has been a readily identifiable streak of racism, sexism and prejudice. For example, one person we met explained that the problem with England was that there were just too many people nowadays. It was not too hard to understand what he considered to be the extra, undesirable types.
In fairness, I should note that almost all of the people we met in London were in fact immigrants from Indian, Pakistan, other parts of the E.U. Along the canals, we meet a number of former Londoners. Indeed, the countryside was overwhelmingly white, while London was extremely diverse with a lot of youthful energy. I cannot think that this division is a good thing for the future.
Then too, I think that social class is a much bigger thing in England and Europe that it is in the States or at least is something that is more apparent. If you ever get the chance to see the Seven Up Series by Michael Apted, you’ll get a much better understanding about how class works in England. The series explored the lives and ambitions of 14 seven-year old English children and then came back every seven years later to see how they were doing. The last installment looked at the subjects at age 56. The kids who were so bright and promising as a seven year old ended in jobs and situations that were more influenced by their social class than by their apparent intelligence and imaginations.
It is too bad that we don’t have an equivalent series on Americans. I think that we would see patterns that were even more disturbing, given the contrast between our idealization of the American Way of Life and reality. Despite our beliefs and hopes, the US now has much less social and economic mobility than it had in he last 70 years.
