Heather Anne

If you have been around our little circle of the Internet for any length of time, you will have no doubt found yourself wholly smitten with the guy who comments simply as "You can call me "Sir.'" His actual name isn't sir, but I cannot reveal his secret identity as we are both in the Global Superhero Alliance. I have been hounding Sir to start a blog for over a year, and until he does I am forcing him to post here. So give him so love, y'all. He's the awesomest of awesomes.
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Heather Anne made two requests: Spill about my recent return to England and provide a guest post for her blog. Because I am nothing if not an efficient killer, I will now kill two birds with a single stone in the form of eight paragraphs.

The back of my house faces East and on Memorial Day of last year I added a deck, because I knew how to do it and figured that it was as good a thing to add as anything else. Beyond the mighty oak that dominates my back yard, past the giant phallus-shaped building that commands the skyline of my little burgh, and across the sea sits the frequent destination of my thoughts as I sit on said deck. For brevity's sake, I will simply say that the Isles and I have a long history. It’s an affection born in Scotland, cultivated in Ireland, and given root during the four years that I lived in England, just outside of Cambridge. When I moved over yonder, I bought a cottage that was over 3x older than America in a village so small that one of the first things the defacto mayor asked me was whether or not I was willing to be a bartender in the pub a couple nights a week. This was the moment that, had the country been a woman, I would've dropped to a knee and asked for her hand in marriage.

From my little slice of heaven, it was a 1-hour drive to the northeasternmost point of the London Underground, followed by another hour on the 'tube' to the center of the city. I made this trip nearly every week for 4 years in order to satisfy the classical music freak that lives inside of my head. As a result, I learned my way around the city well enough to give tourists directions and discovered a side of it that's lessened its ability to intimidate, and therefore made subsequent visits much more enjoyable. Long before this, however, my first trip to the UK was to Scotland, where I studied (played golf and drank) for a semester. In what remain the five happiest months of my life, I didn't talk to a single American and, in the process made enduring friendships with Irish, Scottish, and English types that now constitute places where I can lay my weary head throughout the kingdom. I returned annually until finally moving to England in 2001, left in December 2005, returned in June 2006 for a wedding, then ... nothing. Two years was far too long of a separation, so I decided to take my 'stimulous' check and use it to 'stimulate' the economy of a foreign country.

To the uninitiated, London is a violent assault on the senses. It can be a wee bit overwhelming because it seems physically and mentally impossible to see and do everything that the city offers without going insane or being run down by the occasional bus or taxi. In four years, I still didn't see or do all I'd wanted. What I did realize was that the places really worth finding were the ones away from the glut of humanity. Having said this, I have never tired of spending time in the National Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, and the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but this trip was more about seeing the friends and recharging the batteries rather than fighting crowds in the tourism apocalypse that begins in May and extends through September.

So, I found myself returning to the grounds of Fulham Palace, former home to the Bishop of London, which is situated maybe 1/4 mile off of the main Fulham road and overlooks the Thames. At one end of the botanical gardens that surround the grounds, near Putney Bridge, is a church with a small cemetery, the oldest of whose inhabitants (whose markers I could read) expired in the late 1700s. Adjacent to the church is an immaculate little area with a war memorial along with some benches that look out over the river. It's the only place that I've ever found in London consistently without traffic of any kind. You get the occasional dog being walked, but neither the dogs nor their owners tend to say much, so the mood is rarely broken.

For me, then, a key aspect of enjoying London requires reacquainting myself with such places and letting the day slip by. Admittedly, though, the major reason I enjoy the city anymore, aside from its proximity to the friends, is simply because it's surrounded by the rest of England. I find myself missing the country more every year. And it's not that our two societies are all that different, really; were you to look upon the US and the UK from on high you would see basically the same cultures saturated by reality TV, remarkably unhealthy lifestyles, and a government and media that exploits people's fear in order to further the cause du jour. There are, however, two aspects of the kingdom that make even my cold cynical heart melt.

Pubs. In my little village, I knew nearly everyone because families would all congregate at the pub. Kids, dogs, grandmothers, crazy aunts with the wacky hair. All there. All welcome. You can't buy that kind of social atmosphere and potential for endless entertainment. This is in stark contrast to the states where neighbors may not even know each other. The sense of community inherent in a majority of UK pub culture is so extraordinarily refreshing to an American such as myself that coming back to bars with Bud Light perpetually on tap and screens on every wall showing sporting events running the gamut from badminton to arm wrestling is enough to make a body sit on a deck with a cocktail, staring into the looming dusk toward a far-off shore. If you provide me with a quiet pub on a rainy day, stocked with a dart board, a fireplace, a dog, and Guinness on tap (and not that 'extra cold' crap, either; whoever the hell is responsible for such asshattery should be shaved and beaten in front of their home), you'll throw me into fits of convulsive glee.

The dry sense of humor. It is the land of spotted dick and pubs named The Cock and Bulls (with the associated picture of a rooster surrounded by cattle, as if trying to assure pedestrians that this is the scene the name meant to conjure). It’s only in the company of British friends that I laugh until I cry. There’s comedic timing and an appreciation of the absurd that is so perfect that it almost seems unfair to other cultures. The obvious illustrations of such absurdity are Monty Python, Father Ted, the Blackadder series that made the pre-Bean Rowan Atkinson famous, and the original version of The Office. It does the heart good, though, to see such things in person and it was the Friday of my arrival in a rather large pub that a live band played power ballads to a throng of dancing professionals still in their suits from the day’s labor. Surreal arrived when two storm-troopers, Darth Vader, and a cheerleader walked in (together, naturally), at which time the band stopped what they’d started to play and broke into Smells Like Teen Spirit. The storm-troopers started head-butting each other to the music, the cheerleader did the hop-skip pom-pom thing (as they do), and Darth Vader, who actually turned out to be a short woman wearing a bandanna and leather chaps, started doing the ‘mashed potato’. All while surrounded by men and women wearing (to varying degrees) suits. Now, aside from the faux pas inherent in the Dark Lord of the Sith practicing such an inappropriate dance during a grunge anthem, one need only pause to take in the scene, while remembering that the British are generally a reserved people, to see the comedic ramifications. I don’t do it justice. I assure you: It was epic.

There are much deeper truths behind my affections for the kingdom, but I’ll save them for another time and another web site. I need to learn how to reel myself in on the word count before I tackle such subjects. As it is, I believe this sufficiently killed not only the two birds previously mentioned, but all other wildlife unlucky enough to be within range.