When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations?
From "The Lion and the Unicorn"
by George Orwell, 1941
It took me twenty-seven years before I finally returned to England to visit my Mother's family. I was brought there by my family for the first time when I was seven year old. The highlight of that trip was being personally fingerprinted by a Scotland Yard detective. Man, that was cool -- much more fun than watching the guards change at Buckingham Palace. I returned again with my Mother and my sisters when I was fifteen. That visit took place in the wake of John Lennon's shocking murder. That was not a very happy time for me. My Mom is from the city of Birkenhead which is just across the River Mersey from Liverpool. The Beatles landmark tour I embarked on for a few days in late December 1980 was a very bitter one indeed. I remember thinking how dismal the weather was, how the sun almost never came out the entire time, and how much I missed home. The food was bland and when you ordered a burger and fries, they charged you for the ketchup.
But I aways remembered England by the way the cities smelled. It was a burned brick and petrol odor that seemed to emanate from the very streets and buildings. It gave me a timeless feeling. It made me think of gigantic locomotive trains and towering double decker buses. The England I remembered was a patchwork quilt of green and browns, of hedgerows, dark brick row-houses, cobble-stone streets and narrow back alley outhouses. After the first week of our visit, I realized that, for the most part, England hasn't changed all that much. But we were not at all happy to see McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks in almost every city we visited. Yet the English still like to keep thinks low-key. And they cherish their history and take pride in their beautiful old houses and buildings. They don't like hideous billboards everywhere like we do, they prefer to drive on the wrong side of the road, they don't mind security cameras mounted in every corner of every big city, and they aren't afraid of a little nudity and profanity on the tube. Oh, and the biggest shocker of them all -- they've got Charles Darwin on their ten pound note!
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