The Book of a Thousand and One Teatimes

Martha and Me

2008-06-30T16:36:00.004+01:00

Right: DIY Queen and Chia-Bot - Photo by Jill Greenberg for Wired

A few days ago Martha Stewart, American media icon, was denied entrance into the U.K. This – according to a lawyer unaffiliated with Martha who commented on the case – was “bonkers.” As this worthy observed, and as I can personally attest from my last two experiences being allowed to land in England, it’s all down to the individual who looks at your passport. I looked suspicious enough to be detained for six hours in 2007, and unsuspicious enough to be passed through in 30 seconds in 2008. The legal expert commenting on the case confirmed my own suspicions: it’s all down to the luck of the draw.

What Martha needed was the luck to draw the same passport control officer who allowed convicted rapist Mike Tyson to visit the U.K. after he served his sentence. The U.K. is officially opposed to "the entry to the UK of anyone convicted of "serious criminal offences abroad," but apparently that offense didn't qualify to keep the champ out of England.

It would be one thing if lying to a government prosecutor was a crime held to be more heinous than rape on either continent, but as the lawyer chappie remarked in his comments, the crime that was worth a whopping five months in a federal lockup in the States (which Martha did while knitting sweaters for all her fellow inmates) is in any case not a criminal offense here.

So there would appear to be no clear guidelines for deciding who constitutes a threat to the public welfare, which is presumed to be the guiding principle in either allowing an alien to land or putting them on the next plane back to their airport of origin. A conviction for rape can be overlooked, but one for lying – not perjury, I’d like to point out, but lying in the course of an investigation into insider trading – may not, depending on who’s doing the looking.

In my own case, not appearing to have a satisfactory (to someone) reason for coming to London to live for six months may have aroused enough suspicion for detention. But we might want to consider that the answers that marked me a possible threat to public welfare in 2007 were never uttered in 2008 because those questions were not asked. The questions that were asked were the same initial questions as in 2007, roughly: “Where are you going?” “London” “How long will you be here?” “Six months.” and “Do you have family here?” “No.” And while last year those answers resulted in six hours confinement at Her Majesty’s pleasure while getting photographed, fingerprinted, searched, and multiply interviewed, this year they resulted in Stamp, stamp, “Next!” A perverse part of me wanted to ask why I wasn’t a threat this time, but I clapped my hand over its mouth and walked through the “Nothing to Declare” line into Terminal 4 with my jaw still hanging open just a bit. Finally I got my wits about me enough to manage a mental fist-pump and a silent “Yessssss!”

So Martha, though I may be of the opinion that you’re slightly pointless, you’re a highly-successful slightly-pointless multi-millionaire who emerged from a stint behind bars with your public reputation very little affected by what most Americans seemed to think of as a more than slightly-pointless prosecution and conviction. Publicly you maintained your sense of humor and your sense of self, and turned something that could have killed your career deader than Caesar into a sort of triumph, so I doubt you’re going to let a few of Her Majesty’s customs coppers take the shine off your life; heck, most of them can’t even knit a sweater.

The Last TV Post

2008-06-26T16:18:00.004+01:00

Television – in any nation – is not exactly the most fascinating subject, but it is a certain reflection of its culture, and in case you’ve conceived from my previous post that British TV is all about painfully-polite, tea-sipping Brits making their Yank cousins look like a bunch of Bud-swilling barbarians, I’d like to put the entire subject to bed – so to speak – with this post.

Lots of Americans (many of whom actually are Bud-swilling barbarians) think of the British as prudes, but after having been exposed to a limited amount of British evening TV as a substitute for having friends, I’ve come to suspect this is a classic case of projection. I’ve seen things at 10 pm on the BBC that I’d never have been exposed to on the roughly analogous U.S. broadcast networks at any hour, and what I have not observed are vociferous bands of picketers protesting it. In the States we have decency groups counting how many times SpongeBob holds hands with his friend Patrick, or whether Tinky-Winky should be seen by three-year-olds.

Even confining my informal survey to the past few weeks I can recall a documentary on men who have sex with their cars – and other people’s when they can get away with it – and one on women who have sex with fences, bridges, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, to name only a few willing partners. Sheer educational value notwithstanding, in the States this would have been strictly late-night cable, and one reason for that is the FCC.

As I understand it, the Federal Communications Commission was established 80 years ago or so to determine who would be licensed to broadcast along a limited spectrum of AM radio waves. Over the years, the commission became the Decency Police of American broadcasting, holding its powers over the heads of announcers who might utter words which shouldn’t be heard by decent Americans. Except, perhaps, at home or in the schoolyard. Broadcast is a slowly-cooling dinosaur in American entertainment, and the FCC is starting to draw flies, though they’re also drawing federally-funded salaries. But they’re not the disease; they’re more like the symptom. The Brits got rid of their Puritans, who survived the crossing to become…us.

So you’ve really read this far to find out about men who shag their cars, haven’t you? I knew it. The BBC documentary focused on two American men, a young man from the Midwest whom you wouldn’t be able to tell from your cousin Fred, and a middle-aged man from – ready for this, folks in Seattle? – Yelm, Washington. The younger man has friends and a life and other interests, but the bloke from Yelm seems pretty much content to stay home and pork his classic VW. He’d be only a little out of place at a science fiction convention, or perhaps less. Despite his rather hazy notion of what other people are like (can doctors transplant mirror neurons yet?) I’m pretty certain he’d never have allowed an American documentary crew to tape him rhapsodizing about the exhaust pipes of cars on the highway, or drooling (and worse) all over a Trans-Am in a motel parking lot. Yelm is a small town.

The following week’s doco explored women who can only respond sexually to objects. No, not those objects, but things the rest of us might consider rather impersonal, asexual, and even public, like the Eiffel Tower. One of the women the show followed had married La Tour Eiffel in a private ceremony, but they’d been unable to consummate their love due to all the bloody tourists. Fortunately she has a liberal attitude towards these things, and has been busily shagging bridges and fences in the meantime. She had a mad affair with her bow, but it cooled, and so did her archery career.

It occurred to me that what might be operating in all cases – NEWS FLASH! – was an inability to relate to other human beings. Most of the people profiled were technically virgins and had no interest in sex as we (well, as I…) know it. One of them had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and the rest had not, but almost all seemed to me to be out on that end of the neurological spectrum. None knew there were others like them until they went looking on the Internet. Now they’re starting to link up, and even to share lovers.

“Ten P.M. is the watershed hour,” a gentleman told us when a visiting American friend commented on the adult content on the BBC, which is, for any Yank barbarians who don’t know, a government-controlled-and-funded entity. “It’s assumed children will be in bed after that.” Well, if they’re not, they’re getting an education I was denied in my FCC-controlled childhood in the Puritan States of America. And if they happen to like boinking cars and bridges, they now know how to google up some friends.

COPS in Essex

2008-06-05T10:28:00.004+01:00

Right: Fridays, 8 p.m. GMT

So there's this show on BBC 5 called Police Interceptors. Among the terrestrial channels BBC 5 is the one that runs American crime dramas like CSI, NCIS, and Law & Order, but this is a homegrown show about a homegrown high-speed police interception units. To be fair, I've only seen part of one episode, but I've gotta say it seemed rather typically British to me that it concluded with the Essex interceptor unit pulling over a young woman who was driving without insurance. In addition to an automatic six points on her license, they impounded her car. The excitement was very nearly unbearable.

Now I know the Essex interceptor unit regularly bag drug dealers and other major criminal types, but the fact that they chose to focus on the plight of an ‘Essex girl’ – over here Essex girl jokes occupy same evolutionary niche as ‘blonde’ jokes in the States – illustrates a major difference between U.S. and British shows that deal with crime. In Yank crime drama a suspect who protests his innocence nearly always turns out to be guilty after the cops leave the interview and talk about what a liar they think he is, and then go out and prove it. British TV cops are far more likely to argue that the suspect seems genuine, so they’d better go out and find the real perp, and far more often that turns out to be the case. In general – and admittedly based on an incomplete knowledge of the shows involved – American TV cops seem to me to focus more on the dark side of human nature than their British counterparts.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked: “If all T.V. shows about the police went of the air, and instead we had an equal number of T.V. shows about landlords, how would this change the average American reality-tunnel?”

Of course British TV’s already done landlords, from Basil Fawlty to Peggy Mitchell of EastEnders. They’re okay with that. And the majority of the crime drama on offer seems to be imported from the States: those same endless series with either strings of initials or Ice T, where the majority of civilians turn out to be perpetrators of one kind or another. It's difficult for me to imagine shows like this coming out of the U.K.

One would hope not too much of that attitude will rub off on our British friends, but then the Brits have already embraced Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so there may be no hope for them at this point.

Where's Henry?

2008-05-07T16:52:00.006+01:00

Right: A door behind which ghosts have been seen

After a whirlwind bus tour of London with Michael Watson on Saturday, Sunday was reserved for a more targeted outing to Hampton Court Palace, home of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, among other notable Englishmen and women, most of the latter having been married to Henry at one time or another. Here Elizabeth was kept under house arrest by her sister, after whom a famous drink is named (hint: it's not the Martini). Here royal children were born, christened, and died. Here yeoman guards stood watch in the Watching Room, and tilted in the tiltyard, where I munched an egg and cress sandwich. History's layers run deep around here: from Cardinal Wolsey to my sandwich, a distance of five hundred years.

Thomas Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace - not with his own hands, you may be sure - and was wont to say it belonged to Henry when people complimented him on its grandeur, as it was widely held to be more beautiful, and its visitors more influential, than the royal court. So when Wolsey failed to obtain the divorce Henry needed from Catherine of Aragon in order to produce a male heir to inherit his throne, Henry took him at his word, booted him out, and took residence. There he lived with Ann Boleyn and his subsequent wives. The one who outlived him, Catherine Parr, he married there in the Chapel Royal with its fantastic golden-starred blue ceiling.

The house goes on for acres, and when that's through there are even more acres of garden and "wilderness" - actually another garden. It would require a couple of days to thoroughly tour it all, and though we were there most of a day, a look at the map shows a lot we didn't see.

One thing we didn't see was ghosts, but members of the staff claim to have seen someone on the other side of the door above (one of the staff entrances) who then faded away. Spooky...

Now Hinckley sings its siren call once more, and tomorrow I'm away on that Nottingham train for Jedi Master School, Part Deux. More adventures as they happen.

Once I couldn’t even SPELL Hypnotheripest…

2008-05-02T00:02:00.006+01:00

…and now I are one.

Right: Look into my eyes. Do it. Just kidding.

I just finished up a hypnotherapy certification course with Michael Watson, a delightful teacher I’ll be meeting up with again this coming weekend for a couple days of sightseeing around London. I’ve been doing Hypnosis by the seat of my pants for a while now, and some formal training could hardly go amiss, though I’m not sure one could call any training with Michael formal, exactly; his idea of gravity is something one puts on potatoes.

So eight delegates, a couple of lovely assistants from the Salad Ltd family, and a trance dog (if your course does not include one of these, ask for your money back) explored the many varieties of trance at the Hinckley Island Hotel, which now has an entirely new set of anchors to add to the ones I aquired there in 2003, though the fact that the upholstery in the dining room remains unchaged managed to fire off a few of those as well.

Now I’m off for St Pancras International (It's a rail station! It's a shopping Mall!) to buy tickets for my next training adventure, as the fact that I have a U.S. billing address for my debit card is more confusion than East Midlands Trains’ ticket system can safely handle , so I can’t buy them online and pick them up the day of my journey. It’s the little things that make life interesting.

When it’s not the big things.

Oh, Lord, Stuck in Hinckley Again

2008-04-21T12:41:00.005+01:00

(with apologies to John Fogerty)

Right: Hinckley and environs

After a lovely Thursday evening out with Michael Perez, formerly virtual mate from NLP Connections, I spent Friday with Kate van Loon (also formerly virtual), the world's sparkliest master change-maker. I arrived back at my room to an email from the folks at Salad, asking me if I could come up to Hinckley the following day to assist on a two-day course. My immediate guess was that all the other candidates for assistant had been run over by busses, and I've gotta admit I was grateful for that.

There were no trains running early enough to get me there in time for the start of the morning session, but Elsted House had a room left for both nights, so two hours later I was on my way to St Pancras International, bound for darkest Leicestershire.

I do not claim that Hinckley is less than an absolutely charming place to be, nor could I; my knowledge begins with the rail station and ends with the Hinckley Island Hotel, a conference center inexplicably plunked down miles from the nearest traces of civilization. Somewhere in the middle is a very nice B&B, and a Texaco station where one can buy egg and cress sandwiches. Check back with me in August for the number of egg and cress sandwiches I've consumed in my room in Hinckley. You'll be amazed. I'm amazed that convenience stores run by Hindus don't carry a greater variety of vegetarian food, but maybe that's just me.

The course was brilliant, I met and re-met wonderful people, I got to direct the testimonial videos at the end, which reminded me of my old Public TV days, and unlike the previous weekend, I wasn't actually stuck somewhere trains weren't running, did not stand out in the cold for hours on end, missed no busses, and did not have to spend the night in a Best Western in Leicester. What more could one ask?

Now I'm taking a day off from trains and training, but tomorrow it's back on the rails. Yes, Hinckley beckons me again for a further eight days of getting my brain tinkered with. Ros, my landlady at Elsted House, wonders why I don't just move in.

I've considered it.

There's No Place Like... Hinckley?

2008-04-10T15:59:00.011+01:00

Right: Ted comes with the room

Yes, dear ones, tonight's post is coming to you direct from Hinckley. Hinckley, Leicestershire, that is - former hosiery capital of England, gateway to Rugby and Nuneaton. I've landed here for my next round of NLP training with the nice folks at Salad, Ltd. I'm staying in Elsted House, a nice little B&B that furnishes each guest room with its own Teddy Bear. How English is that? Earlier a man walked by outside with a bulldog. I'm pretty sure they hired him to impress the Yank tourists. We're easy.

I've been here before, actually, for the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) a few years back, but then I only saw the rail station, the hotel, and the inside of a taxi. This trip I've already been up to the Texaco station for an Egg & Cress sandwich, and in Hinckley, my friends, it doesn't really get any better than that.

So now the window is dark, I'm sleepy, and I'm about to tuck myself between those cool white sheets, hug my furry roommate to my chest, and drift away. More tourism excitement as it happens. Don't touch that dial!

“Terminal” is one word for it…

2008-04-08T16:36:00.005+01:00

Right: London Heathrow Terminal Five: the Great White Despair

It’s big, it’s beautiful in a super-mega-industrial sort of way, and it was supposed to be the answer to British Airways passenger prayers for wide-open spaces, shorter queuing times, and the latest in fully-automated baggage-handling. What it’s turned into, however, is a £4.3 billion homeless shelter, currently crowded with passengers sleeping on departure lounge benches and waiting on the tarmac in excess of four hours inside planes that never take off.

Twenty-eight thousand suitcases went walkabout when the baggage system crashed almost immediately after the terminal’s royal launch on 27 March, and at least five thousand of them have never returned home. And baggage continues to be a major issue (not that that’s exactly a news flash to BA). Because the system required almost no-one to operate it, there was almost no-one trained to take up the slack when things went south.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and as of yesterday British Airways was out £85 million in compensation, including the cost of renting up every hotel room and room for rent they could get their hands on for stranded passengers. And there’s no end in sight.

As for me, I have both my suitcase and a roof over my head (albeit in Brentford for the time being), more than many recent London travellers can claim. On my way to Heathrow last week, thankfully to the shamefully outdated Terminal 4 where the baggage carousels actually have baggage on them, my fellow passengers and myself were offered travel vouchers for filling out complaint forms about malfunctioning onboard entertainment. I don’t expect to see my voucher anytime soon, especially if BA have automated their complaint system.

Isn’t it so?

2008-04-03T12:18:00.002+01:00

New directions – good until 1 October 2008:

21 Charleville Road
London
W14 9JJ
UK

I left Seattle on Tuesday 1 April with my usual mixture of sadness and exhiliration and other more complex emotional ingredients. The proposed 2008 trip to London had become somewhat less nervewracking when I’d heard from Ana, my landlady from the Charleville Road house, that she’d rent me a room in her family home while I sorted out permanent digs. I hadn’t wanted to spend nearly £300 on a hotel for 5 days and hope I could round up a place to live in that time after shelling out another £80 in letting agent’s fees. And given the general snafu that is Heathrow Terminal 5 these days, hotel rooms are next to impossible to get anyhow, because the airlines are buying them up for the passengers they’ve stranded, sans luggage, sans destination, sans everything, to paraphrase Master Jaques (and Master Shakespeare). Flights cancelled today: 32. Pieces of luggage vanished into the aether since the baggage system crashed: 29,000 and counting. Heads will roll.

I got in a bit before noon (to Terminal 4, thankfully) on the 2nd after a perfectly nice flight, and spent a whole 30 seconds in Passport Control. That’s roughly 1/720th of the time it took last year just to be allowed entry into the country. Given that experience I had come prepared with emails from the training company, course schedules, and a return ticket printout. I needed none of it. Then my luggage miraculously appeared on the carousel within two minutes of exiting customs, and two minutes after that I was in a taxi headed for Brentford. “That’s how I want the rest of it to go,” I told myself – “Just like that: Effortless.”

When I got to the house in Boston Manor Ana told me that two days ago a tenant in the Charleville Road house gave notice unexpectedly, so I’ll have a permanent room there on the 13th for the duration. As Ana says, “Isn’t it so that you plan for something and it doesn’t happen like you plan it, but it happens better than you planned it?” I couldn’t agree more.

I’m Already Gone

2007-09-14T20:07:00.000+01:00

My strategy for leaving England used to be to save my packing for the day before the flight. One memorable trip saw me throwing stuff into suitcases as the taxi was waiting downstairs to take me to the airport.

This time it’s been different in more ways than one. My baggage allowance coming over in March was three pieces of checked luggage. Flying home from Heathrow, British Air are restricting me to two. There are interesting problems of folding not only space, but an entire extra suitcase. The pain I always feel at my departure, which used to be sudden and sharp, is being drawn out over several extra days, and I still have Tuesday and actually leaving to look forward to, much as one looks forward to the next jolt of pain from a bad knee.

I have felt myself getting closer to Seattle and the folks I left behind there almost since the moment I took my luggage out of the cupboard. Such is the power of symbols on the mind. Strangely, this has not made me more distant from where I am. I see everything that’s become familiar to me, and suddenly I remember that it’s actually strange. It’s like having eyes in two realities, and it’s exceedingly weird.

Since I already know I’ll be back next year – I’ve got training lined up from April till September – I’m disinclined to leave all my household stuff for the next tenant, only to have to buy it again in six months. Since Ana has offered me a rental room in her house in Boston Manor while I’m looking for digs next spring (that’s if I can’t move back in to this house), I’m pretty sure she’ll agree to store a couple of Tesco bags full of things in one of the houses. Having a Brita jug and some seasonings to come back to makes me feel less like a visitor and more like I might almost belong.

But that’s neither here nor there to London. Just as London didn’t notice when I arrived, it will probably take neither pleasure nor pain at my leaving. I am not even a blip on London’s radar. Sometimes I wonder why I bother, but never for long. I know why.

So here’s to Tuesday. Here’s to leaving one life and returning to another, and to familiar and beloved faces at the airport. Here’s to bending time, as one does going west, so that a 9-hour flight will take only an hour and a half by the clockface. When they can apply that magic to the check-in queue at Heathrow they’ll really be on to something.

Au revoir, London. See you in dreams.

Land of the (Smoke-) Free

2007-08-19T14:09:00.000+01:00

England went smoke-free in all public and work spaces about six weeks ago. For most of us that was a banner day. The process of arriving at that day (1 July 2007) was not easy and not free of strong emotion and strong beliefs on both sides.

Celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the more famous anti-ban campaigners, argued that “Pubs are not health clubs…” and “Death awaits you whether or not you smoke.” True enough on both counts, Mr Hockney, without having jack to do with the subject at hand. Of course there’ll be a few people who disagree (still!) that smoke is harmful, and they’ll probably also argue that the fact that the NHS estimates it’s been shelling out £1.7 billion per annum on treating smoking-related illness (often, it must be said, unsuccessfully), doesn’t mean those people actually sickened and in some cases died because they or people around them smoked. Whatever. Many of us used to believe (spoiler alert!) in Santa Claus, too. Now we're adults and we know better.

And then there are people who believe that smoke is harmful when they take it into their own lungs, but not to the people around them. See above.

In 2004, I remember being amazed and amused to learn that Ireland would have a smoking ban in effect before England. The Irish seemed even fonder of their smoke than the English, but there they were cleaning up the air. In fact, not only the Republic of Ireland, but also Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all had bans in effect before England.

But now it’s official. Loopholes are built in for some bus shelters (depending on your local council) and phone boxes, and smoking has another year to run in psychiatric wards, until 1 July 2008. Then you’d better watch out for a lot of really cranky British psychos.

Unlike the state of Washington, where I live when I’m not here, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about smoking in doorways, so as I pass by pubs these days, the doorways are often crowded with smokers obeying the letter of the law. There are metal boxes on a lot of lamp-posts for depositing fag-ends, and I’ve actually witnessed smokers using those, though dropping them on the pavement is still more the rule than the exception in some places.

And what of public opinion? It all depends who you talk to, of course. Some smokers interviewed by the newspapers and TV say they don’t mind the ban – “It makes it nicer for non-smokers.” “I’ve been smoking a lot less.” Some non-smokers don’t seem to get the point – “I don’t smoke myself, but I think the smoking ban spoils the atmosphere.” Of course that person is 21; she may someday have the sense to be grateful for the extra years she’s been given a chance at.

And while few will still argue that smoking doesn’t kill, we’ve already had a tragic case of it contributing to murder. On 23 July at a nightclub in Fulham Broadway - just south of where I live - James Oyebola, a retired boxer, asked some customers to comply with the law and put out their cigarettes. One of them shot him in the face as he left the club. His family took him off life-support four days later, after he was declared brain-dead.

I’d like to remind any Americans out there how rare firearm deaths are in the U.K. Unlike our own country, gun crime over here is less than 0.5% of violent crime and less than 0.01% of total crime. If you adjusted for population the U.S. would still have 34 times the U.K.’s number of gunshot homicides, according to crimeinfo.org.uk., and that statistic doesn’t mention those who are shot, but don’t subsequently die of their wounds. So a guy getting shot to death for any reason is headline-worthy, top-news-story-worthy, even in a city the size of London. For the reason to be a request to put out a cigarette makes it that much more horrifying. For it to have happened in easy walking distance of my house makes me even sadder than I might feel otherwise, as though I owned some part of the tragedy. I probably heard the sirens that night, and wondered what was going on.

So cigarettes are bad, o-kay? Let’s be grateful if we don’t smoke ’em, and grateful if we live somewhere smoking ’em is banned in public. While we’re at it, let’s be grateful for no good reason other than feeling gratitude. Peace out.

Still Learning After All These Years

2007-08-03T16:00:00.000+01:00

Right: TFT Simplified

While I was on my NLP training this last spring I chanced to witness a remarkable thing. A few of the delegates were out to dinner with one of the course assistants, Kevin Laye, an NLP master practitioner with a practice in Harley Street who's also a certified trainer of Thought Field Therapy. TFT works by tapping the start-points of acupuncture meridians to alleviate a number of physical and emotional problems. I'd already heard some interesting things about it; a friend of mine had used it to instantly eliminate someone’s post-surgical pain, so I already had the idea you could do cool things if you knew this stuff.

As we sat down to dinner one of my companions, Stephanie, told me that Kevin had recently treated her using TFT. She'd been suffering for some time from myaesthenia gravis, a serious condition with a dim prognosis. I'd only met her that day, but she was as full of fun and energy as anyone I'd ever seen, and she assured me that less than a month before she'd been more or less bedridden. I was impressed; this TFT stuff was even more interesting than I thought.

Another of our party - Elizabeth - had found walking to the restaurant quite painful. She suffered from a spinal condition related to an old injury, and her doctors had assured her it was all downhill from here. She dragged one leg behind her as she walked, and she told me recently that the pain had been so bad at that point that she would walk along hoping no-one she was with would talk to her, because it took all her concentration just to get through the next step.

So after dinner Kevin remarked that Elizabeth seemed to be holding a lot of tension in her shoulders, and he did something that fixed that. She felt better immediately, and told us about her condition, never mentioning the pain, but that was evident to anyone who'd been paying attention. So Kevin did another treatment on her – total time two or three minutes for both. Then he suggested she go look at her reflection in the restaurant door, 'cause her face had entirely transformed, and she looked at least ten years younger than she had walking in.

A moment later someone said "Where's Elizabeth?" and I turned around to see her sprinting down the block. When she reached the end she turned around and ran back again. That's the point at which I turned to Kevin and said "I've GOT to learn to do that."

And that's how I came to be at Kevin's TFT training in Nottingham in June, getting certified again (hey, it happens...). I've had some successes since, though nothing to rival Kevin's dinner-table miracles. One of the most fascinating things about it, to me, is that no-one can explain why it works. That’s not to say they don’t try, but the explanations sound (to my ear at least) like twaddle. Those of you who know me know I have a low tolerance for twaddle. Just reading an explanation or description wouldn’t convince me TFT necessarily had any merit as a healing modality, but I’m not inclined to deny direct experience. Kevin is a physicist by training, and if you ask him how it works he’ll tell you “It works very well.”

Elizabeth has a slight limp, but she's free of pain, full of energy, and making her doctors scratch their heads. Stephanie, too, is still the picture of health. When her illness was at its worst she was making plans to put her 3-year-old daughter up for adoption, since she could no longer do the simplest things for her, and there was no-one else to turn to. Now she and her daughter run around and do things together, and she has a wonderful new man in her life, and plans for a healthy future.

Before I head back for Seattle in September I'll be taking another training with Kevin, this time in his method for helping people stop smoking. He has a very high success rate with a combination of TFT, NLP, and hypnosis, and he strongly advises his students to go forth and make a living helping people.

So if you see me out in Pioneer Square in Seattle dragging clients off 1st Avenue and into my office, you'll know that I've taken Kevin's advice. Hmmm... "Send me your phobics, your depressives, your hacking smokers yearning to breathe free..." Yeah, what the hell? I just might.

Extraordinarily Close to the Dear Departed

2007-07-21T16:19:00.000+01:00

Right: Angel and friend, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Today was the annual Open Day at Brompton Cemetery, a Victorian necropolis with more than 200,000 residents, all of whom were unobtrusively present for the games, handicrafts, organ music, face-painting, and bouncy castle, as well as tours related to various interests. “This is tree number 26 – lovely cones…” I overheard on my way past the sparsely-attended Cemetery Trees tour. I am not making this up.

I invested £2 in the once-a-year opening of the Brompton Catacombs (or catacoombs, as one says locally). I had walked over from the neighboring borough of Hammersmith and Fulham under glowering skies – the perfect light for photographing graves – so I barely squeaked in to the tour.

Apparently there was a certain amount of status involved with where Victorian ladies and gentlemen were interred, and when the Brompton Cemetery opened for business in 1841 they offered, in addition to earth burial, the option of spending eternity on a shelf. This had been popular on the continent, and the cemetery planners seemed to think it was going to take off like a house afire. Plans were made for enough catacomb space to store around 100,000 customers at luxury prices, but in the end less than 500 bodies ended up in Brompton’s upscale burial suites, and the remaining catacombs were never excavated.

Our guide led a dozen hardy 21st century folk down a stairway and into a narrow brickwork hallway lined with shelves holding coffins in various states of decomposition. Lest that word conjure images of rotting Victorians, you’ll probably want to be reassured that each body was first put into a plain wooden coffin, which was then placed in a 9-lbs-per-square-foot lead box, and hermetically sealed by a plumber. Sometimes a lighted candle was left inside to assure a vacuum after sealing, and disinterred catacomb corpses have been found to be perfectly desiccated and quite well-preserved even after more than a century.

The lead coffin was in turn covered by one of wood or metal which might be decorated with brass fittings or upholstered in leather or cloth and sometimes further embellished with fancy pins. These were not mere burial caskets meant to lie unseen, these were the post-mortem boudoirs of departed loved ones, meant to be visited regularly by entire families with rugs and picnic hampers. It is these outer coverings that are in some cases moldering away to dust and ruin, exposing the lead cases beneath, with the plumber's diamond-shaped markings attesting the coffin had been properly sealed.

But even with the brick walls whitewashed as they would have been in the 19th century, and with tiny skylights – now covered over – admitting a bit of natural light, the atmosphere in the Brompton catacombs cannot have been conducive to a pleasant visit. The hallway is too narrow, the floor too damp, the dead too close for comfort. Although unworried by cold or rain, a visiting family might not have felt at home there, cheek to jowl with not only their own dear departed, but everyone else’s as well. Visits, I’m thinking, would have been brief and to the point, unlike the long summer-afternoon picnics common at ground-level gravesites. The great Brompton Catacomb scheme went belly-up.

Brompton Cemetery covers about 16.5 hectares (41 acres), and if you’re wondering how you get more than 200,000 graves into that space, the answer is, use the Y axis. Graves purchased to hold families were dug up to 24 feet deep, then filled in and re-excavated as each family member’s turn came to move in. Gravestones were filled in progressively as the plot filled.

On my way out the skies over London stopped threatening and started delivering. I was sodden when I reached home, at least partly from stopping to get the picture above, of an angel whose job it is to hold a succession of pigeons heavenward for eternity.

Boudicca Country

2007-07-18T16:22:00.000+01:00

Right: Boudicca and her daughters, Westminster

Earlier this month I went to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who starred in a blog entry from last year, Touching the Mystery. The occasion was the celebration by three expatriate Yanks and one good-natured Briton of American Independence Day (John prefers to call it “Good Riddance Day”), complete with Carolyn bravely grilling burgers and yes, Boca Burgers ™ under the patio roof in a pounding Suffolk rain. East Anglia is, John assures me, a veritable desert compared to the rest of England, but with the summer we’ve been having there’s no way to tell they get less rainfall than any other part of the island. Dineen Edwards joined us for our cool and rainy cookout (and in), and as the three of us overwhelmingly outnumbered our one Brit, victory was again assured for the Yanks.

In between celebrating quaint holiday customs of the colonials, we spent a couple of days driving about in the wonderful countryside of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, and visited even more lovely English villages than last year, including Lavenham, the best-preserved medieval village in the country. Some people here still live in 700+-year-old houses half-timbered with trees that predate the come-lately U.S.A. by half a millennium, and sometimes painted that particular English pink that originally resulted from adding ox blood to white plaster.

Along the way from somewhere to somewhere else we passed The Devil’s Dike, an earthwork stretching over 60 miles of East Anglian countryside, reputed to have been built by Boudicca while defending Norfolk from Romans. Every British schoolchild knows about Boudicca, though she’s largely unknown to Yanks except through various fictional depictions, the latest being Manda Scott’s excellent historical/fantasy series beginning with Dreaming the Eagle. East Anglia is Boudicca country, former home of the Eceni, the British tribe Boudicca was either born to or married into.

In 61 CE, when the Romans had barely begun to make a Roman province out of Brittania, Boudicca raised a formidable army of Eceni and Trinovantes, and burned the Romans’ British capital, Camulodunum (now Colchester) to the ground, taking no prisoners. She then moved on to deal with Londinium, a center of trade, finance, and taxation much as it is today. The attacks were timed to take advantage of a Roman action against the Druids in Swansea, so when Caius Suetonius Paulinus, the provincial governor, rode from Wales to Londinium to check the situation and found 100,000 angry blue Britons two days’ journey from Zone 1, he said whoever wanted could come away northwest with him, but he wasn’t sticking around. The result, which Suetonius and his inferior forces could certainly not have averted, was the first Great Fire of London, and the slaughter of all its remaining inhabitants.

Boudicca’s third target was Verulamium, a former Cattauvallani city these days known as St. Albans. She did to that place what she’d done to Colchester and London. By the time the ashes cooled the death toll for all three cities was around 70,000, and among other things the Romans had lost an entire legion – the IXth – to a rebel ambush. Boudicca excelled at ambush and surprise attack, and had gained much from the Roman assumption of military superiority.

But now Suetonius knew where she was and where she was headed – straight for him and the forces he had led into the west against the Druids. He now had the luxury of choosing his battlefield, which is something you should never let Romans do. He took the high ground just southeast of Towchester with his relatively small but technologically-superior army and waited with his back covered. Boudicca’s forces marched uphill into a slaughter that cost 80,000 rebel lives, a lesson Robert E. Lee should have heeded at Gettysburg.

Boudicca is said by Tacitus (writing 50 years after the fact) to have taken poison to avoid death at Roman hands, though no-one knows for sure what happened to her other than that she doesn’t seem to have died on that battlefield. Her grave, reputed to hold the majority of the treasures of the Eceni, has never been found. Suetonius made sure there would be no repeat of this rebellion with an ethnic cleansing of the Eceni and Trinovantes that left what is now Norfolk almost entirely unpopulated. It would take a thousand years for that part of the country to recover enough to become an important part of British economy and culture.

But recover it has, from Romans and Saxons at least. More recently they’ve had to co-exist with the U.S. Air Force, who at least don’t charge them taxes or burn their villages. It’s a lovely part of the world, and my visit next year is scheduled to include a trip to the coastal regions, which are reputed to be well worth a look. Meanwhile archeologists are still looking for Boudicca’s treasure in north-west Norfolk, which has already yielded more Iron-Age precious metal than any other part of the island. The present dig has already produced some historically-significant finds in the heart of Boudicca country, and the next few years may see the discovery – just possibly – of the lost treasure-trove of Britain’s warrior queen.

Boiled in the Tin

2007-06-15T10:42:00.000+01:00

The tube is a real experience in closeness at rush hour. You think your carriage isn't all that crowded, really, and then you stop at a station and a few people get off, and twice as many get on. And then you stop at the next station.... And only six more to go until your stop!

At some point the driver will announce – with commuters still trying to bend the laws of physics at the open doors – that the train is full, and it’s leaving now. There’ll be another one along in a few minutes, the friendly, hopeful voice says, but those damned souls on the outside know that yet another train with all carriages packed to bursting isn’t going to make any difference.

And what of the damned souls inside? Everyone wants to be near the doors so that they have a prayer of leaving at their stop, but only if people obey instructions – “Please move right down inside the carriage!” – can more be packed in. So eventually your stop is coming and there are a couple dozen bodies between you and the nearest door, and it’s time to negotiate that squishy gauntlet of flesh before the doors open and more of it packs itself inside. Pickpockets do their best work in rush hours, ’cause who can tell if sombody’s touching your butt?!

Rush hours in the summer add a certain subtle dimension of dehydration and heat-stroke on top of all that, and though it hasn't been really hot yet this summer, it will be. And when it's 90-ish F up here, it can get to 115-ish F down there, and rails deform in the heat, and trains stop in the tunnels 'cause they can't move without risking derailment (which happens), and more trains stop behind them, and people who've forgotten to bring water can be in real trouble. Did I mention there's no air-conditioning on tube trains? The ventilation comes from open vents and windows taking in air from the tunnel while the train is in motion. It would be illegal in any first-world nation to transport animals to slaughterhouses in those temperatures. Mooo!

I hear it's lots and lots worse in Tokyo, because the Japanese are better at the skill of turning off that natural human aversion to packing in with strangers long enough to get to work and back. My theory is they enter a sort of commuter trance where the rules are different, and effectively dissociate from the press of alien flesh for as long as necessary. Their trains are really crowded. The persistent thing one hears about Tokyo commuter trains is that someone can have a heart attack and die, and not fall down until the train empties out again. So let's all give thanks that we're not in Tokyo (those who are not), and meanwhile I'll be thankful that I very seldom have to travel in London during rush hour. But that doesn't mean I won't be packing water this summer, ’cause trains get caught in tunnels when it's not rush hour, too.

Crowned Heads

2007-06-07T18:44:00.000+01:00

This June marks the 54th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Now I happen to be from a country that doesn’t have hereditary rulers; our royalty are film and TV stars, hastily crowned and easily deposed. But I’m also old enough to remember the occasion of Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, and even in the U.S., the atmosphere was carnival, with 1950s matrons snapping up commemorative souvenirs, nothing else worth talking about for weeks leading up to the 2nd of June 1953, and everyone gathering around the archaic midcentury television to watch the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Communications satellites were only a gleam in Sir Arthur Clarke’s youthful eye in 1953, so I suppose we must have watched a filmed and quickly-flown-across-the-Atlantic coronation in the States, but the thrill was palpable.

I lived with my aunt and uncle at the time, and I recall that as my aunt and I settled in to witness history, my uncle found something else to occupy him for political reasons. I was far too young for rebellion in those days, but in his lifetime Ireland had fought a bloody and protracted war, outmanned and outgunned on their home turf, to win independence from English rule. They call those years “The Terror” for a reason, and it had all ended scarcely more than 30 years previously. James Patrick McKenna was immune to the borrowed glamour of British royalty.

I don’t think I gave Elizabeth II or royal families in general a great deal of thought after that, and my only childhood brush with political fame was meeting the president of Turkey, another strange childhood moment from the heart of the desert. So I was rather taken by surprise when America erupted with royalist fervor once more over the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. I mean you could only escape it by going home and barring the door and unplugging the TV. What it must have been like for the British I can only imagine, but I felt downright assaulted by it 6000 miles away, so my heart goes out to the poor Brits.

The world has changed since those innocent times – either of them – and now the vulnerable young Queen of my scratchy black-and-white images is eighty-something, and Charles has Camilla, whom it would seem no-one likes but him, and Channel 4 is airing tapes of a dying Diana against the express wishes of her sons, and my uncle Jim is 12 years in his grave, a rebel till the end. I have yet to go see guards changing into whatever it is they change to, though there’s absolutely no politics involved – just apathy. I’ll await visitors from the States to give me an excuse to do such a shamefully touristy thing. I hope they don’t take forever to get here…

Going Postal

2007-06-01T14:37:00.000+01:00

The first time I went to a British post office, back in 1995, I was amazed to find all sorts of wrapping and packing supplies for sale. Within a couple of years you could buy anything you needed along those lines at any United States post office, but that’s about where the grand U.S.P.S. improvement scheme came to a grinding halt: A little wrapping paper, a little tape, money orders, and the commemorative stamps which are, I suspect, the real post office cash cow.

The British have really nice commemoratives, too, but you’re likely not to notice them over the roar of the amazing multi-service biz that is the Royal Post Office. Although this multiplicity of exciting things to do probably contributes to the interminable post office queues, we do have to remember that the British will queue for anything. They’ll latch on to the tail end of a queue on their way home, nevermind knowing what it’s actually for, and then good manners keep them from asking, and there you are. Sometimes they don’t get home for days.

But that’s not to take away from the heightened levels of sheer stimulation to be experienced at your local Post Office anywhere between Northumblerland and Cornwall. Forthwith: a list, probably not complete, of things one can accomplish there.

Buy and sell any of 70 currencies.

Cash several varieties of government cheques.

Purchase gift vouchers for goods and services from various high street businesses and hotel chains.

Get mobile phone and land line service.

Pay for mobile phone top-up for the top six U.K. mobile providers.

Purchase home and life insurance.

Purchase travel insurance, and travel money cards preloaded with £, $, or €.

Pay household bills.

Recharge your electricity key or gas card (pay-as-you-go utilities).

Send and receive money.

Deposit and withdraw funds, and check your bank balance.

Open a savings account or trust fund.

Buy any of several flavours of bonds.

Rent a car.

Pay several kinds of tax and government licence fees.

Print digital photos.

Apply for a driving or vehicle licence.

Buy a fishing licence.

Buy a phonecard.

Apply for a Post Office credit card

Play the National Lottery.

Apply for a loan.

If I didn't have a perfectly nice room I'd be tempted to move in. It’s not enough that Britain’s postal service has made the U.S.P.S. look like a poor relation who can’t even sell you insurance or Zlotys, but now they have their own Oscars, the Best Post Office Awards, most recently won by the branch in Hungerford Road, Crewe. And I don’t know it for a fact, but I suspect no R.P.O. employee has yet gone on a shooting rampage at work, at least not in Hungerford Road, Crewe. You may be sure I’m going to miss a couple of things sharply about Old Blighty when at last Her Majesty evicts me in September, and one of them will be the Royal Post Office.

These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For

2007-04-24T14:52:00.000+01:00

right: No, really. Not.

As I mentioned in my first teatime post of this year, I came to London to take practitioner training in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). Did that, and I’m now looking forward to being able to get further training before I fly home in September.

I first heard about NLP through a friend who went on a course (as one says on this side of the Atlantic) in the early 80s. I went out and bought some books, and was impressed with the attitude and ideas behind it, but it didn’t occur to me then that I might go further down that path. I remembered to remember a few things about NLP, but forgot to remember a great deal more. About a year and a half ago I brought one of the books back out and read it with new interest. This seemed an entirely new take on how we can use our knowledge about the nervous system and language to make huge improvements in the way we think, and by extension the way we choose to feel about events in the outside world. I began to take the idea of training in this knowledge more seriously. A way of dealing with human perceptions that can in a matter of minutes cure a lifelong phobia or residual fear from a psychological trauma, or turn a smoker into a nonsmoker (and I’ve seen this happen over and over again since then) was something I had to get my hands on, and soon.

Last year Æon author John Meaney took practitioner training, and when we met up on my last visit to London, he talked with me about his experiences. Then and there I made up my mind to come back this year and go to “Jedi School,” as we call it in the family, and see what I could see. What I didn’t see was the usual rah-rah motivational talk that sends people out feeling terrific until they figure out nothing in their lives has really changed. What I did see was real change in people’s way of thinking and acting in the world, over and over and over again.

Since I took up a renewed interest in NLP I’ve encountered a certain amount of disbelief and even a bit of hostility when I’ve discussed it with some people. The dominant psychological paradigm insists that change is – must be – slow and painful. Traumas must be discussed in detail and relived over and over again. Phobias must be treated by training the phobic to tolerate greater and greater degrees of terror, or by prescribing drugs. Troubled people must spend years in therapy in order to “deal with their problems,” and statistically not that many come away from that experience materially improved. Change that is fast, painless, and permanent seems to defy all that is holy in our beliefs about the human mind, but those old beliefs – originally the teachings of a man who also told us that all dreams are wish fulfillment and that we all want to have sex with our parents – are a century out of date. Therapists who plan to see their clients once to three times and send them home with their problem sorted once and for all seem like something out of the realm of dreams, but I promise you they exist, and what they do works.

One reason it works is that your brain can most easily comprehend patterns that it perceives quickly. A wise man expained it this way: a flip-book is easily seen as a moving picture when you view the images in rapid sequence, but if someone were to hand you a piece of paper once a week with a stick figure drawn on it, you wouldn't have the same experience. Even if you knew what it was supposed to do, your brain just wouldn't get it. The same wise man compared traditional therapy to masturbating at the rate of one stroke a week. With sandpaper. Your brain also prefers pleasure to pain as a learning strategy. Go figure.

Probably the “fast phobia cure” has created the greatest amount of disbelief and derision towards NLP, but it’s also the easiest to demonstrate. The other day I watched the most arachnaphobic person I’ve ever seen (wouldn’t allow a sealed plastic spider container into the same room – though 30 feet away – when she started) smiling and giggling and quite obviously delighted while a tarantula crawled over her hands after about 20 minutes of going through a few NLP techniques to deal with her phobia. The woman who was “paralyzed” with fear at the very thought of a snake was asking “Can I hold her?” in about five minutes. Former claustrophobics crawled out of trunks they’d been shut into, grinning from ear to ear. In one afternoon I saw dozens of people set free from having constantly to arrange their lives so that they’d never be exposed to the thing they were terrified of.

As for me, I’ve always described myself as “mildly arachnaphobic,” in that I was perfectly happy to trap small spiders and put them outside, but moderately fearful of larger ones, with that fear increasing with the size of the spider. One thing I knew for sure until three days ago was that I was never going to hold a tarantula and let it walk from one of my hands to the other, over and over again, and be reluctant to give it back to the spider wrangler from the zoo when my turn was over. Not under any circumstances. Not this girl. But in that, as in many things I used to think were true, I was wrong.

So there's my experience, or a very small slice of it, and you may do with it what you will. The usual travelogue will resume with the next posting.

Unglued to the Tube

2007-04-09T10:38:00.000+01:00

Right: Okay, not this small...

Ana, my landlady, has thoughtfully provided me with a small television that brings in the basic five free channels: ITV1 and BBC 1, 2, 4, and 5. Most everyone but me on this island has cable, but I get by. For instance, this evening I have the opportunity to watch:

7:00 The Trees That Made Britain
Conifer: 6 of 8. Tony Kirkham visits the glens east of Inverness to view the Scots pine in its natural habitat.

7:30 Johnny Kingdom – a Year on Exmoor
The gravedigger and amateur cameraman profiles the area’s countryside, beginning by attempting to build a badger hide.

8:30 Return to Lullingstone
4 of 6. Jim and his son are disappointed when planners refuse to give the green light to a poly-tunnel for storing exotic plants.

And I haven’t even mentioned soap operas or cricket…

Lest you think I’m making fun of British television – perish the thought! – the free airwaves are absolutely clogged with things worth watching: plenty of good BritTV, and a lot of the Yank stuff too - Friends reruns, House, The Simpsons, Law and Order CI, and all flavours of CSI as well as hours of really terrible old American films and Everybody (but me, apparently) Loves Raymond. There are even NBA games now and then if one can stay up late enough to watch them. I confess to a liking for cookery shows (and wishing Feline would fly over and cook dinner for me) and Antiques Roadshow, and I retain my odd fascination with real estate programmes like Escape to the Country, which make me long to live in a quiet cottage somewhere far from the nearest Tesco. But most of the time the tube stays cold and grey, and I read or surf or go out and walk the neighbourhood, which is what I think I’m going to do now.

Right after Cash in the Attic.

Here’s me, then…

2007-04-02T18:34:00.000+01:00

My room was ready on time, freshly painted, curtains washed, new nearly-wood floor, and the most horrifying coverlet in Britain. I tried flipping it over, but it’s the same thing on the other side. Feline would love it, and the Ladies of Beacon Hill know why. Not ducks, though; horses. Damn thing gives me nightmares.

The TV brings in five channels, one of which enabled me to watch a new production of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which is my favorite. Breaks my heart every time, though I know the guaranteed happy ending. Good ol’ Jane. Most of the rest of what’s on is crap, same as at home, but whilst in a Jane Austen sort of mood I picked up a DVD of Sense and Sensibility at Tesco today to watch on my widescreen laptop tonight. That’s entertainment.

Meanwhile I’m getting comfy on my bed with the fourth Steven Saylor Roma Sub Rosa mystery, looking forward to some delicious tomato soup, and watching the sun get low over the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham through my 7-foot-tall window. I live in a street of white houses, so the changes in light can be quite wonderful. This morning when I woke up all the east faces of the houses were pink. Mind you I don’t make a habit of waking up at sunrise, but my Yank body clock is still making a few adjustments. At least I’m past the falling-asleep-on-my-feet-every-day-at-teatime phase.

Home, Sweet Closet

2007-03-26T15:48:00.000+01:00

Right: The Famous 3 Kings in West Kensington

New Directions, good from now until 18 September 2007:

21 Charleville Road
London W14 9JJ
UK

Through the efforts of the ladies of Flatland, I found a room in West Kensington on Sunday. It won’t be available until next Saturday, but meantime I’m renting a room in the landlady’s other house in Boston Manor, most of the way back to Heathrow. You can save quite a bit of rent living in the outlying districts, but you make it all up when you decide actually to go anywhere. From here you have to join a caravan at Brentford and trek through the wilds of Chiswick and through darkest Ravenscourt Park, fighting off wild animals the whole way. By comparison West Kensington is just slightly west of central London – coincidentally about ten minutes’ walk from where my course will be held in April – a thriving neighborhood of late-Victorian terrace (row) houses on the side streets, and lots of shops and restaurants on the main streets. The room – on the second floor (Yanks read third) of one of the aforementioned terrace houses – is all of a two-minute walk from the West Kensington tube, and perhaps five from Baron’s Court in the opposite direction.

The room itself is quite small; even smaller than good ol’ Room 3 over the Little Apple from last year’s stay, but not by much. It’s narrow and tall, with a nice big window at one end, and the furniture (wardrobe, table, shelves, chest of drawers, single bed) takes up about 80% of the floor space, but it also comes with a microwave, a mini-fridge, a toaster, a kettle, and a TV. There’s no sink, which is the main disadvantage. There is a tiny coal grate with an little mantel near the head of the bed that adds a certain amount of Victorian charm.

Before leaving Bayswater this morning I hopped a train to Flatland and delivered three bunches of tulips to Stephanie, Janine, and Lily, who had helped me find the place. Then I went home and trundled my luggage down the Stairway to Hell (two trips) and into a cab. No more four flights of steep, narrow stairs for me; I’ll be down to two now.

Stairway to Hell

2007-03-25T19:40:00.000+01:00

My previous six visits to this corner of the world I’ve booked my hotel through hotel-assist.com, usually choosing the least expensive lodgings I could find there. Hang on to that “usually” – it’ll come in handy later.

This time I booked a month or so later than usual, and there were fewer choices. Last year’s hotel on West Cromwell Road was not available, but to my surprise I found one even cheaper, albeit with a shared bath. For the price, I could handle a shared bath. Apparently a couple of key brain cells had been lost to debauched living, because I booked a room for six nights.

Fast forward to me dragging my four pieces of luggage into the hotel lobby after six hours of detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Reservation in order, room ready for occupation. “It’s on the top floor…” the receptionist said, and there was something terribly sympathetic in her face that made me remember what I already knew from years of not booking this hotel. “…And there’s no lift,” I said. My God, I’m in the Kensington Court Hotel, the one I don’t stay in because it’s five storeys tall and – that’s right, weary traveller – it has no lift.

The man waiting behind me for his room volunteered to haul up the two heaviest pieces, saving me a second and third trip (at these rates you don’t get bellhops), so I was still able to breathe when I got everything into the room, but then it’s two floors down to the nearest toilet. Down and back up again, that is. And these stairs are half again as steep as stairs built to code in the U.S., because they have to lift you up the same distance while using up far less horizontal space. Grueling, is what it is. I must have gone to sleep with an overdose of either stairways or captivity, as I woke up about 0100 with a splitting headache that didn’t back down for almost twelve hours. Heading into night four, I begin to feel a degree of equanimity concerning the top floor, but that’s probably because I’m leaving tomorrow, about which more… tomorrow.

Immigrants

2007-03-23T17:42:00.000+01:00

BA Flight 48 landed about an hour late yesterday, and I headed into the passport check queues without a care, as last year’s interview had been about 20 seconds long, with that officer concerned mostly with whether I had proof of a booked flight back to the States in case my adventure went south. This year a different officer left with my passport for a discussion with the nice folks in the darkened glass booth at the center of the room. She came back with two more of her official kind, one of whom served me with a paper that said I was liable to be examined further. Something of an understatement, that; for the better part of the next six hours I was the guest of Her Majesty, and this time no tea was on offer.

Mrs Shah – who informed me that they were going to find out “the real reason for my visit” – escorted me to the customs line, and in the presence of a few hundred passing travellers minutely inspeced my luggage, saving aside anything that might provide a clue, including but not limited to my notebooks, debit cards, business cards, receipts, and pretty much anything made of paper with ink on it. She kept up a running interrogation during this, but didn’t write anything down. She was polite in a meaningless, by-rote sort of way that did nothing to reassure me. I tried to like her and failed.

My luggage repacked I was taken behind several layers of closed doors, where I turned out my pockets for the uniformed officer with the electronic wand, and suffered the sour gaze of the evidently senior bloke in the suit who I feared might be in charge of my eventual fate. I was then escorted into the detention area to get acquainted with my fellow suspicious travellers from Nigeria, India, Mexico, China, and Canada (I always thought there was something off about those guys). The two Nigerians, the Indian, the Canadian, and I spoke English. The three Mexicans spoke only Spanish, but the Canadian, the Indian, and I had enough of that language to communicate with them in a very limited fashion. The Chinese bloke didn’t speak a word in any language while I was there. He slept a lot. One side of the room was windows, so we could be observed by Immigrations officers walking past, and there were three 360-degree cameras in the room being monitored from a desk outside so we didn’t get up to anything. In one corner was a little TV tuned to inane cartoon programmes, which we soon began to suspect was some kind of torturous softening-up scheme.

After perhaps an hour, Mrs Shah returned and led me into an office at the other end of our little goldfish bowl, where she filled out forms and took my fingerprints. Apparently I have very unusual fingerprints (remind me to avoid a life of crime), as the computer kept rejecting them. “Finger not recognized” is the error she got at least 40 times before she could convince it to bypass the last print and send the result to my official dossier, which will be on file with the Home Office for ten years.

Now you might be curious how I was doing at this point, and the answer is I was focussed on my outcome for the whole mess, which was the feeling of slipping between clean white sheets in my hotel room that evening, happy the whole thing was over. Every time I felt like I’d stepped into a large royal cowpat I’d replay the image of that bed and the feel of those sheets. I aimed myself at that bed in my imagination. I didn’t know where I might go before the getting-into-bed part, but I wasn’t accepting the notion of any less perfect outcome. So I was actually not doing too badly. Meanwhile the Indian man would get up every hour or so and say “I’m getting out of here. Who’s coming with me?” Then we’d laugh, and he’d laugh and sit down again. He sang to us a lot. The Canadian, who was apparently being sent back to Canada, complained loudly and profanely, but he was laughing, too. The Mexican family, which included a mother, a grandmother, and a boy of seven or eight, were mostly confused. They had come to visit relatives for two weeks and had no idea why they were there, en prison. “Vivamos aqui ahora,” I told them, and we all had a laugh at that too, though it may have been a bit on the nervous side.

Late in the afternoon yet another Immigrations officer came in to do the real interview. His name was Chris, and he was the first British person I’d seen since stepping out of the queue at 1300 who seemed genuinely interested in whether I stayed or was summarily shuffled onto the next flight back to Seattle. We spoke for perhaps half an hour, and he wrote down everything I said. Then he went to talk to his superior and much later came back and said I’d be “allowed to land.” Heck, I thought I’d landed five hours ago, but apparently I’d been circling the whole time. My arms were really tired. “I’m going over the wall,” I told my cellmates when I came back to the detention area. They all seemed happy for me with the possible exception of the Chinese man, who was glued to the cartoons.

The last wait was for the paperwork that would allow me to sign myself out the door and out of Heathrow and into a cab, and finally into those white sheets. But first I walked myself down to the Tesco on Queensway for a long-delayed supper of bread and cheese and fruit. On the way back to my hotel a low-slung quarter moon in the crook of a barren elm in Princes Square reminded me that it was all still perfect: the universe, London, and everything. Just perfect.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

2007-03-21T16:24:00.000+01:00

Right: In a previous century, I had not yet even left Las Vegas

You know, last year when I was getting ready to fly to the U.K. for the purposes of having a (safe) adventure, I was merely terrified. This year terror has given way to a strange sadness to be leaving 99.9% of the people I know on this planet 6000 miles away from where I'll be for the next six months. Last year the thought of going to a foreign, if not exactly strange, country for the better part of five months crowded out a lot of other thoughts. I knew I'd be uncertain and things would be unfamiliar, but I was unprepared for how lonely I was going to be, and the depth of my isolation came as something of a shock. This time I feel it before I've even stepped onto the plane.

And step on I will, this very evening. And if six months living in a rented room in London were my only object, I'd probably be cashing in my ticket, much as I love the place. But this time I have cleverly included a purpose in my visit that will keep me walking down the jetway: I'll be attending a practitioner training in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) in April, and a further training in September. See how I got my hooks into myself?

I wouldn't want you to think I'm not looking forward to my stay in Dr Johnson's city, 'cause if I couldn't provide all of you with some entertainment between now and mid-September my life would have exactly no purpose worth mentioning. So watch this space for sparkling travel commentary, and if you can't find any of that, please read what I post. It'll make me feel good.

Rootless in Seattle

2006-09-18T21:15:00.000+01:00

Right: How can you not love a city with a landmark building that looks like one of these? The Smith Tower

I returned to Seattle as scheduled in mid-August at the end of a comfy and blessedly uneventful flight from Heathrow. Of course the flight left an hour late, and I spent two of my four hours at the airport queueing up for flight check-in, but they were handing out bottles of water, and except for a loud and protracted battle of words between two women heading to Nigeria about whether one of them had jumped the queue (she hadn't), everyone was in pretty good spirits. They were at least flying, after 6 days of cancelled flights and protracted delays.

As an entirely unforseen bonus, I was treated to a full-body scan consisting of three artfully-posed x-rays. I suppose they had to pick someone utterly outside their target group, and I was the token white woman. I didn't mind, really, except for the fact that they wouldn't sell me prints.

After Indian food (cures jetlag instantly) and a couple days' readjustment, it was time for a road trip to L.A. One World Science Fiction convention later I came back just in time to go on another road trip, this time to Sacramento. I've lost track of the number of times I've promised myself never to go anywhere by car, but it's a lot.

Anyway, I'm settled into a basement room in Beacon Hill, and I'll be here until April, at which time I'll fly back to the U.K. and resume reporting my outsider's view of all things British with a few dozen more teatime chats between April and October. Between now and then I'll post anything earth-shaking that comes up.

Cheerio, mates!
Bridget