England has gone missing quite. Everyone there is from Houston, Richmond, or Chandernagore. Real Brits, I reckon, are all in New York poaching work from some poor American actor. To afford local colour, I put on my best long a and Percy Harde-Cheese accent. Damn white sweat socks gave me away. Also my habit of nearly getting struck flat at each Belisha Beacon intersection because I looked left, not right. London has become a brown man’s burden. While the native population is lying doggo, Eastern folk manage most service industries. Restaurant food can be cheap (about $27 per couple) and duller, heavier than a faux marbre desk. After our second week I had to prog around for some Woodward Gripe Water (“safe and gentle way to relieve baby’s wind”). Came over rather queer and all the rest of the boiling, sod it, ta, you know.
Still we felt secure as marsupial young. Yes, there was a new public-order bill before Parliament. Soccer massacres happen: Liverpool 38, Italy 0. Terrorism is expected. (One pub sign said, “In the interests of safety— would patrons kindly advise the staff of any suspicious parcels, cases, or objects.”) Stonehenge has barbed wire around it, the past under siege. You see skinhead children with purple hair and safety pins diapering up their flesh. Yet, all this has an institutional, orchestrated feel. There were no graffiti in the prompt and logical tube system. American crime, by contrast, is much more spontaneous. Individualistic and fearsome. Look wrong at some methmind, he’ll punt you in front of the D train. And not for the IRA or his hometown basketball team—just to express some misshapen free enterprise. In England there isn’t that leg-tapping, apoplectic, violent-ward atmosphere. Instead they elect Scargill for life.
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