Summer Arrives
May 13th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
I had forgotten that intense feeling of freedom that the last exam for the summer brings. I had an exam on Monday night and today I surfaced after my first decent sleep in… I can’t remember since when, and read my first newspaper in a couple of weeks.
It was as if I had regained a sense, or maybe several, after a knock on the head. Exhilirating!
I went out for a walk intending to come back and work on my last assignment, due in a week, and I was so intoxicated with the sunshine that I didn’t come back all day. London was at its best. Blooming. Green. Colourful. Full of tourists. Busy. Above all, richly diverse. Almost a microcosm.
As a boy I imagined what it would be like transported back in time and allowed to watch evolution unfolding. To hear giant frogs calling in the Carboniferous rainforest at night, and much else. I regretted that it wasn’t possible, and I felt a little cheated too to have been born so close to the beginning of videographically recorded history. Somehow I’ve always imagined people in hundreds of years able to surf history in ways that would surprise us now. Perhaps it will even be possible to sit in a London street, virtually reconstructed, and watch the world go by as it was at selected moments, and to see quickly how it changed over time.
Being able to soak it up I felt a kind of euphoria. All around, most people were in a hurry — to the extent hat they seemed oblivious to the diversity and the pace of change around them. And the tourists spend much of their time visiting the past, overlooking the present in many ways. They can’t appreciate, e.g., the contrast in the amount of Russian heard in the street between a few years ago and now.
I felt a sense of wellbeing as I wandered in the sunshine, as I had a sandwich in the park (supplied by a chain store founded by two graduates of my MBA program), read the New Yorker in a magazine shop, read The Times outside a coffee shop, as I added Edward Lear and T.S. Eliott to my list of former neighbours (having discovered their homes with plaques affixed).
Several times I had a pang for a camera (a new camera is on my to do list, a first digital SLR).
Snippets from the newspapers:
There’s that great line: you’re taught for the first five years of your life how to walk and talk; for the next 10 you’re told to shut up and sit down
from a Sunday Times article on education. Will it ever get better? I recently skimmed Managers not MBAs by Henry Mintzberg and found plenty to agree with, and an interesting parallel. The Times article notes that many of world’s greatest never went to school: Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, William Cobbett, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell. Mintzberg gloats a little that in surveys he’s done not one of the most admired business leaders had an MBA.
I can’t say I “enjoyed” this week’s Sunday Times Magazine cover story on the divorce of a two people put on a pedestal by others projecting their romantic fantasies on them, and it’s richer story with the photographs. By the end it was hard not to be impressed with the journalism skills and humanity of the author. No surprise then to find, at the end, — I hadn’t noticed earlier — that it was by Ariel Leve.
Now, as you’ve always suspected: If you’re richer, you’re happier.
Did you BUY the New Yorker before you read it, or read it standing up at the newsstand? When I lived in London the clerks would hover over the magazine racks and slap my hand if I so much as glanced inside one. They ran by china shop rules… you break it you buy it.. and in their minds opening the cover, nay, almost touching it at all, was ‘breaking’ it. The first time said, indignantly, “Well how can I know if I want to buy it if I can’t look at it?” “You can see the cover!” he snapped. I don’t think I bought a single magazine the whole time I lived there. And I remembered wondering, if I went into a bookstore, if I’d be allowed to touch the books. (I was. I bought a lot of books. They were SO cheap back then. A couple long bus rides cost the same as a book. So… I would walk and read.)
No, I didn’t buy the New Yorker this time. I did, indeed, have a quite a long browse also of The Week, New Scientist and several photographic magazines. No Atlantic Monthly alas. I spend enough on magazines in that place to have an occasional browse and I’ve never had any grief. Not counting one occasion where a yob was threatening the staff and I suggested it would be a good idea if he left (he was holding everybody up), but that’s another story. I get a friendly smile from the staff who were there.
That is much like I remember London on a beautiful sunny day but it is not at all what I thought it was now. I had the impression that it had become much more Orwellian than even this side of the Atlantic.
One lady gave me a lesson on Yob calibrating when I had responded to her efforts with “Why bother yourself with this?”. Her response was “It is our responsibility to correct bad behaviour.” (Why is your spelling dictionary using U.S. english?) She was right! Later when some garishly dressed male started a racist diatribe on the tube I asked him to tone it down. He forgot about the racism and started to do my character analysis. The races issue was off the agenda now that there was a new muse that was smaller than he was. Unfortunately I arrived at the Bond Station before I got the full briefing on my ancestors.
London isn’t really Orwellian, although there are cameras everywhere and the movements of ordinary people can, in principle, be tracked on the tube using their “Oyster cards” which replaces cash and which records where they enter and leave the underground.
In many ways the fact that so many people from so many places want to come and live here says something about peaceful coexistence and freedom. However, there’s a growing inequality gap and what’s going on with the British at the bottom of the pile, competing with EU immigrants and losing, is worrying the government.
Wordpress originated in the US. I’ve never encountered the spellchecker, nor do I know if there’s an option to change language. I never spellcheck and I’m quite catholic on the issue of what’s correct; the King’s English not being his any more (Edgar Allan Poe) and all that.