An American Redneck in London

Recently, I took a trip to the United Kingdom to see a certain ladyfriend of mine at Oxford University, about an hour's drive or so west of London.  So the title is a little misleading, but it's catchier, so get over it.  Oxford is the site of the famous colleges, yes, but it is also the location of some amazing developments in literature, like Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, and of course, the Oxford comma.  I had never been to England before, except as a layover on a flight to somewhere really horrible, so this was a new experience for me.  I was excited to go to the homeland, but it was not as I expected.

This is the church where Winston Churchill is buried.  I know that's not funny.  I just think it's cool.

The shared grave of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife

First of all, summertime in England sucks.  It rained almost constantly, with temperatures below 40 degrees at night (Fahrenheit, of course--though there was no way to know that because the TV insisted on giving everything in Celsius, but who the heck can figure out if you need a sweater or not with that).  It was downright miserable there.  It was June, but it bore a strong resemblance to early March in Virginia.  Apparently it had been sunny for three days in a row two weeks before I got there, and that was all people were talking about--the freak weather occurrence where the sun came out for more than five minutes.  There was one day during my visit that it didn't rain for about 8 hours.  It was magical.  I'm convinced that this is why Oxford University was founded there.  It was just too nasty to go outside, so they might as well stay in and translate the Bible or whatever.  So every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.

It's raining again... I know, let's invent books!

Nice day, huh?

Isn't summertime great?

Second, they drive on the wrong side of the road.  I thought I knew that already, and I would just remember it.  But I didn't.  As a red-blooded American citizen, I have spent the last 40 years or so walking up to a street and looking left first, because when people drive on the correct side of the road, that's where they come from.  But not here in freaking Middle Earth.  They come from the other way.  Apparently bus drivers receive some kind of bounty for hitting pedestrians, because it actually seemed they were trying to hit me.

Yes, it's a double-decker, yes it's kinda neat, but it will kill you if you stand in front of it.

Now, like I said, you'd think you could remember that wrong-side-of-the-road business.  But you can't because of a combination of my first point about the weather and the fact that there is a bar or pub about every 20 feet (or 6.1 meters).  People drink at breakfast.  I'm not talking about the guy outside wearing a garbage bag as a jacket either.  I mean middle-aged ladies on the way to shopping or work or whatever.  Drinking is the main pastime.  They do this to help drown out how shitty it is there, I am convinced.  Regardless, the effect it had on me was to keep me from remembering which way to look for oncoming traffic, so every intersection was a life-threatening challenge.  Those drivers are a bunch of half-drunk, sallow-skinned homicidal maniacs.

Let me take your mind off of those pesky buses.  And the weather.  And your responsibilities.
And the fact that none of your teeth face the same direction.

An actual street sign.  I took the picture myself.
I think it is intended to alert the bus drivers that they are in a target-rich environment.

The British seem to think this sign helps.

Now, this next comment is a bit cliche, but it's true.  The food is not very good.  In fact, it sucks.  English people don't know what bacon is.  They think they do, but they don't.  If you order bacon, they bring ham.  There is something basically wrong with that.  They will bring you beans for every meal if you let them, even breakfast.  They have "bangers," some kind of tasteless greasy sausage with no spices in it.  Also, there is porridge on the menu.  I was unaware that people actually ate porridge anymore.  My stomach was not prepared for fairy-tale foods.  I discovered something called "Marmite," a yeast extract that smells like a decomposing corpse, which these folks consider a condiment.  You can't find any mustard, but this crap is on every table.  There's Splenda sweetener, but it is in the form of tiny little pills.  Strange indeed.  Don't even bother trying to find the ketchup.  You may find something that says ketchup on the package, but don't you believe it.  You'll just ruin your sandwich.  

It may be delicious.  I was never brave enough to get past the odor of death.

Why on earth are there beans on my plate?

Not the least of my criticisms is this--for a country that supposedly spawned the language, nobody seems to speak it.  Take a look at this Wikipedia page as an example.  I tried to order a smoked salmon and chives omelette (it was on the menu, I didn't just make it up) at a restaurant, and you would have thought I was speaking in Chinese.  I even pointed at it on the menu.  We had a discussion about it, after which the waiter went to the kitchen and then returned to the table for another discussion.  Lots of hand gestures and more pointing at the menu.  The guy ended up bringing a smoked salmon sandwich with scrambled eggs on top of it. I realize I have an accent myself, but good grief. 

Everything has a fake-sounding name, like Rabbits Warren or some such nonsense.  But the cussing is fun.  Words like bollocks, buggered, feck, and wanker are bad words there, but to me they just make the person sound ridiculous.  The angrier they are, the funnier it sounds.

One more thing... I've made a couple of references to the use of the metric system in this blog, which would be fine if they actually stuck to it.  I've been to other countries that used it, and it was different, but at least understandable.  In England, they seem to use about ten or so different systems.  For instance, in the bathroom there was a scale that tells me that I weigh between 14 and 15 stones, whatever that means.  You buy gas by the liter, beer by the pint, and whiskey by the fifth.  You get a peck of apples at the grocery store.  Gordon Bennett! 


It is a perplexing and remarkable mix of history and modernism.  Everything there is at least a thousand years old, it seems.  New College at Oxford was built in 1371, for instance.  That's the new one.  You have college kids doing crazy things like dumping ketchup on each other's heads when their exams are finished, but they are wearing some kind of weird tuxedo/judge's robe while they do it, and they are standing in a castle. 

The original walls to the city, at New College

They sound weird, but they are still college kids.

That pretty much sums up my opinion of Oxford, England right there--it's as if modern life is going on right in the middle of a museum, or at least the set of Harry Potter.  It's surreal.