UK – Much That Is Fair

A Cup of Kindness Yet

I spent my last weekend in the UK in London with a friend who had flown over from the States, mostly so that she could see the revival of Guys & Dolls playing on the West End before it closes next month. Upon meeting Kings Cross Station, she remarked to me that she always forgets until she arrives in the UK how different its culture is from America’s, a culture shock epitomized this time by a broken-down escalator on the Elizabeth Line. An attendant had been standing by it, explaining that it was broken, apologizing for the inconvenience, and directing passengers to the working escalator. My friend lives in New York City, where the very idea of doing this would probably get you laughed out onto the street. “There was even still a working escalator next to him,” she said, in tones of wonderment.

“A Most Noble Ruin”

After the 2016 election, exhausted from campaign work and horrified by the turn my country had taken, I took a week off before the next political races began to visit an old friend in France. Their family had moved to a town near the Swiss border some years before, and I had hoped to visit for quite some time. I had only once before been to Europe. We saw a whole range of things on a family road trip to visit some of their expat friends who lived on the other side of the country, but what I remembered most were the castles, and how France seemed to have more of them than they now knew what to do with. We saw castles that were overrun with commercialism, full of fake armour and jousting flags, and ones that were open and empty and that you could walk through entirely unsupervised. These ruins had been living spaces once, full of their own histories and purposes. Taken together in the twenty-first century, they posed a difficult question about the physical remnants of history. How do we decide what we do with what the past has left behind?

City of Literature

Perhaps not unlike many children my age, I first came to know Edinburgh through Harry Potter: the legendary place where J.K. Rowling had first dreamed up the boy wizard. Once, a visit to The Elephant House, where the story’s first chapters were written, would have been one of the highest pilgrimages I could make in the United Kingdom. And rightfully so, I think. I owe a great deal to Rowling. Her stories taught me, as they did many in my generation, about the power of our choices, even when our actions seem to have little effect on the wider picture. They offered me role models, particularly in the form of a bookish girl who could get along just fine with her classmates without sacrificing her grades. And it was thanks to Rowling, more so than anyone except perhaps my third-grade teacher, that I learned how to write. She told her readers that if they wanted to learn to write, they had to read: to read everything that came in front of them, from the nutrition facts on the cereal box to any book that passed into their hands.

Monsters & Myths

“‘I’ve been over a good part of the world since I left it, Doctor Watson,’ said he; ‘but I have never seen a place to compare with it.’
‘I never saw a Devonshire man who did not swear by his country,’ I remarked.”
– Henry Baskerville & Dr. Watson, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Of all the places I planned to visit on this trip, only one was really completely inaccessible by train. The National Rail service is very good, of course, but they don’t go everywhere, and remote abandoned castles by the seashore are apparently on the list of places they assume most folks won’t want to bother with. For a moment, I considered taking that as a sign. But then I figured it wasn’t like I was going to have another opportunity coming along in the near future, and so off I went.

Lest We Forget

This September, on a flight from Seattle to Chicago, I met a man who lived in Michigan and was flying home to surprise his wife. Flights into O’Hare, for anyone who has not had the unique misery of heading there themselves, often land early and then sit stranded out on the runway for half an hour. This one took a full hour, and he grew increasingly worried that he wouldn’t make his connecting flight to get home in time. I asked what he would do. “I’ll just rent a car and drive,” he told me. If he did that, he would still get there by the time she woke up.

I could make a statistical guess based on various demographic details about how he voted last Tuesday. I could probably make similar guesses about other strangers I have met in my endless trips around the country: about a retired Army colonel who lives in North Carolina and paid for me to go on a historical tour because he heard I was a student; about the man who stopped my father and me when we were out canvassing in Wisconsin a week ago to warn us that without a flashlight on, we risked getting hit by a car; about a group of women who took me out to lunch in rural Wyoming just because I had driven up to visit their town. I could, but I won’t, because I remember them as decent people, and because we must see our fellow Americans as human beings first, whatever they are to us second.