CHAPTER 38 - ENGLAND

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Exchange rate 1.60 British Pounds to US$1

Sa 3/4/2000 - London (Harold Wood), England

England is my mother's homeland where my main objective above touring was to visit my mother's family in eastern London. This would be my sixth visit to England including my second year of university that was spent in Arundel, Sussex at New England College as an exchange student from the University of New Hampshire.

The original itinenary included a similar stop in Switzerland with Kerry's brother's, Hedley's, family. That plan dissolved when Hedley accepted a position with Southeby's and became involved in a month long orientation with the auction house which entailed flying around the world. During this same period Hedley and family were moving from Wolfertswil to Zurich, a further complication to my plan. Thus, I flew straight from Tel Aviv to London, bypassing Zurich.

In Heathrow my bag was one of the first to wander around the carousel waiting for an owner. In anticipation of a long tube and above ground train ride, I repacked my daypack into my big pack leaving two hands free to share the burden of carrying Monica and Stu's seven and a half kilogram wedding gift (the second gift, the first was damaged in shipping). I breezed through immigration and walked under the green "nothing to declare" sign at customs.

Outside the arrival formalities and in the crush of confused transients loudly rushing about, I phoned Uncle Bob to say I arrived and he asked if I haven't seen my cousin Carol. Carol? I was happy to be retreived but confused because I hadn't told anyone which carrier or flight I was on, only (to my mom) that I would arrive Heathrow at 11am from Milan. Heathrow has four international arrivals buildings and there were at least a few flights from Tel Aviv to Heathrow this morning. To make matters more confusing, my flight arrived at noon London time, not 11am. With a call to Carol's mom Vi, I had Carol's cellphone number and from terminal two surprised her at terminal four. A short time later I was whisked away by Carol, Uncle Ron, and cousin Sue's little Karen who had made a sign, "Welcome back Bobby".

I hung at Ron and Vi's in Shenfield happily emmersed within my British family. Cousin Peter and wife Sandra were down from Nottingham and off tomorrow to Australia for six weeks, a lucky coincident. We talked at length about Australia where they've visitied four times previously (Sandra has Aussie relatives), their excitement was evident. Peter pulled out his Australian road atlas and we took turns pointing and sharing stories. The Vousden's (cousin Sue, husband Peter, and their four children - Karen, Joseph, Laura, and Shannon xxxages aaa) moved to within a kilometer away a year ago and although they visited three years ago, the little one is new and the growth of the others astonishing. The kids laughed, ran about, spent short intervals in front of the tube, and made occasional check-ins with the parents and to stare with curiousity at this visitor from around the world. Catching up with my relatives after six years was great.

At night I returned with Bob and Pam to their home fifteen minutes from Shenfield. Pam prepared a wonderful simple English chicken dinner with vegetables and gravy.

Su 3/5/2000 - London (Harold Wood), England

Yes, most of my English relatives live within fifteen minutes of one another. Five homes are in Harold Wood or Shenfield, only cousin Glyn lives in The Fens ninety minutes northwest, and cousin Peter lives in Nottingham, about two hours north. A handful of houses sit between Uncle Bob and Uncle Reg. Reg now lived alone since Aunt Ivy passed away in April, the oldest of the seven siblings.

Carol thooughtfully organized a mid-afternoon lunch at Garfunkel's with eight family members in attendance (Bob, Pam, Ron, Iv, Carol, Carol's partner Gary, Reg, myself) Afterward the crew returned to Ron and Vi's, later I accompanied Carol and Gary to their home behind Ron and Vi's to use with their computer (email and internet), and to play with a TV tuner board that can recongnize British teletext. Teletext is additional information sent with the broadast signal optionally seen at the bottom of the television screen. It textually includes news, program listings, stock reports, and more on various channels. With good reception the text can be read, displayed in a seperate window and navigated with a mouse. Britian has had teletext for about twenty years, the U.S. has never.

Mo 3/6/2000 - London (Harold Wood), England

I had suggested to Carol that I join her to work, to see how I could help with her compuer hurdles in the office.

Carol with Gary arrved at 8am. Gary dropped us at Harold Wood train station and I was on my first day of commuting in London, shocked at the roundtrip fare to Sout Kensington (BP10.70, US$17.12). The train was packed with passengers josteled and jiggled in the clacking cars. People n dark city clothes were well tuned to the many train hours and read papers and generally ignored one another.

From South Kensington Station Carol's office was a few minutes walk. There I met the "boys", James and Nick. James is the son of Carol's boss of twenty two years. Stephen (55) has retired to Spain and now has little property investment active. Carol functions as secretary and personal assistant to Stephen and to a lesser degree also helps James and Nick's new land development business.

I looked at the office's current computer issues. Carol is running a defunked word processing package on DOS 3.3 with a ten year old computer. James and Nick are trying to sort out a corporate email account with AOL and a website with RapidSite. There is also a Pentium 300 that intermittently crashes.

For lunch I arranged a rendevus with Chris Besser in Holland Park, the ex-owner and captain of Hi Velocity which I spent seven weeks aboard in the Indian Ocean earlier in the trip. Chris met me with his characteristic big smile and enthusiasic personality. He showed me around his flat plasterd with photographs, paintings, books, and maps from his adventures, then we enjoyed more conversation over pizza and salad at a smart European cafe. We exchanged stories of our time after departing one another in Madagascar. Chris was familiar with most of the places I visited in East and Southern Africa. After I left for Nairobi, Chris went on to sail more coastal Madagascar and up to Mayotte where he sold Hi Velocity. Since arriving London he's been busy with many varied ideas and schemes and considering upcoming adventures. The luncheon was fantastic, Chris has accomplished more than any other person I've known personally and his adventures and excitement of life is a great, respected xxxsloppy example to me.

I met Carol about 4pm at her office. We went over computer issues for an hour (I found a way to convert her ten years of word processing files to asc text), then departed via Stephen's BP2.5 million apartment. The unit is part of a conversion with a hospital, a huge and fancy renovation project, an opulent, rambling, flat with strange shaped rooms, and a cavernous living room, one the hospital board room. On my tour Carol pointed out certain features (American sized bathroms) and investment objects (BP30,000 tea pot) and furnishings (BP8,000 draperies).

My Mom's family lives dotted along the same train line east of London, each time someone moved it was further away from the city along this line. From the Central Line at Stratford we boarded British Rail and hopped off in Romford to visit Uncle Tom and Aunt Gladys, the place I called my London home during my second year of school in Sussex in 1977-1978.

After Tom's wife passed away in 197xxx, he and son Glyn were tended to by Aunt Gladys. Now Gladys has alzheimers and the rolls have been reversed - excluding Glyn who lives in luxury in Cambridpreshire ninety minutes away. Tom is xxx, has thinned and shrunk and has difficulty in his new and increasingly difficult role. While I schooled in England, Aunt Gladys was a second mother, she was a perfectly dear and giving aunt. Aunt Gladys also visited my mom and family fairly often in the States during my childhood and school years. Throughout these times I grew extremely fond of her, now after a six year hiatus, I found Gladys very aged, a very different women, and I was very sad.

Tu 3/7/2000 - London (Shenfield), England

*Fat Tuesday*

Up at 630a, another half bath / half shower, a little typing, Pam made a big breakfast (cereal, tea, bacon, egg, toast), and ... I'm a London commuter again. How people live by spending hours each day on the train and tube is beyond me. London is similar to many metropolitan areas - only those wealthy enough can afford decent housing near the city center, otherwise the necessary trade off is a long comumute. We're once again slaves to time and money.

I posed as an English sardine, as a commuter from London's east suburbs into the metropolis. At 810 am I left Bob's house, walked ten minutes to the British Rail station, watched a train depart the station for the city as I paid another BP10.70 for a return ticket to South Kensington, then joined others on the railway platform. At Stratford I joined the Central Liine to Miles End where I crossed onto the District Line. I was dressed in a long blue Helly Hanson coat and khaki cotton pants and white with black New Balance running shoes, a drastic contrast to others wearing black or at least dark colors. Half the people buried their heads into newspapers or books, others stared glassy eyes forward, noone spoke. On crowded cars there wasn't newspaper reading space for those without seats, people stood squashed together like cattle, bouncing against one another with the jostling of the subway. An hour and a half after leaving Bob's house I arrived South Kensington Station and wished never to do this on a perminant basis.

In Carol's office I was surprised to find the troublesome computer still running Windows from the day before - it hadn't crashed, and I talked to Nick about setting up email on AOL with their own domain name (user@capstone.group.co.uk) and a webserver hosted by Rapidsite (www.capstone.group.co.uk). I suppose a newly created property investment company may be embarassrd by sending business cards with non-working email addresses and web pages. With Carol needing modernization and these previous three issues, I would later attempt to impress upon James and Nick their need for a kick start.

Again I planned lunch with Chris, again I quickly walked forty-five miutes to Holland Park through ritzy residential and business neighbors, the wealth exuded through massive stone buildings and an incredible high prcentage of sports cars - Porshe, Mercedes, TVR, Lotus, MG, and Puegot.

Lunch with Chris Besse was as entertaining as yesterday. This man has to be the most energetic, broadly interested person I've met. In my trip notes while sailing aboard Hi Veocity in the Indian Ocean I briefly related stories Chris has told, now I was hearing more stories, more details, amazed and jealous at the interesting yet wild life he leads. He has an autobiographical book in final edit at a publisher, is planning on a job as onsite physician with a movie being filmed in Java (he on set with "Mountains on the Moon", "White Mischief", "Out of Africa", and xxx clint eastwood "~white something, black death"), and is considering opening a new medical facility. When I arrived at his home in Holland Park Mews he and a friend were discussing a new internet company for medical staff placement. Amazing man.

Carol and I repeated yesteray by playing with the computers in her office, meaning she left the office much later than the normal 430pm.

We 3/8/2000 - London (Harold Wood), England

London created two monsters for the millenium celebration - The Wheel, a huge ferris wheel-like ride, and The Millenium Dome, a project under continuous controversy and typical British ridicule for exasperating expenditures. Cousin Sue, and daughters Laura and Shannon escorted their Yankee relative to the later.

I arrived with little knowledge of what to expect and found the Dome a smaller scale (but large) version of World's Fair (Expo) I attended in Vancouver. The Dome housed pavillions sponsored by various businesses such as British Air, Sky TV, Ford, Manpower, Tesco, British Telecom, De Beers, and Marconi. Most were themed around culture and techology and held names like Journey, Work, Money, Rest, Home Planet, and Self Portrait. The Dome is huge, a large white sphere supported by brightly painted giant girders, cables, and concrete anchors.

Because of timing, we walked straight to a viewing of the thrity minute film by Black Adder, the British comedy troupe. xxx unexpectedly drove a time machine irradically through England's past, unintentionally changing history and ultimately benefitting himself.

The center, called Central Arena, is the staging area for the Millenium Show with a round stage with big theatatrical props and surrounded by seating for thousands. The show comprised of many performers in flashy space garb - dancers, acrobats, bungy jumpers, stilt walkers - dancing to custom music by Peter Garbriel. The visual and music was impressive but the theme was thin, something about Space Boy findinng war and love in three acts. A more detailed ongoing explanation would have benefitted the production. In any case when the children became itchy, we left before the mass exodus and ventured through the pavillions.

One of the most talk about exhibits was The Body by xxx. Outside, the buildng looking like the mating of a man, women, and worm. Inside vistors walk through tunnels similar to a throat or veins or soe other tubular anatomy bit. The first specific piece of anatomy was a huge pierced naval followed by similarly scaled pubic hair overhead, complete with crotch lice. On second thought, maybe the piercing as somthing else...

We bounced through most of the pavilions, not givig enough time to those of detail like Journey by Ford, my favorite. It started with a visual room if lights and film and answers to the question of why people journey (experience, adventure, etc) followed by a timeline of events (first time English drove on the left side (due to Roman roads), the year when one million cars had been delivered (and noone had taken a driving test), and the first rollerskate), followed by travel technology ofthe future ("rides" into space, trimarane technology applied to shipping, and the age old hybrid airplane automobile).

One pavillion had a remarkable lagr statue of a shirtless boy crouching and watching people ascend a ramp. De Beers exhibited the largest, cleanest pair shaped diamond (203 carats, double the size if I create an "O" by holding my thumb and forefinger together) and a large set of blue diamonds (105 carats).

One of the most amazing albeit simplist attractions was a very long foosbal xxxsp table (table soccer). It was of standard width but with it's length could hold twenty people and had nearly 200 men.

In a booth I had four photographs taken - front, back, left, and right. My images were then applied to the ET movie scene were a bicycle is riden in an arc across the sky, my hand waving - scary. Clever idea but strange result. The head looked like a stuffed cloth bag with a face painted on. Later at Carol's, I retrieved internet files of the session, unfortunately not the ET scene, but rather a simplier three dimensional renderring that can be rotated and zoomed. Still scary though.

The girls enoyed the day. Little Shannon was equally captivated by acrobats as a handle crank of a gadget as a light on the floor. Both were spent during the day and took turns sleeping in the pram, and late in the evening I shouldered Laura as predicted by all.

The controversy of the Dome's building cost and earnings is obvious. With a growing BP575 million bill, a maximum admission charge of BP20 and an averge gate of 20,000 people per day, the Dome would need to stay open at least four years although the plan is to remain open only one year. Of the six days in London at least a couple days I've seen newspaper articles addressing the finances of the Dome.

The London women and I stayed until neat closing, 6pm. Exhaustion followed the long day so to relieve futher energy expenditure we stopped for Indian food outside the Shenfield station and ate while telling the rest of the Vousden's of our day.

Th 3/9/2000 - London (Harold Wood), England

The last three days were spent with too many hours on the Tube, running across London half lost and standing for hours at the Dome. The thought alone made me tired and today I declared a true relaxation day and therefore made no heavy plans other than to visit Uncle Tom and Aunt Gladys in Romford. Bob and Pam made the trip easy by accompanying me.

Bob dropped Pam and I off in Romford center. We each had a chore, mine was to buy Pam a gift for taking good care of me while visiting. When I spied her tattered thesaurus used for crossword puzzles, I found my gift. With Pam by my side I decided to let the explanation of my quest ride, to see her reation when she figured out my task. Inside a bookstore she suggested I ask where to find "my book", but I said it wouldn't be a problem and walked straight to the reference section with Pam in tow There I searched the rows, saying I needed a "Colin's Paperback Dictionary and Thesaurus for my aunt who does crosswards and whose copy is in about eight pieces". The explanation didn't register, instead I heard, "Yes, I need a new one also". Even though Pam wondered which aunt I could mean, she didn't ask, and only outside when I smiled and said, "Here, it's for you" did Pam realize I had her on. We had a good laugh lasting the next few hours.

We visited with Tom and Gladys for a few hours in the sitting room drinking tea and eating milk chocolate covered digestive cookies - a favorite. Gladys croshied while we talk, seemingly oblivious to the conversation although a couple of times she piped in. Both Tom and Bob are dedicated readers of the London newspapers and like to interest themselves in local affairs, so our discussions covered thinks like petrol costs and other transportion issues, the Dome, but also traveling tales.

Carol is a sweetheart of a cousin like her sister and treated at a classy Chiness dinner in Ongar at Woo Fook. Carol looked real sharp and pretty in a fine black outfit, small rectangluar silver framed glasses, and perfect hair and makeup. Wow! No wonder I shared a crush on her with Glyn on my first visit to London 32 years ago. The restaurant was funky in their service - we sat in a small loue corner eating cashews and sipping drinks while our food was prepared, then we were sitted at a nicely decorated table. The plentiful wait staff hovered and the food was excellent.

Fr 3/10/2000 - xxx

Trip day 497 and the last. How could sixteen months pass so quickly? I was bewildered at the trip's start, I tried to convieve this duration of vacation and was left at a lost. One month I had done before, never a year or more.

Now it's passed and I'm sad for it, I'd rather be traveling from Greece to Tibet or through South America or to Antartica then back in the forty hour work week in Newport, leading a similar life to the previous nineteen years. Nineteen years is a long time in one place. I wonder what the future will bring, maybe I'll have a decent position in Newport, that would make settling back into the long term grind easier, a position I don't care for may create itchiness for a new adventure.

What have I missed? Family and friends mostly, the greasy American weekend breakfast of western with cheese omelets and banana blueberrry pancakes, Thanksgiving dinner. I've missed Newport - the Thames Street vibe, sailing the bay, cliffwalk. But this can be found - or at least good substitutions - elsewhere. A person once said repeating travels is less of an adventure and learning experience. In that case Newport must have worn it's attractiveness for me, then what brings me back?

I've collected memories in the form of text and photographs throughout the trip and hope to close the trip within the next two months by completing by creating a decent presentation opened with a short computer generated film followed by a slide show and accompanied by quality photographic enlargements. In the end I imagine a CD, one piece of plastic holding all notes and slides.

I'm currently sitting in a British Airway's 747 bound for Boston where my niece maybe pieved because the flight departed an hour late. Here I'm thinkng of these things and organizing my tripwork and making notes on other tasks - many tasks - I'll have to tackle immediately. Buying a car, finding home, and purchasing a computer top the list.

This morning Bob and Pam dropped me at Harold Wood station and I said goodbye to the last of my British relatives. They were good to me, I'm fond of them, I'll miss them.

My face must have cringed while I waited for the cost to Heathrow on the train, but since it as just past noon, outside the rush our, the price was only BP4.70. I lugged my heavy backpack and the wedding gift onto my first train of the day. At Stratford I changed to the Central Line and at Holburn to the Piccadily, arriving terminal four an hour and forty minutes later.

With observation the adventure refuses to end. I heard a very British announcement while changing at Holburn to the Piccadily Line, "Custodian to platform three to clear a nominal pile of acculumlated rubbish". A train passed through the station with a stereotypical punker with tall, bright purple spiked mohawk. On my next train a young couple necked heavily, oblivious of the mob around them, the boys eyes opened to find a semi-interesting advertisement to read while his mouth continued like a gasping, slobbering fish. In Heathrow's terminal four I was shanghied once again, this time at a currency exchange - thank you Britian! My checkon luggage weighed 27.5 kilograms, my daypack 2.8 kilograms. On the aircraft ramp I watched a sleek and expensive Concorde jet, twenty six years old and capable of twice the speed of sound, being pulled onto the runway. With observation the adventure refuses to end.

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Books to read:

"Antunin Besse of Aden", David Footman (Chris' grandfather) (listed in Amazon as out of print)

"They Call Me Mama Daktari", Anne Spoerry (Chris' aunt) (1997, Amazon)

"L'Ere De L'eau", David Doubilet ("The World of Water") - incredible photos!! ISBN 0-7148-9063-4 (or 0-1148-9063-4)

Film: "Mountains on the Moon" - scenes on Lamu, Kenya

Egyptian musicians to checkout: Natacha Atlas (album Gedida) and Abdel Halim Hafez, "the dark Nightingale" (I wrote about previously) and Hakim, "the Egyptian Elvis"

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