... and think of England

7.45am, Heathrow Airport, 12/6/2008

I could grow to like England, if eighteen hours in a country, five of which were spent navigating an airport, is any indication.
My trip from the States was more or less uneventful. I slept for perhaps two hours on Monday night, after helping my siblings pack for Shanghai, and my mother, youngest brother and I woke at 5am to bring them to Newark Airport. I then returned home, did two loads of laundry, and packed for my two months in the Balkans.
The cab that brought me to JFK (my mother did not feel up to driving all that way, nor did I wish her to have to negotiate rush hour and the stench of landfills) was driven by a part Austrian Egyptian who related stories of his teenage years in Vienna in the 1970’s, punctuated by periodic declarations of ‘I like you. You’re intelligent. I don’t drive that many intelligent people these days. When you are in the White House or on television, remember me. I think you will do great things.’
Five minutes after arriving at the airport, I’d checked my bags and breezed through security. After sitting in the gate for two hours waiting to board, this speediness was more than compensated for by the four and a half hours it took for us to be cleared for takeoff.
I’d never before been to England, having hitherto confined my travels to countries where I do not speak the language of the majority of inhabitants. Indeed, I did not find that my native language abilities helped me all that much in getting out of the airport, due both to the confusing and often unlabeled layout of Heathrow, but moreover to the tendency of information personnel to mumble inaudible responses to my queries. I had to ask directions from no fewer than seven people, four of whom gave different instructions involving any combination of three terminals, the underground connecting train, and two bus lines, for me to get to a hotel no more than fifteen minutes drive away.
I had originally planned to venture into London proper, but after arriving in my room and taking a luxuriously long shower, I was captivated by the BBC’s news coverage of a bill proposing the extension of the number of days that terror suspects could be held without being charged from 28 to 42, and which was being voted on in the House of Commons that evening.* The coverage was simply exquisite; the reporters presented the facts and strove to find commentators from different parties and voting sides, periodically cutting to the floor and passionate speeches being given by parliamentarians, which sounded almost entirely unlike any speech I’ve ever watched by one of our own Congresspersons, whether on C-Span or in hearings. The substantive nature of the story was very refreshing; I’ve never cared for American television news or coverage of the government, which always seems blippy and rarely frames issues in their larger contexts, but I hadn’t previously realized just how good political coverage could be. It was a revelation – thoughtful, sound, with background and, perhaps most significantly, no commercial interruption.
My delight with the BBC does not indicate that the network may not be subject to biases, nor does it imply a similarly high opinion of other British television news sources, one of which, London news, ran a story about a baby who had a leg rash until its mother bought a new sofa (this seemed much more the type of story I would expect to see in States-side). This, combined with the newly released books available at the airport, certainly seems to beg for the sarcasm and satires of Monty Python sketches and of Crace’s Digested Read.
After watching the news, I ventured out to find dinner. It was by then nearly 7pm, and I elected not to spend a lot of money, and ultimately also decided not to spend an hour of my life riding into London. Instead, I set out to find a local place where I could procure cheap, good food (not entirely an oxymoron in England, I hoped – the hotels were all charging between sixteen and twenty-two pounds for dinner, which was over twice that many dollars thanks to the current abomination that is the exchange rate). I wanted curry, specifically, as I am highly doubtful that I’ll be able to find any in Serbia, and I also wanted to see a bit of the area while the sun was still up. I walked for nearly forty minutes and wound up in a town called Harlington. I passed restaurants, pubs, and shops, and decided to see where the road I was on ended. This brought me to a small fieldstone church, surrounded by a shady, verdant, tranquil graveyard. I first saw a stone commemorating the lives lost in the Great War, with names of local soldiers engraved on its base (for what seemed to be a small village, there were many, many names), and decided to try to get closer to it. The gate at the front was locked, so I wandered around to the side, and found an entrance across from the estate housing. It was nearly dusk and the churchyard was desolate, the quiet broken only by an occasional swoosh of traffic passing on a nearby thoroughfare, and by the more frequent songs of birds, the rustling of leaves in the wind, and the flapping of mourning doves’ wings.
The church had been restored in 2005, but the churchyard had not, and in many places it seemed as if the graves were caving in upon themselves. Weathered stones lined a wall; others tilted precariously over the long-forgotten dead. Only a handful of graves showed any indication of the living, with withering flowers or fading veterans’ ribbons. There were at least two of what I presumed were cypress trees, and expanses of what I initially took to be unoccupied land, but later realized was simply no longer marked. Hierarchy and patriarchy were visible even in death, with the monied or notable personages located nearer to the church, including one woman granted importance by her status as the daughter of a baron. I was particularly drawn to the stones of couples buried together, and to the stones of those who survived either of the wars only to die a short while afterward.
En route back, I paused at a store and bought a chocolate croissant and a box of fair-trade tea (it cost under one pound, and while at the time I was pleased to find such a cheap but ethical product, I must in retrospect wonder just how it was possible for it to be so affordable). I then entered the more reputable-looking of the two ‘Indian’ restaurants I had previously passed.** By this time (a bit past 10pm), the jet lag, coupled with the overall lack of sleep I’d gotten this week, was hitting me. My entrance disturbed the three employees from their televised cricket match. I ordered takeaway for under twelve pounds, and while it was being prepared, the Pakistani owner brought some papadom and chutney to me and proceeded to sit at my table and tell me about the time that he had moved to Nashville to try to settle there. It hadn’t worked out, but he retained a soft spot for the United States, not in the least because we were the first country to offer asylum to Pakistani Christians.
This bit of information snapped me from my jetlag stupor, and he continued to discuss his work with an alliance to support Christians in Pakistan, much of which work is carried out in the United States (particularly, apparently, Philadelphia, which I would not previously have pegged as a hotbed of Pakistani-American Christian activism), and to show me photos of him with Benazir Bhutto (who ‘supported’ their cause, although, he said, the organization had done more work with her father). We exchanged business cards.
The food was swimming in a sea of oil, and not as good as the activism work the restaurant’s owner allegedly did, but was otherwise quite passable. I cannot say as much for British late-night television, which seemed to be characterized by shows about prostitutes, depictions of sex-mad Americans, and commercials for a show on incestuous sibling relationships.
Nonetheless, I could grow to like England. This would certainly be the case in more economically beneficial times. I would like to return someday when I have money, or at least more of it than I currently have – or when I am too old to challenge myself by going to countries where I don’t speak the language – or if I ever had the opportunity to study twentieth century military history, a topic which I continue to grow more enamored of, in terms not of troop movements but of the humanity behind them. Currently, though, I am seated at Heathrow awaiting the boarding of my flight to Belgrade. I had wanted to bring some gifts for the few people I know in Serbia, but I did not have the opportunity to shop back home and do not have the funds to do so in the duty-free stores here.

*The bill, unfortunately, passed. Among the individuals asked for comment, the BBC found one student who had been detained for two days after printing out an al-Qaeda training manual for his dissertation research. A former prime minister said that it was a sad day, as the Magna Carta had effectively been ignored. The student commented that the American system was better, because an individual could only be held for two days without charges; although I am fairly certain that this is not in fact the case any longer, at least with regard to terror detainees, it was refreshing to hear a positive opinion of the States. What I did not fully understand is why the extension to forty-two days is expected to make such a difference to the government’s investigation; I remain wholly unconvinced that the potential cost to innocents is worth the possibility of maybe, perhaps finding some new information in the additional two weeks, and I suspect that to some extent it may take a bit of heat or urgency from the investigations, which may be bogged down in bureaucracy – there’s less of a temporal incentive for the government to finish in a timely fashion. (The entire issue calls to mind the movie ‘V for Vendetta.’)
Further, the proclivity of British government institutions to be affected by errors of the humans who compose them was, I think, illustrated by a breaking story about some highly confidential, top secret documents containing current information about al-Qaeda and the Iraq war, being left on a train and found by a rider, who turned them into the BBC’s security correspondent. Apparently this is not the first time this year that government officials have lost materials, including two cd-roms with all of the names of individuals in England who collect child benefits, and a laptop computer with the information of several hundred hopeful military recruits.

** My couchsurfer from Australia, Maloti, had mentioned that South Asians comprised either the largest 'minority' group in London, or else the largest group period. I believe that I in fact encountered more individuals of Indian and Pakistani extraction than I did Caucasian Britishers. I have to say that I find a certain ironic karma about this, the double-edging of the sword, the backlash, of empire.