Martha and Me

Right: DIY Queen and Chia-Bot - Photo by Jill Greenberg for Wired

A few days ago Martha Stewart, American media icon, was denied entrance into the U.K. This – according to a lawyer unaffiliated with Martha who commented on the case – was “bonkers.” As this worthy observed, and as I can personally attest from my last two experiences being allowed to land in England, it’s all down to the individual who looks at your passport. I looked suspicious enough to be detained for six hours in 2007, and unsuspicious enough to be passed through in 30 seconds in 2008. The legal expert commenting on the case confirmed my own suspicions: it’s all down to the luck of the draw.

What Martha needed was the luck to draw the same passport control officer who allowed convicted rapist Mike Tyson to visit the U.K. after he served his sentence. The U.K. is officially opposed to "the entry to the UK of anyone convicted of "serious criminal offences abroad," but apparently that offense didn't qualify to keep the champ out of England.

It would be one thing if lying to a government prosecutor was a crime held to be more heinous than rape on either continent, but as the lawyer chappie remarked in his comments, the crime that was worth a whopping five months in a federal lockup in the States (which Martha did while knitting sweaters for all her fellow inmates) is in any case not a criminal offense here.

So there would appear to be no clear guidelines for deciding who constitutes a threat to the public welfare, which is presumed to be the guiding principle in either allowing an alien to land or putting them on the next plane back to their airport of origin. A conviction for rape can be overlooked, but one for lying – not perjury, I’d like to point out, but lying in the course of an investigation into insider trading – may not, depending on who’s doing the looking.

In my own case, not appearing to have a satisfactory (to someone) reason for coming to London to live for six months may have aroused enough suspicion for detention. But we might want to consider that the answers that marked me a possible threat to public welfare in 2007 were never uttered in 2008 because those questions were not asked. The questions that were asked were the same initial questions as in 2007, roughly: “Where are you going?” “London” “How long will you be here?” “Six months.” and “Do you have family here?” “No.” And while last year those answers resulted in six hours confinement at Her Majesty’s pleasure while getting photographed, fingerprinted, searched, and multiply interviewed, this year they resulted in Stamp, stamp, “Next!” A perverse part of me wanted to ask why I wasn’t a threat this time, but I clapped my hand over its mouth and walked through the “Nothing to Declare” line into Terminal 4 with my jaw still hanging open just a bit. Finally I got my wits about me enough to manage a mental fist-pump and a silent “Yessssss!”

So Martha, though I may be of the opinion that you’re slightly pointless, you’re a highly-successful slightly-pointless multi-millionaire who emerged from a stint behind bars with your public reputation very little affected by what most Americans seemed to think of as a more than slightly-pointless prosecution and conviction. Publicly you maintained your sense of humor and your sense of self, and turned something that could have killed your career deader than Caesar into a sort of triumph, so I doubt you’re going to let a few of Her Majesty’s customs coppers take the shine off your life; heck, most of them can’t even knit a sweater.

The Last TV Post

Television – in any nation – is not exactly the most fascinating subject, but it is a certain reflection of its culture, and in case you’ve conceived from my previous post that British TV is all about painfully-polite, tea-sipping Brits making their Yank cousins look like a bunch of Bud-swilling barbarians, I’d like to put the entire subject to bed – so to speak – with this post.

Lots of Americans (many of whom actually are Bud-swilling barbarians) think of the British as prudes, but after having been exposed to a limited amount of British evening TV as a substitute for having friends, I’ve come to suspect this is a classic case of projection. I’ve seen things at 10 pm on the BBC that I’d never have been exposed to on the roughly analogous U.S. broadcast networks at any hour, and what I have not observed are vociferous bands of picketers protesting it. In the States we have decency groups counting how many times SpongeBob holds hands with his friend Patrick, or whether Tinky-Winky should be seen by three-year-olds.

Even confining my informal survey to the past few weeks I can recall a documentary on men who have sex with their cars – and other people’s when they can get away with it – and one on women who have sex with fences, bridges, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, to name only a few willing partners. Sheer educational value notwithstanding, in the States this would have been strictly late-night cable, and one reason for that is the FCC.

As I understand it, the Federal Communications Commission was established 80 years ago or so to determine who would be licensed to broadcast along a limited spectrum of AM radio waves. Over the years, the commission became the Decency Police of American broadcasting, holding its powers over the heads of announcers who might utter words which shouldn’t be heard by decent Americans. Except, perhaps, at home or in the schoolyard. Broadcast is a slowly-cooling dinosaur in American entertainment, and the FCC is starting to draw flies, though they’re also drawing federally-funded salaries. But they’re not the disease; they’re more like the symptom. The Brits got rid of their Puritans, who survived the crossing to become…us.

So you’ve really read this far to find out about men who shag their cars, haven’t you? I knew it. The BBC documentary focused on two American men, a young man from the Midwest whom you wouldn’t be able to tell from your cousin Fred, and a middle-aged man from – ready for this, folks in Seattle? – Yelm, Washington. The younger man has friends and a life and other interests, but the bloke from Yelm seems pretty much content to stay home and pork his classic VW. He’d be only a little out of place at a science fiction convention, or perhaps less. Despite his rather hazy notion of what other people are like (can doctors transplant mirror neurons yet?) I’m pretty certain he’d never have allowed an American documentary crew to tape him rhapsodizing about the exhaust pipes of cars on the highway, or drooling (and worse) all over a Trans-Am in a motel parking lot. Yelm is a small town.

The following week’s doco explored women who can only respond sexually to objects. No, not those objects, but things the rest of us might consider rather impersonal, asexual, and even public, like the Eiffel Tower. One of the women the show followed had married La Tour Eiffel in a private ceremony, but they’d been unable to consummate their love due to all the bloody tourists. Fortunately she has a liberal attitude towards these things, and has been busily shagging bridges and fences in the meantime. She had a mad affair with her bow, but it cooled, and so did her archery career.

It occurred to me that what might be operating in all cases – NEWS FLASH! – was an inability to relate to other human beings. Most of the people profiled were technically virgins and had no interest in sex as we (well, as I…) know it. One of them had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and the rest had not, but almost all seemed to me to be out on that end of the neurological spectrum. None knew there were others like them until they went looking on the Internet. Now they’re starting to link up, and even to share lovers.

“Ten P.M. is the watershed hour,” a gentleman told us when a visiting American friend commented on the adult content on the BBC, which is, for any Yank barbarians who don’t know, a government-controlled-and-funded entity. “It’s assumed children will be in bed after that.” Well, if they’re not, they’re getting an education I was denied in my FCC-controlled childhood in the Puritan States of America. And if they happen to like boinking cars and bridges, they now know how to google up some friends.

COPS in Essex

Right: Fridays, 8 p.m. GMT

So there's this show on BBC 5 called Police Interceptors. Among the terrestrial channels BBC 5 is the one that runs American crime dramas like CSI, NCIS, and Law & Order, but this is a homegrown show about a homegrown high-speed police interception units. To be fair, I've only seen part of one episode, but I've gotta say it seemed rather typically British to me that it concluded with the Essex interceptor unit pulling over a young woman who was driving without insurance. In addition to an automatic six points on her license, they impounded her car. The excitement was very nearly unbearable.

Now I know the Essex interceptor unit regularly bag drug dealers and other major criminal types, but the fact that they chose to focus on the plight of an ‘Essex girl’ – over here Essex girl jokes occupy same evolutionary niche as ‘blonde’ jokes in the States – illustrates a major difference between U.S. and British shows that deal with crime. In Yank crime drama a suspect who protests his innocence nearly always turns out to be guilty after the cops leave the interview and talk about what a liar they think he is, and then go out and prove it. British TV cops are far more likely to argue that the suspect seems genuine, so they’d better go out and find the real perp, and far more often that turns out to be the case. In general – and admittedly based on an incomplete knowledge of the shows involved – American TV cops seem to me to focus more on the dark side of human nature than their British counterparts.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked: “If all T.V. shows about the police went off the air, and instead we had an equal number of T.V. shows about landlords, how would this change the average American reality-tunnel?”

Of course British TV’s already done landlords, from Basil Fawlty to Peggy Mitchell of EastEnders. They’re okay with that. And the majority of the crime drama on offer seems to be imported from the States: those same endless series with either strings of initials or Ice T, where the majority of civilians turn out to be perpetrators of one kind or another. It's difficult for me to imagine shows like this coming out of the U.K.

One would hope not too much of that attitude will rub off on our British friends, but then the Brits have already embraced Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so there may be no hope for them at this point.

Where's Henry?

Right: A door behind which ghosts have been seen

After a whirlwind bus tour of London with Michael Watson on Saturday, Sunday was reserved for a more targeted outing to Hampton Court Palace, home of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, among other notable Englishmen and women, most of the latter having been married to Henry at one time or another. Here Elizabeth was kept under house arrest by her sister, after whom a famous drink is named (hint: it's not the Martini). Here royal children were born, christened, and died. Here yeoman guards stood watch in the Watching Room, and tilted in the tiltyard, where I munched an egg and cress sandwich. History's layers run deep around here: from Cardinal Wolsey to my sandwich, a distance of five hundred years.

Thomas Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace - not with his own hands, you may be sure - and was wont to say it belonged to Henry when people complimented him on its grandeur, as it was widely held to be more beautiful, and its visitors more influential, than the royal court. So when Wolsey failed to obtain the divorce Henry needed from Catherine of Aragon in order to produce a male heir to inherit his throne, Henry took him at his word, booted him out, and took residence. There he lived with Ann Boleyn and his subsequent wives. The one who outlived him, Catherine Parr, he married there in the Chapel Royal with its fantastic golden-starred blue ceiling.

The house goes on for acres, and when that's through there are even more acres of garden and "wilderness" - actually another garden. It would require a couple of days to thoroughly tour it all, and though we were there most of a day, a look at the map shows a lot we didn't see.

One thing we didn't see was ghosts, but members of the staff claim to have seen someone on the other side of the door above (one of the staff entrances) who then faded away. Spooky...

Now Hinckley sings its siren call once more, and tomorrow I'm away on that Nottingham train for Jedi Master School, Part Deux. More adventures as they happen.

Once I couldn’t even SPELL Hypnotheripest…

…and now I are one.

Right: Look into my eyes. Do it. Just kidding.

I just finished up a hypnotherapy certification course with Michael Watson, a delightful teacher I’ll be meeting up with again this coming weekend for a couple days of sightseeing around London. I’ve been doing Hypnosis by the seat of my pants for a while now, and some formal training could hardly go amiss, though I’m not sure one could call any training with Michael formal, exactly; his idea of gravity is something one puts on potatoes.

So eight delegates, a couple of lovely assistants from the Salad Ltd family, and a trance dog (if your course does not include one of these, ask for your money back) explored the many varieties of trance at the Hinckley Island Hotel, which now has an entirely new set of anchors to add to the ones I aquired there in 2003, though the fact that the upholstery in the dining room remains unchaged managed to fire off a few of those as well.

Now I’m off for St Pancras International (It's a rail station! It's a shopping Mall!) to buy tickets for my next training adventure, as the fact that I have a U.S. billing address for my debit card is more confusion than East Midlands Trains’ ticket system can safely handle , so I can’t buy them online and pick them up the day of my journey. It’s the little things that make life interesting.

When it’s not the big things.

Oh, Lord, Stuck in Hinckley Again

(with apologies to John Fogerty)

Right: Hinckley and environs

After a lovely Thursday evening out with Michael Perez, formerly virtual mate from NLP Connections, I spent Friday with Kate van Loon (also formerly virtual), the world's sparkliest master change-maker. I arrived back at my room to an email from the folks at Salad, asking me if I could come up to Hinckley the following day to assist on a two-day course. My immediate guess was that all the other candidates for assistant had been run over by busses, and I've gotta admit I was grateful for that.

There were no trains running early enough to get me there in time for the start of the morning session, but Elsted House had a room left for both nights, so two hours later I was on my way to St Pancras International, bound for darkest Leicestershire.

I do not claim that Hinckley is less than an absolutely charming place to be, nor could I; my knowledge begins with the rail station and ends with the Hinckley Island Hotel, a conference center inexplicably plunked down miles from the nearest traces of civilization. Somewhere in the middle is a very nice B&B, and a Texaco station where one can buy egg and cress sandwiches. Check back with me in August for the number of egg and cress sandwiches I've consumed in my room in Hinckley. You'll be amazed. I'm amazed that convenience stores run by Hindus don't carry a greater variety of vegetarian food, but maybe that's just me.

The course was brilliant, I met and re-met wonderful people, I got to direct the testimonial videos at the end, which reminded me of my old Public TV days, and unlike the previous weekend, I wasn't actually stuck somewhere trains weren't running, did not stand out in the cold for hours on end, missed no busses, and did not have to spend the night in a Best Western in Leicester. What more could one ask?

Now I'm taking a day off from trains and training, but tomorrow it's back on the rails. Yes, Hinckley beckons me again for a further eight days of getting my brain tinkered with. Ros, my landlady at Elsted House, wonders why I don't just move in.

I've considered it.

There's No Place Like... Hinckley?

Right: Ted comes with the room

Yes, dear ones, tonight's post is coming to you direct from Hinckley. Hinckley, Leicestershire, that is - former hosiery capital of England, gateway to Rugby and Nuneaton. I've landed here for my next round of NLP training with the nice folks at Salad, Ltd. I'm staying in Elsted House, a nice little B&B that furnishes each guest room with its own Teddy Bear. How English is that? Earlier a man walked by outside with a bulldog. I'm pretty sure they hired him to impress the Yank tourists. We're easy.

I've been here before, actually, for the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) a few years back, but then I only saw the rail station, the hotel, and the inside of a taxi. This trip I've already been up to the Texaco station for an Egg & Cress sandwich, and in Hinckley, my friends, it doesn't really get any better than that.

So now the window is dark, I'm sleepy, and I'm about to tuck myself between those cool white sheets, hug my furry roommate to my chest, and drift away. More tourism excitement as it happens. Don't touch that dial!

“Terminal” is one word for it…

Right: London Heathrow Terminal Five: the Great White Despair

It’s big, it’s beautiful in a super-mega-industrial sort of way, and it was supposed to be the answer to British Airways passenger prayers for wide-open spaces, shorter queuing times, and the latest in fully-automated baggage-handling. What it’s turned into, however, is a £4.3 billion homeless shelter, currently crowded with passengers sleeping on departure lounge benches and waiting on the tarmac in excess of four hours inside planes that never take off.

Twenty-eight thousand suitcases went walkabout when the baggage system crashed almost immediately after the terminal’s royal launch on 27 March, and at least five thousand of them have never returned home. And baggage continues to be a major issue (not that that’s exactly a news flash to BA). Because the system required almost no-one to operate it, there was almost no-one trained to take up the slack when things went south.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and as of yesterday British Airways was out £85 million in compensation, including the cost of renting up every hotel room and room for rent they could get their hands on for stranded passengers. And there’s no end in sight.

As for me, I have both my suitcase and a roof over my head (albeit in Brentford for the time being), more than many recent London travellers can claim. On my way to Heathrow last week, thankfully to the shamefully outdated Terminal 4 where the baggage carousels actually have baggage on them, my fellow passengers and myself were offered travel vouchers for filling out complaint forms about malfunctioning onboard entertainment. I don’t expect to see my voucher anytime soon, especially if BA have automated their complaint system.

Isn’t it so?

New directions – good until 1 October 2008:

21 Charleville Road
London
W14 9JJ
UK

I left Seattle on Tuesday 1 April with my usual mixture of sadness and exhiliration and other more complex emotional ingredients. The proposed 2008 trip to London had become somewhat less nervewracking when I’d heard from Ana, my landlady from the Charleville Road house, that she’d rent me a room in her family home while I sorted out permanent digs. I hadn’t wanted to spend nearly £300 on a hotel for 5 days and hope I could round up a place to live in that time after shelling out another £80 in letting agent’s fees. And given the general snafu that is Heathrow Terminal 5 these days, hotel rooms are next to impossible to get anyhow, because the airlines are buying them up for the passengers they’ve stranded, sans luggage, sans destination, sans everything, to paraphrase Master Jaques (and Master Shakespeare). Flights cancelled today: 32. Pieces of luggage vanished into the aether since the baggage system crashed: 29,000 and counting. Heads will roll.

I got in a bit before noon (to Terminal 4, thankfully) on the 2nd after a perfectly nice flight, and spent a whole 30 seconds in Passport Control. That’s roughly 1/720th of the time it took last year just to be allowed entry into the country. Given that experience I had come prepared with emails from the training company, course schedules, and a return ticket printout. I needed none of it. Then my luggage miraculously appeared on the carousel within two minutes of exiting customs, and two minutes after that I was in a taxi headed for Brentford. “That’s how I want the rest of it to go,” I told myself – “Just like that: Effortless.”

When I got to the house in Boston Manor Ana told me that two days ago a tenant in the Charleville Road house gave notice unexpectedly, so I’ll have a permanent room there on the 13th for the duration. As Ana says, “Isn’t it so that you plan for something and it doesn’t happen like you plan it, but it happens better than you planned it?” I couldn’t agree more.