Greenwich, meantime

(Right: the place where time begins)
Today I left my hotel in Earl's Court with an invitation to visit an old mate from Master Practitioner training, Rabiyah Patel. Rabi and her husband Nigel, her brother Farid, and her adorable baby son Nour, live in a lovely apartment in Greeenwich, overlooking the Thames, just west of the Cutty Sark, a 141-year-old clipper ship - the last-built merchant sailing vessel, the only remaining tea-clipper - that some arsehole tried and failed to burn three years ago.

My feet being the kind of ruined they've been since I had to give up my orthotics, I nearly contacted Rabi on any number of occasions in the past week to turn down the honor of her invitation, especially once I scoped out the distance between the nearest Docklands Light Rail station and her apartment. Doubling that distance for a round trip, and adding the trek through Bank station to the DLR tracks seemed like asking for trouble.

But one doesn't have adventures by avoiding trouble, even supposing it could be done. So after braving The Horror That Is The Breakfast Room, I walked the very few yards between my hotel and the Earl's Court tube, and headed east.

The world standard of maps and driving / transport / walking directions is the Google map, but when Google goes head-to-head with London, put your money on London. I had not yet arrived at this useful conclusion when, armed with my walking directions from you-know-who, I set out from Cutty Sark DLR station, already a bit late for the lunch Rabi's mum was making for me: homemade Dal and Basmati Rice.

Londinium is about 2000 years old, having been built by Caesar's lads, who laid out streets much as they are in Rome, along cartpaths, footpaths, and cowpaths. The way in which streets begin and end, rename themselves seemingly at random, and fade into nonexistence in the middle of council housing estates is either quaint and charming, or diabolically perverse, depending on how much your feet hurt. Outfoxed by London's streets, I wandered around Deptford for 45 minutes, aided by three sets of conflicting directions from locals, before asking a west African man near Deptford Green. He was new to the neighborhood, so he reached into the back seat of his car and pulled out his A-Z.

The "A-to-Zed" is the London standard of maps and directions. Every one of those deliberately perverse little bovine trails is represented somewhere in its pages. We found the street, and he offered to drive me there, as it was a miserably hot and humid day in Caesar's little riverside town. When we had no luck finding a way in to Rabiyah's street, we asked a passerby, who sent us 180 degrees from our destination. As I began noticing streets I'd walked down forty minutes before, I alerted my benefactor, who turned the car around, then noticed that the end of the street was right in front of us, nowhere near the location indicated by either the A-Z or Google. He dropped me off, and I walked around for another 20 minutes looking for the right building.

So in the end I got my Dal, and some water, and then Rabiyah and I walked to Greenwich Park, and up the hill to the Royal Observatory, where time on this planet begins and ends, then down through the park to the Old Royal Naval College--one of the architectural marvels of 17th-century Britain. Then we turned past the Cutty Sark (still undergoing restoration), and back to the DLR station.

My feet still haven't forgiven me, but the rest of me is glad I opted for a bit of adventure on my last day in town.

Alarums and Excursions

Right: Leicester Cathedral

Ask anyone who knows me—I hate alarm clocks. I’ll do almost anything to avoid having to wake up to any sort of buzzing or beeping. Sometimes “anything” includes getting to work late, but don’t tell my boss.

In England, though, one is much more likely to wake up to church bells. Every city has a cathedral, and every village, town and market town has at least one church. Sizeable towns and cities have sizeable numbers of them, and that means that you’d have to be pretty far off the beaten path not to hear church bells announcing every hour of the day, and specialized bells for canonical hours, to call the faithful to prayer. As I’m not faithful, I don’t know one of these tunes from another, except to say, “Oh, it’s that one. Nice.”

The executive flat where I’m staying on this trip to Leicester has about four times more space than my hotel room at the Travelodge, where I stayed week before last, about six times more than my London hotel room between trips, a kitchen, a leather couch, a huge television, and Leicester Cathedral. Well, the latter’s not actually in the flat, but just a little way outside where I can see and hear it, and by hearing, know the time.

Bells have a certain authority that mere clocks lack. Let’s face it: your kitchen clock can say one thing, your oven clock another, and your bedroom clock something unlike either. One can quibble with a clock, but bells are another matter; they leave no doubt what o’ the clock it is. They give the clock a voice. And they give a tired traveller a buzzless, beepless way to wake up in time to get to her seminar.

So today was the first day of Chris Hall’s three-day seminar on “The Paradoxical Nature of Change” at the lovely old Ramada Jarvis Hotel here in good old Leicester, wherein our heroine learned that problems are paradoxes, and “stuckness” is a result of not knowing how to resolve them via a sort of unified field. Golly. Wonder what I’ll learn on day two?

Life for the Win

As I’ve been restricting my running about to save what’s left of my feet, I’ve no exciting tourist photos to build a story around. But the other night on the BBC I encountered this story, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

In October of last year, Richard Rudd was riding his motorcycle past a filling station near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, when a car exiting the station struck him and threw him 20 feet. Rudd, 42 and the divorced father of two teenage daughters, could initially move his limbs, but a post-operative infection caused his organs to begin shutting down, and he went into a coma. When he emerged, he was completely paralyzed.

He was moved to a special neuro-intensive care unit at Addenbroke Hospital in Cambridge, where doctors determined that the damage to Richard’s lower brainstem was such that he would never recover movement in his body, or the ability to speak, or even to breathe on his own. His father and his children agreed that Richard himself would not want to live in that condition.

They related stories of Richard saying things like “If anything like that happens to me, I don’t want to go on.” Richard’s father said he felt that keeping his son alive would be “like playing God.” There was “no way in a million years” Richard would want to live in these circumstances. It seemed pretty clear that if Richard had thought to draw up a living will, it would have included a provision to withdraw care at this point.

The family’s consent to take Richard off the ventilator having been given, it was now up to the doctors in the unit to come to a decision. There seemed to be a general agreement that there was no point to keeping a man alive who wouldn’t want to be under these conditions. But Professor David Menon, a leading expert in treating brain injuries, and the creator of the neuro-intensive care unit, felt there was still some input missing. Richard’s.

He went to visit Richard, shortly before the time scheduled for shutting down the respirator and removing the tubes that fed oxygen to his brain. He asked Richard if he would move his eyes to the left. Richard did, then to the right on Menon’s second request. A BBC film crew was present, and caught the expression on Menon’s fact that seemed to say “This changes everything.” Richard performed those eye movements over and over at Menon’s request, but was unable to respond to a more complex suggestion that involved holding on to an instruction over time.

Menon determined that Richard was not capable of giving a meaningful answer to the question of whether he wanted to live…yet. His responsiveness hinted at higher brain function still intact. He decided to wait for the final life-or-death decision until Richard himself might have a chance to weigh in.

Menon put a speech therapist on the case, who interviewed the family for Richard’s likes and dislikes, and facts about his life. She came to his bedside every day with a list of 23 questions to which he could answer yes or no by moving his eyes to the left or right—questions that included tests of long- and short-term memory. Every day for three weeks, she asked the same questions and got the same answers. Sometimes after the questions, she'd have a conversation with him. Richard passed all tests easily. At no time did anyone ask him about withdrawing care. It wasn’t yet time for that question. Menon wanted to give Richard time to consider his life as it was now.

What Richard had been experiencing since waking from his coma is what doctors are now calling “Locked-in Syndrome.” The patient’s total paralysis and inability to speak are much the same as in vegetative states, but as demonstrated by the recent case in Belgium of a man who reported having been conscious during a 23-year vegetative state, locked-in patients are awake and aware, although unable to communicate. David Menon had demonstrated that the nerves controlling the muscles that moved his eyes—located higher up on the brainstem than the worst of the injury—were still intact and responsive to Richard’s will. He had given Richard Rudd a way to communicate with the outside world.

Once Professor Menon was convinced that Richard was capable of understanding his condition and prognosis, and of considering the question of his own future, he began to have that talk, and ask those questions. Three times on separate occasions, he asked Richard if, under the circumstances which he now understood, he wanted to live. Three times Richard answered yes.

The photo below was taken in March of this year, five months after Richard Rudd’s motorcycle accident. He had, by this time, learned to move his head an inch in either direction. He had also recovered the use of some of the muscles in his face, allowing him to smile.

Richard’s case has inflamed renewed debate over living wills, which are legally binding documents. A spokesman for a group opposing the use of living wills says: “This case shows the weakness of giving legal force to documents which, by their very nature, can never cover every possibility.” And no matter where you come down on the subject, you might agree that there’s a difference between an imagined future and a tangible present.

David Menon puts it this way.“There may sometimes be differences between what a patient declares when he is fit and healthy, and what he feels when he is the one in the hospital bed.” Richard Rudd is living proof of that.

Manhunt

As events of the trip so far would be of little interest to non-Jedis, I thought I'd tell you a true story, as I watched it unfold on TV. This was going on for most of my first week in England, and I thought you might find it interesting:

Last Friday, as I was preparing for this year’s trip to London and Leicester, Durham prison was releasing Raoul Thomas Moat from a prison term for assault. Though it would not come out for some days, Moat had already been arrested once for conspiracy to murder, and the prison authorities alerted the Northumbria police upon his release that he might pose a threat to his former girlfriend, Samantha Tobbard. The warning was filed and ignored.

Sam Tobbard had written Moat a couple of weeks earlier from Northumbria, just north of Durham, telling him that she was breaking up with him for another man, who was "better looking." In an effort to frighten him away from confronting her, she said later, she told him her new partner was a Northumbria police officer. He was actually a martial arts instructor. She had just sentenced Chris Brown to death.

A couple of hours into Saturday, UK time, Raoul Moat went to Sam’s house on Tyneside, near Newcastle, and started shooting. Brown tried to protect Sam, but Moat shot him three times in the head, and shot her in the stomach. Brown died of his wounds; Sam Tobbard lived to regret taunting a psychopath.

So far, although it was a sad case, it was not yet newsworthy in the long term. But 24 hours later, as I was boarding my plane for Heathrow, Raoul Moat rang 999 and announced he was going to kill another police officer. A few minutes after that, he walked up to a parked patrol car, and shot unarmed Northumbria Police Constable David Rathband in the face and upper body, possibly with a sawed-off shotgun. The BBC declined to air the photos of Rathband’s injuries.

If terms like “firearms officers” and “armed response teams” create a certain sensation of disconnect, you might be a Yank. Police in the U.K. “serve by consent” and do not, as a rule, go armed. So while Moat was in no danger from P.C. Rathband, the response to his shooting was as might be expected: Coppers with guns descended on the formerly sleepy village of Rothbury, north of Newcastle, where Moat had liked to camp, and where some intelligence they’d received led them to believe he’d be.

Meanwhile, Moat had gone to visit an old friend, and had given him a 49-page handwritten letter to deliver to the police, in which he promised to “keep killing police until I’m dead.” The police had already interviewed the friend, but were not keeping him under surveillance, so missed their chance to arrest Moat, much as they had missed their chance to protect Sam Tobbard and Chris Brown, and possibly arrest Raoul Moat for a lesser crime before he shot two people, then picked David Rathband as his next victim. Another letter from him was found later in the week in an abandoned tent near the River Coquet.

Suicide by Cop?

The situation seemed custom-made for “suicide by cop,” but for a few things: Moat took no hostages, provoked no armed police, and did not go to ground to make a last stand. He disappeared into the wooded rural area surrounding Rothbury, helped by friends in the area and occasional forays into empty houses. One family reported someone had broken into their house while they were away, took some food, and slept in a bed. Despite the ubiquitous police presence in Rothbury, it took police three hours to respond.

The search for Moat, and the bizarre sight of hundreds of armed men and women patrolling the village streets (at the height of the hunt, 10% of all Britain’s firearms officers were involved, along with aircraft, helicopters, and lots of fancy technology) was on the front page of every newspaper, and at the beginning of every news broadcast on every channel all that week. BBC1 even ran live coverage of a town hall meeting in the village hall, where police attempted to reassure townspeople they’d be safe, while also reminding them there was a dangerous criminal nearby, and they should remain indoors. Even the spy exchange between Russia and the U.S. was small potatoes next to the biggest police manhunt in Britain for 30 years. It was an inescapable dramatic narrative.

“You’re better off dead.”

Photographs of a three-year-old Raoul Moat reveal a lovely, round-faced, ginger-haired boy with sparkling blue eyes. These were frequently shown on TV and in newspapers alongside his mother’s advice on hearing of her son’s alleged crimes: “…you’re better off dead, son.” Just something to reflect on if you’ve ever wondered if psychopaths are born or made.

Newscasters and armchair investigators wondered why the massive search effort continued to narrow until it contained little more than the village of Rothbury, but when Moat was spotted on Friday evening, it was very near the center of town, lying on a riverbank near a bowling green, a few yards from the entrance to a storm drain—a favorite dog-walking area for villagers. The drain was connected to a tunnel that ran under Rothbury to a drain on the other side of the village. Raoul Moat had probably been under the police's feet on and off for days.

On spotting their target, police officers surrounded Moat, but not too closely—he was holding his sawed-off shotgun to his own neck, and they'd publicly promised a peaceful conclusion to this business. Negotiators were brought in, and the quiet standoff continued for seven hours, while officers stood by with guns and tasers, and rain came down in buckets. At the end of that time, Raoul Moat apparently heard some officers who had been creeping up behind him in the darkness, and shot himself. The manhunt was over, and so was a life that must have been a painful one to leave so much pain behind.

P.C. David Rathband will live, but has already undergone the first of many facial reconstructive surgeries, and may never regain the sight in one of his eyes. He says he holds no malice towards Raoul Moat, and that he wants to continue to be a police officer. Chief Constable Sue Sim has assured him he'll always have a future with the Northumbria Police.

You may find it somewhat disturbing—as I do—that some people in and around Moat’s native Newcastle consider him some sort of Robin Hood figure. They’ve been leaving candles, floral tributes, and notes outside his former home, expressing sympathy with him, his actions, his bravery. Perhaps they’re short of heroes up there.

The Churchfitters

When one is invited to a musical event at the Garboldisham Village Hall (and if one is me, which might be even less of a shared experience), one might be forgiven for wondering if one is in for a long, long, evening. I left Seattle last month with just such an invitation in hand, fresh from experiencing The. Worst. Live. Band. In. Seattle – possibly in all creation, so I may have been more concerned than I would have been otherwise.

Carolyn White, John Thurgood and I arrived in Garboldisham at a quarter to seven on a Saturday night in late January, and had no problem finding good seats towards the front of the hall. In fact there were so few people in evidence that we feared the acts would be playing to a sparse audience. We soon learned we had arrived an hour early due to misinformation in the local paper, and by a quarter to eight, every seat had been claimed, and the bar was doing a good business in Old Chimneys Ale, a local brew.

The opening band was a husband-and-wife duo at least the equal of T.W.L.B.I.S. They sang original but indifferently-composed-and-written songs, and while she could sing and he could play, she was so enamored of her own style and so in her own head during her performance that she did sing-along numbers flourished up with her own vocal meanderings that had the audience totally unsure where to go next. Good singers have rapport with the people they’re singing to; this woman, despite having a lovely voice, was not a good singer, in my opinion, at least as humble as the one in paragraph one. By the time they’d left the stage I had grown even more concerned with what I was going to hear for the next 90 minutes.

But history is not prophecy, and neither is the quality of the first act. The Churchfitters had me in the palms of their hands from the opening chords of the opening number. The spine of their music sounds like very solid and proficient Irish trad, but onto that they build every possible rock-blues-folk sound and more, including a bit of Breton flavor, and playing a staggering number of instruments, including hand-built bass viols and bass guitars created by Boris, the bass player, who might have come straight from an audition for an Addams Family revival.

The degree of sheer musicianship would have been impressive by itself, but the band is also practiced and tight and innovative and original and FUN. Though becoming better known all the time in the UK and France, they are not a worldwide phenomenon…yet.

The astounding live experience of The Churchfitters is not to be replicated in an audio-only medium, so have a butcher's at this. You can also listen to a wide variety of album tracks on their website, and if that prompts you to buy a CD and tell a friend, so much the better. On the way out the door I told Boris, “I’d go around the world to see you guys again.” I hope their fame grows and grows, so I won’t have to travel quite that far.

Return to Elysium

Above: Size really, really doesn't matter.

Some of you may remember my fond tales of the Elysee Hotel in Bayswater and its two-person lift (luggage not included). Believe me, you haven’t heard them all, but that’s as it should be. Suffice it to say those anchors are still in place, and I remain quite fond of it, even though they enlarged the lift.

Ye olde Elysee been somewhat modernized since my last visit, with wireless access in the public areas, and the addition of some tiny garret rooms on the fourth (fifth) floor. I booked one of these “compact singles,” expecting it to be a hole in the wall into which I could insert myself and my bags, and to my delight it turned out to be a charming and nicely-appointed little space with a nice view of the street, where a light snow is falling. There’s a TV on the wall at the foot of the bed, and they’ve even managed to find space for a desk. The bathroom is predictably tiny, but quite nice. After living 12 months in a 6x12x10, this roughly 8x7x7 space seems quite livable, at least for three days.

Last night I walked out and bought a supper to eat in my room. I passed places I’d eaten and shopped and done my laundry in, and in the process reminded myself how much I sometimes miss dear old London. That said, I’ll be happy to get back to my life and my people and my projects, none of which are here.

I’ll be off with Dev Agarwal and Terri Trimble tonight, to the streets around Waterloo Station, to find a good curry.

This is Your Brain in Leicester

Leicester used to be the place from which I caught a train to Hinckley. I spent so much time in Hinckley during 2008 that I developed a fondness not only for that place and its wide variety of cheap curries, but for the unprepossessing railway platforms of Leicester. One incident in particular stands out: I had just come on a Sunday night from enjoying a leisurely coach journey from Hinckley, necessitated by engineering works on the railway. The journey was so leisurely, in fact, that when I arrived on the platform I’d missed the last train to London.

I remember well the compassion of the Midland Mainline employee as she regarded me with head cocked in disbelief: “The LAST train to LONDON left TEN MINUTES AGO!” as if I alone in all the land had not memorized the timetable. I had to find a hotel room.

Now in those days I was living in London on £400 a month, something many people, including my friends at Her Majesty’s Customs and Immigration, thought was impossible. And I was living well, eating three meals and a TV time snack in a comfy room in a nice neighborhood. But even with what help my loved ones could give, the travel demands of my training were hard on the budget. Rent included utilities, so everything I had left after the landlady came around on Monday for 80% of my weekly budget was divided into a) food and b) everything else. Everything else often included a monthly rail journey to Hinckley for my Master Practitioner training.

So when I found myself facing taking the cost of a Leicester hotel room out of the bank, you might imagine my dismay. A lovely taxi driver drove me to a hotel quite near the rail station, where I negotiated a rate that made me feel a little better, and all was well, as usually happens, does it not?

So now Salad’s trainings are being held in Leicester, where I was for the past week. I had no internet connection worthy of the name, hence the lateness of this post. So I’ll say that Leicester was a great place to spend a week, that Carluccio’s and Mem’Saab offer a great menu for the price, and that the U.S. needs more pie shops. I ate most of my lunches and a couple of dinners from Urban Pie, and a fellow delegate, seeing me tuck in to my pie and mash, said “Oh, that’s so ENGLISH!” And so it was. And so was she; I was the only Yank in the room aside from our trainer.

Christina Hall has got to be one of the most amazing trainers in the world, and that sentiment was echoed by several delegates who had taken NLP trainer training with others at the top of the field, including from Bandler and Grinder themselves. The training was spectacular. When she’s through with me in July I ought to be able to teach any subject with a lot more skill and a lot more understanding of the learning process; when this is done I may actually have earned my “Jedi Master” title. I made new friends and continued old friendships, and made new understandings from previously-acquired knowledge, and ate lots of pies and mash. What else could one ask?

Sneaking in (and out)

Left: Look closely - I'm in row 27

It's Wedsneday afternoon, and I'm waiting for my flight to Heathrow to start boarding. I'll only be in Old Blighty for two weeks this time, and another two in the summer, so I hope no-one's expecting any mind-expanding travel commentary, but I'll do what I can.

The occasion for these next two trips is NLP Trainer training, which I'll be doing in Leicester with Christina Hall. Chris is a big name in NLP for a few reasons: one is that a lot of people think she's a fantastically good trainer (I had the privilege to spend three days learning from her a couple of years ago, and I agree); one is that she's been in this field since Richard Bandler was a slender young man with a full head of hair. Last but not least, she's famous for being the person RB sued back in 1990-ish over who owned "NLP." The court ruled nobody did, and that's about all I know about the whole matter. I respect and admire both parties in the dispute, and my interest pretty much ends there.

When I came back from my training with Chris in 2007, I rhapsodized to my friend Michael Perez, who said "Now you know how Richard used to teach, many years ago." Dr Bandler is famous these days for teaching in ways that impact the unconscious mind more than the waking one. The result is that you learn a lot, but aren't necessarily sure what you learned until you find yourself doing it. He has training partners who handle the more cognitive bits, but what he does is more indirect and...dare I say it...sneakier. He's a sneaky genius.

Some people, it must be said, find Dr Bandler scary. A friend once asked me if I did. I replied that I find being held at gunpoint by a psychotic for several hours scary (and after that, not a lot else is, when you think about it), and I think RB's a very eccentric genius with a tremendous amount of compassion. I'm glad I was able to learn from him, and I'm glad I'm going to be spending two weeks this year soaking in as much as I can from Chris Hall. She rocks.

Before and after training I'll be visiting with friends and re-igniting my love affair with London. When I land I'll go directly to Cambridge to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who've been the inspiration for several of my earlier posts, and after a few days enjoying winter in East Anglia, I'll head for Leicester, then on to London after training. Meanwhile, as it occurs to me to write here, I will. I miss the old blog, and it's good to be back, even if only for a while.

Au revoir, Seattle! Look out, England!

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.

I’m Already Gone

My strategy for leaving England used to be to save my packing for the day before the flight. One memorable trip saw me throwing stuff into suitcases as the taxi was waiting downstairs to take me to the airport.

This time it’s been different in more ways than one. My baggage allowance coming over in March was three pieces of checked luggage. Flying home from Heathrow, British Air are restricting me to two. There are interesting problems of folding not only space, but an entire extra suitcase. The pain I always feel at my departure, which used to be sudden and sharp, is being drawn out over several extra days, and I still have Tuesday and actually leaving to look forward to, much as one looks forward to the next jolt of pain from a bad knee.

I have felt myself getting closer to Seattle and the folks I left behind there almost since the moment I took my luggage out of the cupboard. Such is the power of symbols on the mind. Strangely, this has not made me more distant from where I am. I see everything that’s become familiar to me, and suddenly I remember that it’s actually strange. It’s like having eyes in two realities, and it’s exceedingly weird.

Since I already know I’ll be back next year – I’ve got training lined up from April till September – I’m disinclined to leave all my household stuff for the next tenant, only to have to buy it again in six months. Since Ana has offered me a rental room in her house in Boston Manor while I’m looking for digs next spring (that’s if I can’t move back in to this house), I’m pretty sure she’ll agree to store a couple of Tesco bags full of things in one of the houses. Having a Brita jug and some seasonings to come back to makes me feel less like a visitor and more like I might almost belong.

But that’s neither here nor there to London. Just as London didn’t notice when I arrived, it will probably take neither pleasure nor pain at my leaving. I am not even a blip on London’s radar. Sometimes I wonder why I bother, but never for long. I know why.

So here’s to Tuesday. Here’s to leaving one life and returning to another, and to familiar and beloved faces at the airport. Here’s to bending time, as one does going west, so that a 9-hour flight will take only an hour and a half by the clockface. When they can apply that magic to the check-in queue at Heathrow they’ll really be on to something.

Au revoir, London. See you in dreams.

Land of the (Smoke-) Free

England went smoke-free in all public and work spaces about six weeks ago. For most of us that was a banner day. The process of arriving at that day (1 July 2007) was not easy and not free of strong emotion and strong beliefs on both sides.

Celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the more famous anti-ban campaigners, argued that “Pubs are not health clubs…” and “Death awaits you whether or not you smoke.” True enough on both counts, Mr Hockney, without having jack to do with the subject at hand. Of course there’ll be a few people who disagree (still!) that smoke is harmful, and they’ll probably also argue that the fact that the NHS estimates it’s been shelling out £1.7 billion per annum on treating smoking-related illness (often, it must be said, unsuccessfully), doesn’t mean those people actually sickened and in some cases died because they or people around them smoked. Whatever. Many of us used to believe (spoiler alert!) in Santa Claus, too. Now we're adults and we know better.

And then there are people who believe that smoke is harmful when they take it into their own lungs, but not to the people around them. See above.

In 2004, I remember being amazed and amused to learn that Ireland would have a smoking ban in effect before England. The Irish seemed even fonder of their smoke than the English, but there they were cleaning up the air. In fact, not only the Republic of Ireland, but also Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all had bans in effect before England.

But now it’s official. Loopholes are built in for some bus shelters (depending on your local council) and phone boxes, and smoking has another year to run in psychiatric wards, until 1 July 2008. Then you’d better watch out for a lot of really cranky British psychos.

Unlike the state of Washington, where I live when I’m not here, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about smoking in doorways, so as I pass by pubs these days, the doorways are often crowded with smokers obeying the letter of the law. There are metal boxes on a lot of lamp-posts for depositing fag-ends, and I’ve actually witnessed smokers using those, though dropping them on the pavement is still more the rule than the exception in some places.

And what of public opinion? It all depends who you talk to, of course. Some smokers interviewed by the newspapers and TV say they don’t mind the ban – “It makes it nicer for non-smokers.” “I’ve been smoking a lot less.” Some non-smokers don’t seem to get the point – “I don’t smoke myself, but I think the smoking ban spoils the atmosphere.” Of course that person is 21; she may someday have the sense to be grateful for the extra years she’s been given a chance at.

And while few will still argue that smoking doesn’t kill, we’ve already had a tragic case of it contributing to murder. On 23 July at a nightclub in Fulham Broadway - just south of where I live - James Oyebola, a retired boxer, asked some customers to comply with the law and put out their cigarettes. One of them shot him in the face as he left the club. His family took him off life-support four days later, after he was declared brain-dead.

I’d like to remind any Americans out there how rare firearm deaths are in the U.K. Unlike our own country, gun crime over here is less than 0.5% of violent crime and less than 0.01% of total crime. If you adjusted for population the U.S. would still have 34 times the U.K.’s number of gunshot homicides, according to crimeinfo.org.uk., and that statistic doesn’t mention those who are shot, but don’t subsequently die of their wounds. So a guy getting shot to death for any reason is headline-worthy, top-news-story-worthy, even in a city the size of London. For the reason to be a request to put out a cigarette makes it that much more horrifying. For it to have happened in easy walking distance of my house makes me even sadder than I might feel otherwise, as though I owned some part of the tragedy. I probably heard the sirens that night, and wondered what was going on.

So cigarettes are bad, o-kay? Let’s be grateful if we don’t smoke ’em, and grateful if we live somewhere smoking ’em is banned in public. While we’re at it, let’s be grateful for no good reason other than feeling gratitude. Peace out.