Monthly Archives: June 2013

Wisdom From David Frum

Bob and I are in Nottingham, visiting with our granddaughter Sarah and her partner. It has been delightful–but would be better if Bob didn’t have an increasingly awful cold and hacking cough. We’ll do a first-hand exploration of the British health-care system this morning; flying home with an untreated upper respiratory infection probably isn’t the best idea.

I’ll try to report more on Nottingham tomorrow, but blogging may be spotty until we get back to Indy on Thursday. Meanwhile, I urge you to click through and read this essay from David Frum. As most of you know, Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush; since his service in that administration, however, he has been making a lot of sense, with the result that he’s been labeled a RINO by the ideologically extreme members of the GOP.

Frum is a thoughtful and genuine conservative voice, and he deserves to be heard. Whether the movement is too far gone and too rigid to listen is an open question.

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About that Identity Crisis

I blogged yesterday about our unfortunate experiences entering Stratford Upon Avon. (My unstated conclusion was that the town is confident that William (Shakespeare) will continue to pull in the tourists, and additional efforts are unnecessary.)

That said, we did encounter a couple of wonderful, helpful people. When we got off the train in Stratford, we were on the opposite side of the tracks from the station, requiring us to negotiate one of those bridges that spans the tracks. Up a flight of stairs, across, and then down to the platform. I had the big suitcase, and a young man insisted on carrying it for me up, across and then down the steps, despite my protests that I could handle it. Bob’s experience was similar–a man traveling with his toddler daughter took both cases across the bridge for him.

In my case, the helpful young man was an Arab. Bob’s helper was black.

I don’t want to use this happenstance to draw any large social conclusions; I simply note it. But we have both remarked upon the changing composition of the English crowds we’ve encountered on this trip. Americans like to think our country is more diverse than other western industrialized nations, but if our observations are representative, multiculturalism is hardly confined to the U.S. As we looked out the windows at each of the 15 stops between London and Stratford, we were struck by the number of women wearing hijabs (even a few burkas), and others who clearly were not from stereotypical English backgrounds.

Those observations made me think about our dinner companions on the just-ended cruise. We ate with a couple from Switzerland whose son lives in Florida and whose daughter lives in Germany. The wife’s sister lives in Paris. The couple themselves have a flat in Nice, an apartment in Florida and their “ancestral” home in Switzerland. They are multi-lingual (I always feel like an ugly American around people who are fluent in three or four languages…). During our trip, we met a number of people with such multiple “homes” and what one might call “shared identities.”

Is there a point to these random observations? Probably not–unless we chalk up all these experiences to “the world is changing” and “you can’t tell a book by its cover.” Stereotypes–racial, national, religious, what-have-you–have never been particularly reliable, but in the world we inhabit, they have gone from being marginally useful to downright misleading.

Sometimes, travel outside one’s safe, familiar world is a forcible reminder that identity is a social construct.

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Calling the Chamber of Commerce–in Stratford Upon Avon

Okay….I’m the first one to bitch when we do things badly in Indy. But let me tell you–we’re WONDERFUL compared to Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Here is my tale of …woe, or whatever.

We disembarked from our fabulous cruise ship this morning, in Tilbury, outside London, and we were bussed to Victoria Station. (The cruise was wonderful, by the way. No complaints. I hope we can do it again.) We took a taxi to Marleybone Station, and the train from there to Stratford-upon-Avon. (NOT Stratford ON Avon–if you search British rail for that, you come up empty. It’s UPON, thank you very much.) The train was great. Prompt, clean, user-friendly. Impressive bathrooms.

We got to Stratford UPON Avon at 3:30 in the afternoon. Although it is quite a bustling place, there were no taxis at the station. I asked the sole employee of the place how we might get a taxi, and she pointed (disinterestedly) to a bulletin board with taxi numbers–none of which I was able to reach. I asked the ticket agent what I was doing wrong, and she responded “I have no idea” and turned away. I assumed my inability to get through  was my lack of understanding of Iphone calling in another country, but an incredibly nice young man who turned out to be from Cincinnati  told me that he’d actually gotten through, and been told that the distance from the train station to the town center was too short to justify a taxi–“you can just walk.”

So my 80-year-old spouse and I schlepped our three bags–one huge one that we’d hoped to ship home but couldn’t and two smaller ones–into the center of Stratford. And schlepped. And schlepped. Meanwhile, my poor husband was coughing and hacking, having caught a cold earlier in the week. After we’d walked a considerable distance, we saw–oh joy!–a cab stand. I ran toward the cab in front, dragging my gigantic Kirkland suitcase; he opened the door. I told him the name of our hotel. He closed the door.

“It’s a five-minute walk. Just at the bottom of that street, then turn right.”

On we went. Both of us schlepping. Bob coughing. Me sweating. (And no, I was NOT in a good mood at this point.)

We finally found our hotel. We even found the check-in desk (not a simple task.) We were informed that our room was on the first floor (in Europe that is the first floor ABOVE the ground floor). No help with our bags, no elevator. Steep stairs. No apparent concern from the desk clerk.

We had reserved and paid for tickets to “As you like it” at the Shakespeare theater, but Bob’s cough was really bad. We figured we’d do the other patrons a favor and skip the performance, but I was really worried about Bob, and asked the desk clerk where I might find a drugstore/chemist. She gave me (incorrect) directions, and I took off, fairly panicked at his constant hacking. Several wrong turns and four requests for directions later, I found a lovely lady pharmacist in a large drugstore called Boots. That was the store the desk clerk had suggested, but nowhere remotely near where she told me it was located. The nice lady sold me a cough medicine and I (literally) ran back to our hotel. (It has helped already, to my great relief. Wives really do worry…)

There’s no WiFi in our room, so we are currently in the hotel bar, responding to email and (in my case) drinking. And listening to Bob’s (thankfully diminishing) coughing.

The bar television is turned to a cricket match. I’m sure Mayor Ballard would be delighted.

All of this reminded me that, back when I was in City Hall, Mayor Bill would periodically have meetings with cab drivers and hotel personnel in the downtown area. He would remind them how important they were–how important first impressions of a city can be.

No shit.

Let’s just say I’m not a fan of Stratford UPON or ON or UNDER Avon. IF there is a Chamber of Commerce in this place, they are doing a crappy job.

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