An English Holiday

I spent the last week in London with Pumbaa. It wasn't like I needed a holiday but Chuckles was being overly indulgent so I took advantage.

Those who know me know I am a closet anglophile. I can't tell you the exact moment when that happened. It may have been while I read Shakespeare's sonnets or the highly embellished poems of the Romantics. It may have happened over a particularly spectacular description of the moors in Wuthering Heights or even as the grit and grime of Dickensian London slowly unfolded itself before me. As a curious teen I spent hours discussing Darcy and Rochester and Carton and inevitably falling in love with the same characters like countless women before me. Were all Englishman like them? By the way, is there a woman who isn't in love with Darcy?

Five years of English Literature and many, many P.G. Wodehouse books later I knew that I had to visit London. Though I must admit the recent hullabaloo over the Royal wedding, I did dither a little. But my faith was strong. After all Pumbaa and I had been planning for the past three years.

I dreamt of going on long literature walks, treading the same paths as Austen and Dickens. Reading a book by the Thames. Sitting at a cafe and sipping tea as I watched London pass by. Visiting Liverpool to pay homage to the Beatles. Or just flipping through a book at Hyde Park. All that was surprisingly not to be. We did go to London but it was not dreamy and airy and frou-frou.

It was all about being the perfect archetypical tourist, complete with guide book in one hand and map in the other, camera slung around the neck, asking for directions. We walked through the bustle of Oxford Circus and caught the lights at West End. We rode the bus through Bloomsbury and Holborn and imagined the narrow lanes of Dickensian London. We watched Dr. Faustus at the Globe while standing for two hours and 45 minutes. We toured the Tower and gasped at the decadent opulence of the Crown Jewels. We shared space with fellow tourists at Stratford-upon-Avon and silently discussed what a waste of a day trip it had been. We listened to a woman squeal about her unbelievably good fortune at scoring tickets for a Take That reunion concert, in a north English accent. We ate ice-cream by the Thames and I practiced my fake British accent. We looked ridiculous as we took pictures at Abbey Road. We walked till our legs threatened to leave us. Through Soho, through Leicester square, through Southwark and Westminister till finally it was time to go. We saw everything and simultaneously saw nothing.

After Faustus at the Globe

Not once did I open a book and read at Hyde Park or sit by the River Thames and marvel as Wordsworth had at London. I had done everything a tourist would do and then some. Well played London, well played.