Month: May 2008

A Royal Home and A Sixties Theme

Lee Hausman
 
We went seriously Tourist on Wednesday and went over to nearby Windsor, about 10 miles away, and toured Windsor Castle. It’s the “oldest and largest occupied castle in the world”, according to the guidebook, and figures in “900 years of British history”. Queen Elizabeth is said to go there most weekends during the season when she’s in residence in London. The weather was a dreary and constant drizzle but at least it was warm; good weather to be inside.
 

Inside, touring the “State Apartments”, we agreed it was on a par with a visit to Versailles. The opulence and grandeur of the rooms is stunning. These are the public rooms used for various functions and some of the historic rooms, such as the King’s Bedroom, which are maintained for display only. Alas, no photography is allowed, of course.
 
The art on the walls alone is worth a visit: Rembrandt, Rubens, Canaletto, Gainsborough, and van Dyke, are there, to name but a few. The weaponry on display, arranged in clever patterns on high walls, is also quite amazing, from all eras of the British Empire. A staff of 150 lives in the castle to keep all that stuff well-polished and, no doubt,  to see to every Royal need.
 
What was once the moat around the interior keep is now dry and landscaped with a beautiful garden. The castle is quite a tourist draw, complete with airport-style security, and there were lots of visitors. The girls and I thought it was a marvelous afternoon. Be sure to put it on your list!
 
By popular demand we spent the girls’ last day here back in London. We had a nice, partly sunny day, and our first stop was the famous Abbey Road crosswalk that appeared on the Beatles album cover. Luckily, this is a “Zebra” crossing, which means traffic must stop if anyone is crossing.
 
And there were quite a few people there getting their pictures taken, slow-motion goose-stepping across ala the album cover. The actual Abbey Road Studios are two doors down and surrounded by a white wall that’s covered with graffiti greetings from pilgrims. The neighborhood, Saint John’s Wood, is very posh and seems an unlikely location for a studio.
 
In keeping with our 60’s theme, our next stop was Soho and Carnaby Street. In the 60’s, Carnaby Street was associated with the “Mod” fashion style and was home to many independent clothing designers. It eventually fell out of favor but has made a bit of a resurgence lately as a pedestrianised shopping zone between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, a block off of Regent Street. We spent the afternoon (mostly) window shopping and enjoying the good weather. The girls reported that the prices for everything were really high.  When we’d seen all there was to see in Soho, we walked down to Westminster to let the girls get some photos of themselves with Big Ben in the background, and then made it back into the tube before the afternoon rain began.
 

Incidentally, if you’ve been following this week of sight-seeing you should know that all of the places we visited charged an admission fee of between 10-15 GBP per visitor (yes, even Stonehenge). Contrast this to the Smithsonian Institution’s nineteen totally-free museums around Washington, D.C. !
 
Back in Reading, we rested up a bit and then went out for a nice farewell dinner. Afterwards, we strolled the Reading City Center, enjoying the warm evening and talking about our week. 
 
The next morning, I surrendered those two wonderful young women to the tender mercies of Virgin Atlantic airlines and sent them home. I started missing them the minute they were out of sight.
 
 
 

The Beauty of Stonehenge

Lee Hausman
 
For those following the Father-Daughters 2008 Tour, we high-tailed it Sunday in the pouring rain for two hours up to Leicester (US English: "Lester") and gave my new SatNav (GPS) navigation unit a test. It insisted on taking us there via the weirdest back-roads route you can imagine, with about 200 roundabouts, but otherwise it worked pretty well and we arrived on time. In Leicester, daughter Lindsay met up with an old girl friend who now attends Leeds University and the girls socialized and went to a few museums for the afternoon. I took myself off to a sports pub and watched some golf and had a fine afternoon with a pint and the Sunday London Times. Visiting over, we drove back in the evening, bullying the SatNav unit into taking the big motorways instead of back country tracks.
 
Monday was a “Bank Holiday” here, corresponding with Memorial Day in the US, and we generally lazed about and visited the local mall (“The Oracle”). We had a change of plans when we found out that the only seats left for new Indiana Jones movie were in the front row. The girls did some window shopping but found nothing they just “had to have”. After the past few days "on the go" it wasn’t bad doing nothing.
 
Tuesday, we fired up the SatNav once again and headed for Stonehenge! The site is about an hour from Reading and the SatNav took us right there. What an impressive sight! The massive stones, their arrangement and hillside prominence, and their mysterious history combined to create a wonderful experience for us. The girls found them enchanting and, even though you can no longer walk among the stones, it’s still a very interesting and engaging place.
 
The surrounding countryside is also impressive, with great open vistas across the Salisbury Plain, dotted here and there with burial mounds. It’s something to think about: the construction and use of this site was going on at about the same time the Egyptians were building their pyramids, yet we know comparatively little about the builders of Stonehenge and so much about the ancient Egyptians.
 
After an hour we saddled up again and headed for Avebury, another stone ring site nearby. It’s much larger than Stonehenge (so large a road goes through it and there’s a little village with a pub and post office within it) but much less impressive. None of its stones are rectangular which somehow makes them less esoterically pleasing and all of them had fallen and were re-erected in 1938 by an English archaeologist. You can walk freely among the stones and touch them, but the experience was diminished by the fact that sheep are used to keep the surrounding grass "cut" and their copious poop was everywhere. We spent most of our time watching our steps rather than enjoying the stones. My advice to you, prospective tourists, is to see Stonehenge but pass on Avebury.
 
We agreed that we enjoyed our day among the stones. The sheer mass of them (up to 100 tons) and the amazing effort it took to transport them to their places 3,000 – 5,000 years ago fires the imagination and it’s inspiring to visit them.
 
 
 

Who Was That Rotund Man?

Lee Hausman
 
We continued our Saturday tour of London by walking up to Piccadilly Circus (the “Times Square” of London) in time for the 4 pm matinee of The 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre. The 600-seat theater is entirely underground and has been around, in one form or another, since 1874. Our seats were comfy and in a good location. The 1915 novel The 39 Steps has been made into three movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, and is the story of an innocent man thrown into a spy intrigue, accused of murder, and pursued across England.
 
The play featured a great ensemble of four actors, playing 150 roles, with a minimal set and some wonderfully imaginative direction. And a lot a humor! At one point (the chase across the Scottish countryside) cut-out silhouettes of the characters were projected against a drop – and in the corner was the famous Hitchcock silhouette that used to grace his TV program in the 50’s. It was a very funny show and, we thought, over too soon.
 
We topped off our evening with a nice Italian dinner at one of the ASK branches in London and then went to Paddington to get our train back to Reading. However… the soccer fans we’d encountered in the morning were now returning, too. They were also in a sullen mood because they’d lost. Luckily, special trains had been laid on just for them and a serious number of policemen were there to keep things orderly. After a bit of confusion about which train was going where, we boarded the right train and found police on board it, too, which is pretty unusual. But the soccer fans were pretty subdued, which was a blessing, and our ride home was uneventful.
 
All in all, we had a very nice day out and I, for one, slept quite soundly that night!
 

Bunkering Down

Lee Hausman
 
The Churchill Cabinet War Rooms is the underground bunker from which Winston Churchill and his generals directed the British fight in WWII. It was built, in anticipation of the bombing that was sure to come when Germany declared war on England, beneath an office building near Downing Street.
 
The girls thought it sounded interesting, so we took the tour. The underground rooms have been faithfully restored based on WWII photographs. Some rooms were simply shut up and abandoned at the end of the war and their furnishings and maps are the originals. It’s a fascinating walk through the technology (very low) and trials (chamber pots) of those who led the defense of England during the months of The Blitz, the devastating "buzz-bomb" missile attacks, and the long road to victory.
 
The picture shows The Map Room; notice the heavy timbers that were installed to help support the 6-foot thick cement slab that was hastily poured above the basement rooms. At the time, no one knew if the bunker would actually survive a direct hit on the building above. Luckily, they never had to find out; apparently the location of the bunker was never discovered by German spies.
 
The bunker occupants included Churchill and his wife, his civilian advisors, his generals, military officers and staff, cooks, communications staff, and secretaries. Churchill refused to flee London and even occassionally watched the bombing raids from the rooftop of the office building above! He also went out after the raids into flattened neighborhoods to offer consolation to survivors.
 
The guided audio tour that came with our admission tickets provided all of the details, including the location the secret room that Churchill used for encrypted phone conversations with US President Roosevelt. So secret that most of the staff thought the room was a private flush toilet for Churchill’s personal use! Excerpts of Churchill’s speeches, the wail of air raid sirens, and the sounds of bombs exploding above are all piped in and add to the experience.
 
My daughters found it very interesting and it’s another fine tourist attraction for you to put on your list! P.S. Not for the claustrophobic, however.
 
 

Daughters on Holiday

Lee Hausman
 
I picked up my daughters, Lindsay and Sarah, at Heathrow airport last Friday and they were none the worse for the flight from Dulles (even if it was a few hours late departing). It was wonderful to see them and they are beautiful, poised, smart young women, and a tribute to their mom.
 

We took the walking tour of the Reading city center that afternoon and had dinner at the local Irish pub, O’Neil’s. Saturday morning we took the train into London and the girls got a close-up look at drunken soccer fans. All of the trains were jammed with fans from Bristol going to a big match in at the stadium in Wimbledon. We encountered these young men at 10:30 am and they’d already been drinking for several hours, and continued to do so on the train (which is legal here). Lindsay and Sarah wound yp sitting right amongst them while I stood in the aisle. I had to quietly put up with these louts oogling the girls and making a few sotto voce comments but, in the end, the boys behaved themselves. I dare say they probably would have been very surprised had they gotten frisky with their hands; Lindsay would have put them in their places in a flash. Mostly, the fans were just noisy and in the way.

 
We arrived at Paddington Station in London to transfer to the tube and there were hordes of additional soccer fans (and police keeping an eye on them) also getting on the tube and, sadly, going our way. With the added chaos of a shut down of one tube line for maintenance, the crush of soccer fans, tourists and natives made for another set of jammed train rides. It took us two hours to get from Reading to Westminster Abbey, about twice as long as usual.
 
We waited for about half an hour in line to get into Westminster Abbey. The girls, left, used the time to take many photos and pose for a few, too.
 
We spent an hour touring inside, and what an amazing architectural achievement a cathedral is. It’s also amazing that it survived the World War II bombings of London. The girls were fascinated – it’s so nice to have adult children who actually enjoy seeing things related to history! A lot of kings, queens, and knights are buried beneath the abbey’s floor and you walk right over their "horizontal headstones". The altars, side crypts, ceilings, and ornaments are really fascinating.
 
In one section, "Poet’s Corner", it was very cool to see the graves of Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Robert Browning, Chaucer, Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and others. And, of course, there was Issac Newton’s grave, which figured heavily in The Da Vinci Code. If you ever get to London, we recommend you see Westminster Abbey! Our next stop, discussed in my next post, was Churchill’s War Rooms.
 

Very Special Guests

Lee Hausman
 
My apologies for the sporadic nature of my recent posts. I’ve been preparing for the arrival of my two very special guests: Lindsay and Sarah, my 22- and 19-year old daughters. They’re arriving Friday for a week and I’m looking forward to seeing them. A number of other recent events has complicated my life (in a good way) including the addition of another employee at our office and the delivery of my leased company car.
 
Having a car has changed life immensely and opened up lots of things to do with my time: gym, driving range, golf, going to the super-duper grocery store across town, etc. It’s been interesting not having a car for 4 months but it’s also been limiting in many ways. Now I’m exploring the surrounding area and having a ball.
 
Stay tuned for Father-Daughters Adventure reporting!
 
 

Good Times at the Reading Library

Lee Hausman
 
Libraries are wonderful institutions and the Reading Central Library has provided me with a lot of good books to read. Some cultural observers think that, in the Digital Age, printed books, like newspapers, will die off but I strongly disagree. Something about the tactile experience when reading seems so fundamentally human, I hope it is never replaced by "digital book readers", several of which have come to market and failed. However, I feel the same way about the print version of newspapers and they are clearly under seige these days.
 
I was amused when I went to the Reading Library to get a library card; as a recent arrival here and someone who lives in a serviced apartment, I had neither a bank statement nor a utility bill, the common proofs of residence, to present. However, on the strength of my passport, I was allowed a "Junior Membership". This did not, in fact, restrict me to the children’s books but simply limited my borrowing to 2 books at a time, plus 1 CD and 1 DVD (more on these last items in a minute).
 
The Reading Library has a rather unusual book shelving system. Many fiction books are shelved in "A-Z by author name" fashion. However, there are "specialty subject" shelves as well, such as "Action & Adventure", "Adult Crime Fiction", and "Historical". It gets a little confusing when you find, as I have, that books by the same author and of the same genre are sprinkled around in all these areas. Locating a specific book is sometimes a challenge!
 
However, there is a modern stand of PCs, with a good catalogue search, so that helps a lot.
 
I’ve found no big lag between here and the US in terms of when books are released. Some of my acquaintance assure me that books are published here before being released in the US but I see no proof of that either. In general, the books in the Reading Library are not in as good condition as those commonly found in the Fairfax County library system, for example, though they’re not abused or torn up. That may say something about circulation rates being higher here or the US penchant for replacing perfectly good stuff when it shows a little age.
 
As I said, you can also "borrow" DVDs and CDs, however you must pay a rental fee or 1-2 pounds to do so, ala Blockbuster. I found this revenue center a bit surprising in a public library but that’s today’s economic reality, I guess. The library also features good-sized sections of books in several foreign languages reflective of the local immigrant communities.
 
I give thanks for the library here; it was a great comfort to have books to read for entertainment when I arrived. In these often-mercenary times, the idea of a free, lending library is just fabulous.
 
 

Farewell $1 Bill

Lee Hausman
 
From time to time you read about the U.S. Treasury department considering doing away with the $1 bill. They say it would be much better, for many reasons, to replace it with a coin. These stories usually also contain many reasons why it would be a bad idea, not the least of which is the failure of the Susan B. Anthony and Sachajawea $1 coins to "catch on".
 
Apparently, almost every other industrialized nation has already made the switch. And, here in the U.K., there is no 1 Pound note, only a coin. This coin is small in diameter but pretty thick and easily identified both visually and by touch. They’re also heavy and a pocketful of them is pretty weighty. There’s also a 2 Pound coin which is widely-used and reduces the bulge in your pocket.
 
So, as a newcomer here making the monetary system transition, has it been a shock not having a 1 Pound note? Not at all – I’ve not noticed any operational inconvenience as a result of having to use only 1 Pound coins. In fact, I think I find it rather more convenient to be able to make most small purchases without having to haul out my billfold.
 
I chalk up the poor acceptance of the Susan B. and Sachajawea dollars to their sizes (one’s too big and the other’s too close to a quarter) and the continued presence of the competing $1 bill. In addition, cash register drawers here are designed so that coins get most of the real estate, which is just the reverse in the U.S. making it difficult for cashiers to find a place to put the $1 coins that do come their way.
 
I think the U.S. would find that doing away with the $1 bill would not be the end of the world and that retail commerce would very quickly adjust. Coins apparently last 5-10 times as long as bills, are cheaper to produce, and are harder to counterfeit. Go for it, U.S.!
 
While we’re on the topic of handling money to buy things, every now and then I find myself still surprised by the fact that you pay the exact cost of an item. There is no sales tax on most consumer goods, so the if the price is 6.99, you hand over 6.99. I suppose it’s the same in states that have no sales tax, like Florida, but decades of dishing out an extra 4-5% in Virginia has made an impression, and it’s a pleasure not to have to do so here. They do, of course, have the dreaded Value Added Tax (VAT) on lots of stuff here and that’s 17.5% of the item cost!
 
 
 
 

Rugby: The Sport of Men

Lee Hausman
 
Today I attended my first professional rugby match, featuring the local favorites, The London Irish, versus Leeds. There’s a nice stadium just outside town and convenient bus service from the city center, so off I went. I’d followed this team a bit over the last few months here, watching parts of matches in pubs, but I was intent on attending because today was their last home match of the season.
 
Rugby has the reputation of being a brutish sport and most Americans know little about it. It is, actually, a very interesting game, requiring lots of strategy, skill, and athleticism. The rules are totally beyond me, though, and learning them is my off-season challenge. Note that rugby doesn’t attract the kind of violent fans that football (soccer) does here. Supporters of both teams mingle in the stands and will even applaud scoring and good plays made by the opposing team.
 
I’m going to post my observations and leave an explanation of the game to Wikipedia. I plan to look for a “Rugby for Idiots” book to see if I can figure out what’s going on during the off season.
 
The stadium is very nice but small: maximum capacity 25,000. So, there’s not a bad seat in the house. My walk-up ticket was in the upper deck, along the south side of field and just a bit off center. The view was fantastic.
 
The scoreboard is modest in size and tucked into one corner of the stadium; there were no pre-match fireworks, dancing girls, etc. though the crowd sang along with traditional Irish songs that were played. Did I mention this team has a heavy Irish heritage thing going? Yep, and so do I: me mum was of Irish descent.
 
     
 
The teams engaged in 40-minutes of pre-match warm-ups, calisthenics, and drills before withdrawing to their locker rooms. Local middle school children formed the “Walk of Honor” down which both teams later entered the field. The players are a bit like NASCAR vehicles, with advertisements plastered on their jerseys, totally upstaging the team name, but the whole scene was very charming anyway.
 
There was no security search of bags upon entry, there’s no smoking in the stadium at all, and alcohol is only sold before and after a match, and during half time. When they’re being sold, you may stock up on beers and take them to your seat, but I saw no one who behaved as if they needed to be cut-off.
 
The traditional stadium hot dog exists here, too, only it’s a foot-long and served in a baguette (French bread). From the look of them, they enjoy the same questionable nutritional content and health risks inherent in all stadium dogs.
 
      
 
A match has two 40-minute halves and 5 points are apparently awarded for running the ball across the goal line, 2 points for the “extra point kick”, and 3 points for a penalty kick. The extra point kick, for reasons that eluded me, is kicked straight-on sometimes and sometimes from a right or left hash mark (which makes for a much smaller target). Get this: the team who is scored against must then kick off to the team that scored! A sort of “off-sides”, high tumbling kick is usual, followed by a wild scramble for the ball.  Team members who are “on the bench” often stand behind the end zone and shout encouragement as their teammates approach to score.
 
Basically, the ball (which is football-shaped) is moved down the field using a series of lateral passes (must always go backwards) that moves the ball down a running wave of players spread across the field. Ball carriers are tackled and brought down and immediately swarmed by players. The ball squirts out the back of the pile and the lateral passes begin again. The ball hitting the ground and being “down” isn’t a concept that applies here. Helmets, shoulder and kidney pads, and all that other sissy U.S. football gear isn’t worn either. Oddly enough, no one was injured and carried from the field during the match.
 
Well, anyway, it was a terrific afternoon and lots of fun. I’m considering buying season tickets for next season (starts in August) which are laughably cheaper than, say, Redskins season tickets. Oh, yes, we won: 43 to 20.