Admittedly random questions

The current snapshot

I apologize in advance to my beloved friends in Scotland or Birmingham when I admit we in London for a few days but are not coming to north this trip. It’s not that we don’t want to see you (we most definitely do) but the agony of potential train disruptions due to the seemingly ubiquitous ‘industrial action’ meant we could only face one stop in winter.

My husband wanted to hear high quality classical music so we came here to get more bang for our Yankee buck. And the music in our first two concerts has been ethereal. So, mission accomplished. And Messiah is yet to come!

Let me say upfront I am well aware everything I write today is built on an unrepresentative sample of anecdotes so I have not lost my mind but have some observations surprising me.

London is a substantially different city than the one where I studied forty plus years back; I have known that since I returned in 1989 to find people no longer queued for things but acted like a mob to board trains or get into a grocery store (that was not the British society of the 70s which was orderly but far less affluent). Stores are open on a Sundays, first off. The sidewalks are overflowing as shoppers are laden with gift bags. It is tres gratifying to find bookstores utterly brimming with people purchasing books but is that common across the country?

The pervasiveness of electrical vehicles is also shocking as Teslas join the LEVC taxis (which I assume must mean London Electrical Vehicle Company cars) silently gliding along the streets of the capital where they can avoid the traffic jams. It is rare seeing a charging station unoccupied. I can’t say I see that phenomenon at home in large metropolitan areas but perhaps I am missing these stations in major streets. This is a busy City of multimillionaire so they put the recharging where they can.

I am gratified beyond belief to see plant-based menus but things are not really ‘pubby’ anymore. A Ploughman’s lunch has appeared on zero menus I have examined but that could be just London. Menus online for Scottish restaurants, however, do seem to include plant-based options which sure wasn’t the case when we visited as recently as eight years back.

We are finding it hard to book meals, first because there so many higher end restaurants rather than beloved pubs and, more relevant, I am still astonished one books a dinner in London at the kind of places we go (I admit being so passé). In short, the prosperity overwhelms one’s sense in central London.

Lots of shops are empty as true in Manhattan, Seattle, or San Francisco. The pandemic left its mark everywhere.

But this city is definitely thriving. Or, it is it just the central part of the metropolitan area?

Or was there so much incredible wealth produced across England as one portion of the United Kingdom after decades of growth?

Or is this all a facade? If things are so well, why are teachers, National Health Service employees, transportation workers, and others at various times still talking about strikes and taxes? Are they simply anti-Tory while the Londoners are anti-Labour?

Or it most likely is something in between. Yet the folks in this city are upbeat and ready to face the new year without fears, it would appear.

And that is the part I find most curious. The Tory Party, with its peculiar in-fighting and seemingly stunning ineptitude in so many ways, has at most 13 months longer to rule without holding a general election yet the fits and starts on taxes, sending immigrants to Rwanda until a court rejected the plan, returning Lord Cameron of Brexit miscalculating fame to the cabinet, and other scandals still retain a majority in Parliament because Labour apparently is even more inept and there does not have to be an election until early 2025. Labour keeps winning by-elections yet the Tories under Rishi Sunak hold the power. I think the Labour leader Keir Starmer faced a de facto slap today because he said something positive about Margaret Thatcher. (Heavens, sounds about like the intolerances of our own political fringes). British politics sounds as bad as ours. Odd odd odd odd.

What amazes me is that I am not seeing the effects of Brexit that I expected. We are still hearing so many foreigners, obviously feeling welcome like us. At tea in a kicky little tea shop on the edge of Covent Garden Friday, the table to my right was two German-speaking thirty-something’s raising their eyebrows at each other over the wee child at a table with its mother. They had jetted over for the day to shop, I could tell from my knowledge of German The table on my left were two Spaniards prattling on about how cheap it all was (perhaps we received their bill and ours? Did not seem all that cheap to me).

We have a sandwich bar where jacket potatoes with baked no beans still survive on the menu so we have had two lunches there. The staff during prior visits was Polish, I believe. The accents sounded Italian the first day we popped in, then our server was Bolivian (That is one I had yet to see before yesterday) as was everyone else on the weekend crew. So, clearly people are still coming here whether to savour tea amidst their shopping stops or to work in small food establishments. The biggest surprise has been the number of Spanish-speaking tour groups we have seen all over day and night.

But, how representative is this of the Brexit effect and how long will the prosperity last? The aforementioned industrial action doesn’t seem resolved but it also doesn’t seem to slowing down the country. Is that true everywhere? I read two British papers daily, The Guardian and The Telegraph which focus on the trials and tribulations of the society yet they could be on different planets. But I am not sure they give me as much information to answer my questions as I might expect or desire.

The logical answer is to visit more of this country which I cannot do on this particular sojourn. But, I also have to wonder whether London is simply

an outlier for Britain as a whole (most likely absolutely true). Alternatively, the dire Brexit effects could have been vastly overstated, thus making me and thousands of other analysts wrong (certainly could be true). Third, it may be that we are simply in such a tourista area of central London that we are missing truth (hard to imagine this is not the case).

I also have to wonder if Brexit’s effects aren’t going to be a more extended decline than what has occurred over the initial two plus years. if we believe the theory that bigger trade markets expand economies, then Brexit ought hurt Britiain. I do not want to see that but I fear it. Catastrophising can certainly happen.

It may be that the signs are not as evident on the individual level yet; a gradual change might be harder to recognise. A slow deterioration also might be a condition that Britons would embrace without feeling the need to change their individual beahviours, even if being ‘outside Europe’ seems somewhat less advantageous because of merely going through immigration queues or paying different rates for postage outside of the EU. Perhaps the lack of a cataclysmic change leads all to feel pretty ok even as gradual erosion occurs: who knows? Maybe things have not changed much after two years.

Europe may miss Britain more than they expected but their focus is to the East these days with the war in Ukraine. The Dutch vote for Geert Wilders last week raises new questions about the long-term trend for a Europe bound together into a single happy family. Britains probably feel smugness about that vote in some ways.

Again, the snapshot of time plays a roll in any analysis. How easily we forget we are always seeing only that glancing moment, regardless of the topic. The world can change in the blink of an eye, both for better or, sadly, for worse.

My husband and I have another couple of days to enjoy our time here. This gives me a bit to work out these questions. I expect to have more questions by the time we are wheels up but perhaps you, the faithful readers, will answer more effectively. Have you been to Britain recently? Do you have knowledge, from whatever authoritative sources, of how the Brexit story is proceeding? Please do share!

London is still beautiful. As someone less prone to enjoying cold temperatures than I. The past, I welcome the spaces with warmth as we found in the early 18th century St. Mary’s Le Strand last night where we heard Bach.

Be well and be safe. FIN