Tag Archives: London

The Harbinger of Death Gave Me the Finger

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, Travel, , , , , , , , ,

This first appeared in June 2013 during a short semester teaching abroad in London.

Nothing good can come from this.

The raven bothered me. Walking through Highgate Cemetery in the late afternoon with a small group of students looking for the graves of one of my favorite authors (Douglas Adams), and some guy named Marx (not Groucho, the serious one who worried more about the fate of the proletariat than he did of proper beard maintenance), a raven’s caw split the stillness of this ancient, vine-covered final resting place of roughly 170,000 people.

I froze and looked around. Nothing.

The raven, an intelligent, three-pound creature marked by legend to signal the end of the British Empire if the flock left the Tower of London (only about six are left there), was really, really close. But, scanning the heavy deciduous canopy that loomed over about 53,000 gravestones, this black bird, as big as a small dog, was invisible. Was it even there at all? This was the only time the harbinger of death cawed during my trip to the cemetery and I got more nervous with each step.

Highgate Cemetery, a friendly sort of place.

Then my chewing gum crunched. “Ouch,” I said, spitting gum into my hand. Bits of silver dotted the green glob. Are you kidding me? I stuck my tongue into the hole in my tooth just to be sure. I lost a filling?

At the caw of the raven, a vital piece of oral hardware popped out, opening my jawline to infection and, what was worse, giving me an extreme sensitivity to all the beer I planned to drink while in England. I was 4,290.5 miles away from my dentist. Problems with teeth, much like problems with your private parts, aren’t things people worry about when they’re away from home. Travelers are more concerned with pickpockets and having to talk to French people.

At that moment, I did what any British person would do in this situation; I went to the pub.

The cemetery sits atop a steep hill in the Highgate area of London as most things there do. Of course, some things also sit at the bottom of a steep hill. The pub we found was somewhere in the middle. Set back from the street, the Whittington Stone looked a bit more modern on the outside than most pubs I’ve been to, although that might mean it’s less than 500 years old. Inside, it captured the dark wood, and friendly “welcome and get politely drunk” atmosphere British pubs are known for.

The Whittington Stone pub is named after Richard Whittington (1354–1423), a merchant, four-time Lord Mayor of London, and epic champion of the lower class who founded a hospital for unwed mothers (it’s unknown if he helped them get their start), funded drainage systems for the poorer sections of London, and founded a charity that still exists. The “stone” on this hill is where he sat and heard ringing from Bow Bells Church six miles away; apparently 400 years before the Internet that was a pretty big deal for poor people in East London. A weatherworn statue of Wittington’s cat, a legendary mouser, sits just up the street from the pub.

Getting the hang of all this pub business (this was only a couple days into our journey), my students and I found a table, wood with a brass number at the end, and grabbed a menu. One of the many great things about pubs is what they do with their menus. Most pubs post menus outside so you don’t have to go in to realize you’ve made mistake and need to be somewhere else. A chalkboard marquee set up out front took the posted menu’s place, offering shepherds pie for £5.99, a pretty cheap price for dinner in London. Considering I’ve spent a pound more for just a hamburger (albeit a proper hamburger), £5.99 was right in my price range. The menu inside one-upped the marquee. It boasted a two-for-£7 deal my students took full advantage of.

My students ordered barbecue chicken, fish and chips, and one of them decided it would be best to flirt with the barmaid. 

“What are you going to eat, Offutt?” one student asked.

Me? With fish and chips, a beef sandwich, and the chalkboard shepherds pie all looking delicious, I played with my tooth hole. 

“Beer,” I said. “I’m going to have beer.”

Lots. The best part, I didn’t have to chew. Wait. That was the second best part.

Running into a quasi-medical problem so far away from home in 2013 isn’t like it was in 1847, or even 1987. I took advantage of the six-hour time difference and cell phone technology and called my dentist. 

“There’s a product called Dentemp,” he said. “It’s a temporary filling. Get that and I’ll see you when you get home.”

In 1847, a traveler with a tooth problem may have died an agonizing, oozy death. Today I just went to the chemist (pharmacy) and got the British equivalent to Dentemp, Toofypegs (a name I assume people at an ad agency came up with while high on nitrous oxide). I was going to be fine. As for the rest of the trip—I survived my trip to England without an oral infection.

Screw you, raven.

Introspection From a Night at the Pub

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, , , , , ,

This first appeared May 30, 2013 during a short semester teaching abroad in London.

The Warwick Arms.

It’s interesting what kind of insight you get about yourself when it’s through the eyes of someone who thinks you’re a bit silly, by which I mean they know you’re American.

The Warwick Arms is a friendly sort of pub (I’d like to think they all are). The warmth as you walk in is welcoming compared to the ever present cold rain that falls on London an average of 160 to 200 days of the year. Yellow tungsten lights glow on a wall of liquor bottles behind a polished wooden bar that spouts taps of UK beers like Fuller’s London Pride and Guinness Stout. Barmaids fill pint glasses of these room temperature beers by cranking hand pumps, no American Co2 set-ups here. Traditional British food like meat pies and fish and chips dot the menu, as well as a long list of Indian food.

But the most interesting part of any night at the pub is the locals.

“He was a piece of shit,” a man in a blue delivery uniform I’d soon discover was named Tom said to a gentleman in a tweed jacket (I’m not making that up) named Bob (I’m not making that up either). Both gentlemen sat on stools next to me at the bar.

Tom referred to British-born Michael Adebowale who brutally murdered British military drummer Lee Rigby near the southeast London Woolwich barracks in London May 22. Like Adebowale, his accomplice Michael Adebolajo was a convert to radical Islam. Witnesses say the men butchered Rigby with a knife and meat cleaver on a city street.

Bob took a pull of an amber lager in a tall, thin pint glass and sat it onto a Fuller’s London Pride coaster on the bar. “These were not smart boys,” he said. This was two days after the attack.

My goodness, my Guinness.

I took the dark black pint of Guinness the barmaid handed me, and turned toward Tom and Bob. “I doubt the American media has given this story more than a mention,” I said.

“Why’d you say that?” Tom asked.

Glad you asked, Tom. As a print journalist and current university journalism teacher, I feel I’m in a good position to criticize the media, and the American media is notoriously bad at covering its own country, let alone what’s going on overseas.

Like any good American, I didn’t realize I’d be wrong.

“When I came into town a couple of days ago, the front page of ‘The Metro’ (a free daily newspaper provided to the London Underground) was about the tornado in Oklahoma,” I said. “If a tornado hit a city of the same size here, the American media might not have mentioned it.”

“And why should they?” Tom asked. “There’s 300 million people there in America. There are 62 million people here. Why would they care?”

I didn’t expect that. The American media has faults – many, many faults, like the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo. When I drove to Canada in 2011, anyone who discovered I was from Missouri brought up a tornado that destroyed Joplin, Mo., months before. They seemed genuinely concerned. That same year, Tropical Storm Washi struck the Philippines killing more than 1,000 people. Can’t say I heard of it at the time.

“Say you’re in the middle of Utah,” Tom continued. “Why would you care about someone from Britain or from Kyrgyzstan, or even know where it is, you know?”

That made sense. But still. “Then why was the British press in Oklahoma?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of us over there,” Tom said. “More than you’d think.” Then he turned back toward Bob and resumed their conversation.

Sipping my inky black stout I thought Tom made a good point. Maybe the America-centric nature of the U.S. media isn’t because Americans don’t care about the rest of the world, it’s because, well, we really don’t care about the rest of the world.

“You’re not talking to me.” Bob’s voice grabbed my attention. He was in the middle of a story. “Piss off. My food’s getting cold.”

Bob howled in a belly laugh, and Tom joined him.

“Where you been so far?” Tom asked, turning back toward me, leaving Bob laughing at his own story.

“Today I went to Borough Market.”

Tom shook his head. “No, no. Burah. Burah Market. It’s spelled like that, though, isn’t it? Borough. But it’s pronounced Burah. You pronounce it Burr-oh.”

For an American, pronunciation in London is rather confusing. “I noticed that with the Thames (Tims) and Gloucester (Gloss-ter),” I said.

Tom nodded. “That’s because you Americans pronounce things phonetically. Which makes sense. With us, I don’t know. It’s hundreds of years of this. That’s just how it is.”

He drained his pint glass and motioned to the barmaid for another. “Where else you going over here?”

I smiled and said, “Stonehenge.” Maybe the most iconic 5,000-year-old structure on the planet, right up there with the Great Pyramid. It’s mysterious, something every school child reads about, or at least remembers from the first “Ice Age” movie, and I was going to hop on a bus and stand next to it in a few days.

“Stonehenge?” he asked, his voice rising a bit at the end. “You want to see a bunch of rocks?”

“Uh, yes,” I said.

“You do know they’re just in a circle, don’t you?”

Just another night at the pub.