The Food.

Before I left for England, advice was thrown my way like drunks playing darts in a pub. A lot of the advice was nonsensical, overly-critical, generalizing, or simply incorrect, however, a subtle nearly-invisible thread existed in their words. I’m going to take a leaf out of those people’s books and make a bold statement in the same light – only this statement is true. I’ll say it, I will. Everyone’s thinking it, but I’ll be the one to say it. The English can’t do food. Yes, it’s actually that bad.

Okay, maybe I’m not being fair. It’s not that I want to retract my statement so soon, but I don’t want my English friends to hate me. Let me rephrase: generally, the English can’t do food. (I don’t know if that changed anything, but I tried.)

Just imagine a perfectly good plate of…anything. Hamburger, pizza, chicken, fish, anything. Now imagine that perfectly acceptable plate of food left to soak in a pot of grease over a stove on Wednesday, only suddenly remembered once a copy of The Guardian hits a front door step on Sunday. The result is an overly-cooked and overly-soaked taste in a somehow-pulled-together, seemly-looking dish. You learn the tricks to cope, of course. Salt and pepper make everything better, naturally. But another unsung hero makes everything great: ketchup. Ketchup becomes the elixir that makes you wonder why any other flavor exists, let alone any other condiment. Ketchup on toast, soup, chicken, fish, vegetables, fruit, beans, meat pies, pancakes, everything. You can’t go wrong with it. Yes, this is my minor ode to ketchup. 

Mostly, I think it just comes down to the food being bland. Boring. There’s no excitement. We’d have to create fun with our food, like we were five years old again:

 (Also, note the irony of the copy of Oliver Twist featuring the starved orphan boy on the cover. Deep.)

There are a few common English dishes that aren’t all that bad – they just aren’t all that great. Shepherd’s Pie and the other pastry-fillers get old quicker than the accent, every sausage has an eyebrow-lifting air that makes you question your own taste buds, the Sunday Roast feels like it could stick to the ceiling above you, and Yorkshire pudding soaks up any bit of flavor gravy might’ve had before it consumed the rest of the plate. But, that being said, fish and chips is always a good fall back. In London, it seems like no matter where you are, there exists the distinct and lingering scent of fish and chips that permeates rooms, down halls, through walls. It’s in bathrooms, classrooms, clothing stores, under tables, in parks, on the bottom of shoes. The scent sends you in a trance; you can’t not give into it. The seduction begins with one single fine plate of fish and chips, and you’re set from there.

How could this not seduce you?

In all honesty, I ate so much fish and chips that I convinced myself for a whole solid week once I came back to America that I had mercury poisoning. (Hey, it could happen.) Somehow there was solace in adding vegetables to every dish. My body would crave all the nutrients of leafy greens lost with every grease-ridden, English bite. I felt like someone could actually end up eating veggies with every meal even if they despised them their whole life. Adding a scoop of peas to a slice of fish slathered in ketchup completed a picture no artist could dream of drawing simply because all the grease deprived you of real taste. Highly seasoned potatoes seemed to make a difference as well:

 

The strange food phenomena continued with Heinz beans. First of all, I’ll be the first to admit that the English version of Heinz beans trumps the American version hands down. I’m not sure why they taste different, but they do. Anyway, beans became a staple dish in my previously exclusive American diet. But an odd thing began to happen. Both my American roommate and I felt like we couldn’t heat up the beans, or even put them in a bowl, like they were unspoken rules among the English. It seemed they could only be eaten out of the can with a half-crooked fork and grimaced face. Every bite of bean felt like we were rationing for WWII. If it wasn’t in a can, it was depressingly poured over a piece of toast and, again, slathered with ketchup. It actually tasted okay, but boy, did it feel like a war was going on.

By that time, if I’d already bothered to make toast with my WWII-rationed beans, I’d probably complete the full English Breakfast experience and add an egg or two. Toast, beans, eggs, salt, pepper, and ketchup for days. This meal became so regular that the thought of eating eggs today makes me nauseous. I never thought food could become so…unalive.

Now, regardless of any of that, it’s time to get real. You wanna talk food? Let’s talk food. I’ll give you two words – two of the best words to ever get together and form a loose phrase: Indian food.

 

Without sounding too much like all those British morons who colonized everything in sight and saw India as “the jewel of the empire,” I can’t help but think that Indian food is just so…mystical. I take a single bite of that wonderful country’s supernatural cuisine and I’m instantly warm inside. It literally fulfills me. Naan, curry sauce, tikka masaala, wine, rice, chicken, lamb, and simosas begin to form a soup of mouth-watering comfort sliding down a throat and through a nation, a time, a crevice of the heart.

Somehow, this spicy, fiery culinary knife has cut through the soul of a bland, damp island in the northern Atlantic – but how? Can the Indian food of Brick Lane pervade the hearts of simplistic, dead, bland English food? For a brief time, my American roommate and I were convinced that the English were so stern and polite and subdued because they were inherently and continually unsatisfied from food. Is this too harsh? Maybe. Maybe not. Does food fuel a nation? Where else do we get our power from, if not the food we eat? There must be a connection between the non-existence of taste in English food and over-powering kick from Indian food that bring the colonized and colonizer together. Or maybe that’s all a lie.

One thing is for certain, though, every time I wander past a curry shop or stand selling moderately adequate fish and chips back here in America, my heart twinges. Perhaps the English have learned to survive on the sweetly bitter taste of nostalgia just like me.

The Transport.

The first spoken sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is “I love walking in London.” Initially, the sentence means nothing. But you take a walk or two in that city and you’ll understand the meaning behind those words.

Travel always seems to inspire us, doesn’t it? Never mind the mere existence of this blog, but I mean the everyday sort of travel, the mundane from here to there type of movement. Yeah, right, you’re probably thinking, what could be more inspiring than two hours of traffic on the 405, or three train delays on the A C E? Alright, traffic is a plate of tedious with a slice of hell, but travel is what takes you places. Literally.

 

Somewhere along the third or so train ride in and around London, I fell in love. That jittery feeling that enraptures the pit of your stomach when you board a train that’s seen all, been all, everywhere – I lose it. The split second before all the doors slide close and the train is just about to begin shuddering beneath your feet – that’s where the magic happens. Essentially, in that moment, you could be anywhere – in any city, any town, place, time, mind. This idea of going on a journey with a group of strangers is so thrilling that I find myself creating excuses to take a train somewhere outside the city to bring that feeling back. That little feeling almost travels itself sometimes, right off the train and into your step. How could you not carry with you the weight of knowingly moving through King’s Cross Station?

 Moving around London is like navigating an uncharted city without a written map. Each street turns and curves and twists into alleyways and streets and lanes a hundred years into the past only to turn up back in 2011 before the third streetlamp. There’s wonder in walking through this labyrinth with just the slightest bit of danger attached. You never know if you’re walking right into a trap: a place you’ve been before, or a place you’ll never seen again.

The Tube tends to have this affect as well. The Tube, properly called The Choobe, has, for some reason, become the ideal model of transport that puts everything else to shame. I don’t know why or how this started, but mastering the Tube became the equivalent of medaling at the Olympics for me. It seemed so impossible at first, but after a few visits, it was expected I’d get the gold. Everything is so clean and so bright and slick and beautiful shades of red, white, and blue flicker off streaking trains heading down darkened tunnels. Much like the rest of England, the sounds on the train are pretty minimal unless infiltrated by children (or worse, Americans), but the most pleasant fact comes in having a personal seat. It’s quite nice knowing that no one will fall asleep on your shoulder while you’re highlighting the 957^th line in Middlemarch, worrying if you’ll ever remember all the characters’ names. It’s your own private space in the most un-private space imaginable that literally sinks deep into the skin and underlings of the city. It’s a time-warp of cleanliness in what should be very dirty, a polite promptness in what should be anxiety ridden. It’s a simple salutation: Mind the gap, please. Mind the gap, please. 

Those rides in the Tube started to feel very special after awhile and I’m not sure why. It brought on that same feeling of walking through the maze of streets. Perhaps there was something magical about it – and I mean magical in the Harry Potter way – like all of the staircases changing in Hogwarts when you don’t keep an eye on them. There was always this feeling that, when walking down a certain street or boarding a particular train, you might never see it again. I’d like to think I have a pretty good sense of direction, especially if I have a map, but somehow it became so easy to get lost in London, as if the city kept playing a game with me, but I didn’t know until it was my turn to roll the dice. Towards the end of my stay, given after five months, a friend and I walked out of a Tube station we’ve walked out of numerous times before and somehow managed to walk in the wrong direction for 45 minutes before realizing our mistake. It’s pretty embarrassing to know you have to be by the River, ask someone where said river is, only for them to laugh and say you’re nowhere remotely near any body of water. (Did I mention that England was an island?)

At least there’s always the comfort in knowing that, even when the streets may trick you, the trusty double-decker bus is always, always on your side. Those buses were more than simply like clockwork; those buses were clocks. New York City may boast to be The City That Never Sleeps, but not a single night went by during my time in London without a lonely traveler waiting outside my window on Woburn Place for that double-decker to show up at 2, 3, 4-whenever in the morning. And guess what? It always came. Even when London hit those odd, apocalyptic hours when you’re sure everyone’s been killed in a silent zombie attack, that bus came and picked up whoever was waiting there. Everyone rode those buses – how could you not? It’s history beneath your feet, a mere tap of the Oyster Card and you’re there. Getting that prime spot on that top deck in that first, front seat was everything in the world. At that height, you can look into the lives of passerbys without a care. There’s power and humility capturing a single seat on a single bus.

 

The way the Tube and buses forced you into the heart of the city, particular train rides casually brought you to another world. Trains heading out of London always seem to crawl back in time to intimate rows and rows of chimneys and houses circa 4 Privet Drive and fields that look like WWII vengefully left its mark. It makes the return to London that much more special. The walks are just the same – certain walks that leave you between times and places without you realizing it. One of the best walks I ever took was from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to the heart of Bloomsbury in the dead of a damp spring (though still very wintry) night. Imagine being suspended on the swaying, steely Millennium Bridge, hovering over the sputtering River Thames as eerie lamps light up St. Paul’s magnificent dome with nothing else but the sound of soft rain pattering against the silent city.

Interestingly enough, after reading and mocking the hundreds of years’ worth of literature about weak English characters catching a cold from opening a window or walking outside, I ended up getting pneumonia that night. After catching a glimpse of the soul of the city breathing on a chance stroll that night, I’d say it was pretty much worth it. The gap between time and space closed on that suspended bridge and it seemed as if the city was floating on itself on accident. I realize, it’s walks like that really teach me the meaning behind the words, Mind the Gap.