I'm back in England, and as usual I haven't been particularly looking forward to it or to the disruption of my daily Texan existence. Also as usual, it turns out that the thing I haven't been particularly looking forward to is the flight, not so much being in the air, but the bullshit and misdirection of airports, the stressful automated transactions which always inevitably go wrong for my discomfort and inconvenience, and spending up to twenty-four hours of my life in constant motion; but aside from these aspects, it's mostly okay - as I always seem to forget.
I'm at Heathrow with just a single National Express coach left to catch, the final leg of my Tolkienesque quest. As usual, the first thing I've done is to purchase tobacco. I don't ordinarily smoke and have accordingly developed a superpower by which, should I be driven to do so by anything stressful, I can smoke my way through a twenty-five gram pouch of tobacco then simply quit without having to think about smoking again until the next time, assuming there'll be a next time. Practically this means that I smoke, on average, for about three weeks of the year and don't miss it for any of the remaining forty-nine; and two of those three weeks usually occur in England because I don't like flying and I don't like waiting around, which I have to do a great deal when catching planes or coaches.
I pop into the WHSmith kiosk situated in Terminal Three, as usual. Strangely this has become a routine. The pouch of tobacco costs me £34 but I pay up because I really, really need a fag.
'Has it gone up in price?' I ask the small boy working the till, trying hard not to seem like some indignant expat gammon raging that you couldn't make it up!
'It has,' he explains, 'but it's airport prices too.'
'It was about a tenner this time last year,' I whimper plaintively, whilst trying to keep from sounding like I think it's his fault.
I go to stand outside the terminal building where there's a designated smoking area. I think about the sheer improbability of a complete fucking clown like Boris Johnson having become Prime Minister, and I think about my £34 worth of tobacco, and I look around half expecting to see someone pushing a wheelbarrow full of money into a bakery. The last time I came back to England, my initial unwelcome shock was provided by the headlines of newspapers on sale in the very same branch of WHSmith, mostly crowing over Brexit with creaking, witless puns such as SEE EU LATER or DOVER AND OUT. There's always something.
I take a coach to Coventry, then a taxi from the bus station to my mother's place in Earlsdon. She is now having trouble getting around, finds it difficult without a stick, and has had a stair lift installed. This follows on from a series of medical complaints of mysterious composition which began with an email amounting to I don't want you to worry but I think I've had a stroke. Thankfully, what medical diagnoses she has been given have at least confirmed that it wasn't a stroke, and neither was it anything in the general vicinity of cancer; so despite everything, the situation is at least not quite so terrible as I'd feared. I'd anticipated the beginning of the end, my mother seeming abruptly and dramatically two decades older than she was this time last year with a house miraculously transformed into the set of Steptoe and Son, neither of which have turned out to be the case.
Each night, we watch the evening news on Channel 4. I haven't really seen television news in over a year, more or less since my last visit. I avoid it at home in Texas because it clashes with Wheel of Fortune and features a depressing level of focus on American politics, which is never anything sunny. My wife and myself occasionally watch Eyewitness News on KENS5, but only because it precedes Wheel of Fortune and we sometimes want to know what the weather is doing; but otherwise it doesn't really count as news, mostly being gurgling horseshit about basketball.
My perception of what's going on in the United Kingdom, is therefore usually subject to distortion. For example, back in July, 2018, one of my neighbours posted on Next Door, our neighbourhood forum, giving account of her visit to London, which had coincided with that of Trump. Don't worry, she reassured us, the Brits love our President. I know there were some protesters, but I'd say there were about two-hundred of them at the most, so don't believe what the liberal media has been telling us. The liberal media - and a few of my facebook friends who had been on those same marches - estimated the number as being at least tens of thousands. I mentioned this but the subject was subsequently closed because I'd brought politics into it. The point is that what little I know is mostly seen through a funny-shaped keyhole.
I spend some of my time in England with my dad, and whilst he hardly mentions Brexit - perhaps having finally realised that we're never going to see eye to eye on this subject - his general fear of reality expresses itself in other ways. Whilst out walking, there are a couple of points at which he somehow steers the conversation around to the history of the environment. Our climate is now very different to what it was in prehistoric times, he explains as though this will be news to me. He doesn't quite get so far as to deny climate science, but it feels as though that's where he's heading. Later, as we wander around Coventry city centre with my Aunt Lynda - presently visiting from Australia - I hear him conclude some muttered discourse by telling her that England is full up. Later still, Mary - who would have been his third wife but for the fact that he didn't want to get married again - tells me that what she likes about Donald Trump is that he says what he's thinking.
Channel 4 News therefore comes as quite a shock to my system because I'm not accustomed to discussion of climate change as something which is absolutely, definitely happening right now; and I'm not accustomed to discussion wherein angry numbskulls who don't understand stuff aren't steering the conversation. So there's coverage of the Extinction Rebellion protests, very much impressing upon me a sense of scale, and just how many people are genuinely pissed off by how things are going. There's coverage of glacial retreat, green valleys which were filled with compacted ice just ten years ago. There's coverage of coastal towns and villages abandoned as sea levels rise, both in Wales and Rhode Island.
It's horrifying, but at the same time it's kind of uplifting to realise that people are actually talking about this stuff, and a lot of people, and people who can string a fucking sentence together without having to pull a rolled up Daily Express from their back pocket and have another look at the headline. Channel 4 News additionally visits a Swedish plant which sucks carbon out of the atmosphere; the message being that, contrary to the received wisdom, the technology exists. Rendering the planet unfit for human habitation is now something in which we have options. We could make a start on undoing the damage right now; or we could bow to the shitheaded edicts of people who demand that there be two sides to every story when they can't even get their own arguments straight.
Against the usual odds, I return from England feeling better about the world, because I return with a better understanding of the shape it's in, and a significantly better appreciation of how many people actually give a shit. On my last day in England, the Supreme court essentially tells Boris Johnson to go fuck himself, and then later in the evening I learn that impeachment proceedings are underway back in the US, at long fucking last. It feels as though we're coming to our collective senses. It feels as though we're finally getting to claw back some ground from the shitheads.
