London's Motorway

The Tangerine Dream

It's going to be mine now, the orange Skoda Fabia we call The Tangerine Dream. Starting in a few weeks, I'll be using it to commute to my new job.

I thought my first job here might have me commuting by public transport to Central London. Now, in place of commentary on the state of the National Rail and sketches of colorful characters who ride the train, my commuting stories will be about the traffic jams encountered between Junctions 10 and 16 on the M25 to Uxbridge. I'll try to make it seem interesting.

The M25 is the 117-mile London orbital road known around here as 'the world's biggest car park'. In length, it's sort of the Capital Beltway half as much again, or Route 128 times two. For traffic jams, it may be times ten. A couple of weeks ago, traffic was backed up for 28 miles and parts of the road were closed for 24 hours. I've read that sitting in traffic on the M25 inspired Chris Rea to write 'The Road to Hell':

On your journey 'cross the wilderness
From the desert to the well
You have strayed upon the motorway to Hell

I think it's probably a metaphor.

Some of London Is Burning

Thanks to all of our stateside friends who have inquired about our well-being in light of the riots in the UK. We are about 30 miles out of London, in the country, and so haven't seen any of it.

I was thinking it's probably a good thing I haven't found that perfect job in London yet. Then again, this morning I was speaking with a friend who works in London and she has gone into work every day this week without a problem. Yesterday they were told to leave early, and that's when she got angry. Not so much for herself as for all of the people whose lives have been disrupted and livelihoods ruined.

I haven't been here very long, and so I won't start delivering my opinion based on my five weeks of being a permanent resident temporarily living in a West Sussex hamlet. Maybe when we move closer to London at the end of the month, I'll start to be able to form an articulate sentence about the culture.

I will offer one piece of advice to my American friends and family: Don't read only the US press. Don't follow only Fox, or only Salon, or only anything. Here are some links to UK news sites:

www.bbc.co.uk/news
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The Ties That Bind

I've written before about discarding those things which no longer have any meaning to us, if they ever truly did. But before we left the States, we also let go of things that we used, things we loved, things we would have kept if we only felt we could. Things like: 

• Our cars, especially our Mazda MX-5 (Miata). Two-year-old 'Red Sonja' replaced the 1997 model John bought used just a month after we started dating. That's 13 years of top-down driving along winding country roads in New England. In theory, we could have shipped it, but fortunately there are plenty of MX-5s in the UK, and the roads are narrower and twistier (or 'naggery', as one pub denizen described them).
  

  

  With 'Red Sonja'

  
• Our living room set. Almost as young as Red Sonja, and just about as big. We feared our America-sized furniture wouldn't fit into England-sized doors or living rooms. This fear was confirmed when friends told us they had to remove a window to get their American couch into their English house.
• Several hundred books. Maybe we would have reread them all, if we won the lottery and quit our jobs and spent our days reading. As it was, our shelves had become sort of monuments to books we've read. There will be no room in our house for monuments.

Those of our belongings we did ship made it through UK customs this week and are now in temporary storage. Just a few short weeks and we'll all be reunited at the house we will be renting. As we unpack, maybe we'll think, "Why did we keep this?" Or, "We have no room for this".

And then we'll start letting go all over again.