I am writing this on an Internet terminal in Heathrow Airport, London, on my way home after over two weeks in the UK.
I really can’t wait to get home.
I really don’t want to leave.
My husband, our house, our dog will all look so good when I see them again. It’s almost Horse Show season, and the Farmers’ Market has started.
At the same time, being in England, and especially London again, was like meeting an old friend after thinking you had said good-bye forever.
The parts of the rest of England that we visited were all new to me, so the feeling wasn’t as strong in the countryside. But in London, it seemed eerie that everything was right where I had left it.
Since most of my exposure to London in the last 20 years has been via the celebrity press, fashion magazines and other media, I expected that London had probably become just a clone of a big American city, except they drive on the left and talk funny.
It’s true that just as here, a lot of small businesses have been replaced by global brands: Starbucks, the Gap, Sony, and all the luxury brands.
However, London also has at least half a dozen of its own coffee chains, and other brands that I think of as singularly British: Marks & Spencer, Boots, Barbour.
But more important, the landmarks, the major streets and squares and the remarkable feeling of peace in parts of the city have not changed a bit.
True, there are some monstrous new skyscrapers (including one that looks like a darning egg) on the edges of the city but they don’t really intrude on the “real” London. On Saturday, it seemed even more crowded and noisy than before on Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, but not by orders of magnitude.
Then on Sunday morning, it was cool and completely still except for the sound of church bells all over the city.
We read about the football hooligans and the crazed youth of London but everybody I met was as polite and helpful as they were 20 years if not 40 years ago.
I believe that all travel is a quest for something. One of the questions I am constantly asking myself is whether change and progress must necessarily destroy all that is unique and worthwhile about a place. I wonder about this in general, and I wonder about this in the case of Hollister. This tour of the British Isles was in part a quest for the answer to that question, and now that I have reached the end, I am encouraged.
Of course, the people I met in London complain about the traffic, the cost of living, immigration issues, politicians, obnoxious building developments… many of the same things we complain about. Somehow, though, London has managed to stay London. I’m not sure what specific lessons we can learn, but I believe it is possible to find them.
Elizabeth Gage is a Hollister resident. Her column runs Tuesdays. Reach her at
ga***********@gm***.com
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