As I type this we are cruising along at 34,000 feet and 613 miles per hour, having recently passed the Isle of Skye on our way over Greenland and then danglier bits of the Arctic, en route to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. My definitely-not-inedible, valiant attempt at a chicken casserole is sitting well in my belly. (The emergency backup bacon, Swiss and tomato paninis I bought at Café Forum this morning remain in their silo; if my normal routine is observed, they will likely be eaten over the next day or two as a silent tribute/memoir of our vacation.) We are comfortably ensconced in bulkhead seating in British Airway’s World Traveler Plus section; basically the same as coach except they reduce the seat count left-to-right and front-to-back to make finding a comfortable position for a Shambling Mound such as myself far, far easier to do. Truth be told, I am more comfortable here in this flying cigar tube than I have been in several days. It’s cool, the seat is sufficiently sized for my needs, and the gentle roar of the jets is much, much better experienced from inside the plane than from a hundred feet below it. Perhaps I should have spent our vacation on the plane.

I know, I know; exactly how long and to how many people do I plan on bitching about our vacation anyway? (This long and that many; you happy?) Truth be told, we both loved our time in the UK, and no amount of relatively minor discomfort was going to change that. This was fun.

One of the games tourists play when out on the town in surroundings vastly different from their home is the “Would We Want To Live Here?” game, and we’re no different from most tourists, no matter how much we’d like to think so. The answer, after considerable pondering, would seem to be no.

We love it here in the UK, for so many reasons. We love the sense of ancient history embedded in and encapsulating nearly every street, every building, every shop (well, maybe not the Burger Kings, pretensions to royalty notwithstanding); we love the incredible mass transit system that can take you to places near and far, far and farthest, farthest and where-the-fuck-are-we anyway?; we love the little cafés and specialty shops that seem to thrive where a typical American Mom N Pop operation would be lowballed into oblivion by packs of rabid Wal-Marts and Targets and Circuit Cities. (Though there’s a bit of that going on here as well; remember, 57 pence of every pound spent in Inverness is spent at Tesco. Thanks a lot, Graeme!)

Personally, I love the dichotomy of a culture that lingers for hours in restaurants, pubs and coffee shops (in restaurants ‘round these parts, the waiter won’t bring you the check for at least—hell, I don’t really know, since I’ve never been patient enough to out-wait the waiter—and if you actually have the temerity to ask for the check, you are likely to get a look of mild shock and reproach. Just trying to help move your business along, Mack, no need to get all bent out of shape there) but will bowl you over like a ninepin if you dare get in their way exiting the Tube station. The pace of life here has an attraction to it, to be sure. Lots getting done, but also a lot of time devoted to smelling the English tea roses.

On the other hand, there are a number of things we found less than thrilling. Along with antiquity comes an inevitable corollary; obsolescence. Things here tend to work right up to the point where they stop working, and then it’s likely to cost you an Imperial assload to get it repaired. Looking at the constant, unrelenting, Brobignagian scale of the renovation and reconstruction industry here (I just finished reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, his quasi-fictional account of the nightmarish working conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago in the early 1900’s, in which he talks about the Beef Trust, a consortium of purportedly competing meatpacking concerns that regularly gathered to set prices across the industry and discuss ways to quash the labor unions. Looking around me everywhere we went, I was tempted to believe that there must exist in the United Kingdom a Scaffolding Trust, a subterranean organization of renovation-support-structure barons that rule the industry with a cold-forged, two-inch-diameter iron pipe fist), it is obvious that shit is just falling apart around here. Probably not as fast as the dwellings in the average crackerbox housing development in the American ‘burbs, where you may have oak trim in every room but when you walk through the kitchen the china rattles in the hutch in the dining room. But a building that is two or three hundred years old is likely to be due for some major retrofitting sooner rather later, and at a cost significantly higher than that needed to patch a little drywall. I can’t imagine what it would cost to, say, re-plumb a unit an eighteenth-century block of flats. There probably aren’t enough spare organs in my body to pay for it.

This segues into one of the other problems we would have living here: stuff is expensive. I don’t think I really appreciate how much we spent while we were here, because the difference in currency threw me off. I simply cannot take a coin seriously as a significant piece of legal tender, despite the fact that some of them were worth nearly four bucks apiece. It was no problem to spend nearly twenty-five bucks for a couple of (delicious, filling, bacon, ham, tomato, cheese and béchamel, you-can-take-your-Egg-McMuffin-and-stick-it-where-the-sun-don’t-shine) breakfast croques, two pan au chocolat, two juices and a cappuccino. I know because we did it damn near every morning while we were staying in London. (God, those croques were spellbinding! I dreamt of scooping up Café Forum and transplanting it, whole, into our neighborhood. Then I’d remember how much everything they did cost, and decided that, fantastic products aside, they’d fold in a month from lack of business.) This pattern was repeated just about everywhere we went, not just the touristy spots. Kew Gardens is a working bedroom community, and our experience there was largely the same. Retail grocery prices were of course far lower, but still appreciably higher than the US, reflecting among other things a higher average sales tax than we have in any given community in the States. (And perhaps also reflecting a more realistic assessment of the actual cost of growing, packaging and transporting grocery items. I can’t be sure.)

And if we found the food prices daunting, the real estate prices were enough to send me careening across the afternoon sky on a contrail of shit and tears. Once again, Kew Gardens: standard bedroom community, smallish but with a lot of services, offering great access to public transit but even better access to the underbellies of departing 747s. Half a duplex starts at well over half a million. Thirty-nine-year leases are not at all uncommon, and fifty-year leases are on the rise. Uh uh, no way.

You know how I raved about the public transit here? Damn-friggin’ good thing too, because private transit is a nightmare. I already have a problem controlling my tendencies towards road rage, as evinced by my near-weekly postings under the “Blood (Boils) On The Highway” category. Just walking here has made me despise the British (and Scottish, and Jerseyite) motorist. These people drive like—well, as my dear wife has already put it, like they’re suffering from the hallucinatory stage of tertiary syphilis. And the only thing crazier than an English motorist is an English motorcyclist. These death-loving bombardiers literally weave in and out of traffic—standing still at lights or moving along the motorways at speed—acquiring and appropriating any space on the blacktop sufficiently long and/or wide to accommodate them. The reasoning apparently goes something like this: “I can do it, and since anyone I piss off in a car has just about no chance in hell of catching me on my motorcycle, I shall do it.” I hate to say it, but if bikers in the UK are going to continue to behave in such an antisocial manner, then this country needs more guns.

I suppose that if, in the days following the inevitable demise of our beloved cats, a close friend were interested in renting our house for a year or two, we might consider a temporary move to England. To paraphrase David Sedaris, living in a foreign country is something that you’re obligated to do; it’s supposed to help sand down the provincial edges, leaving you more a person of the world. I suspect there might be something to that. On the other hand, making that sort of transition also sounds a little precious and self-aggrandizing. And hell, if I want to take a real shot at worldliness, why not someplace like Prague or San Salvador or Lesotho? Why improve myself by sitting around a first-world country run by a conservative Christian government when that’s what I’m doing anyway? Why not instead join the Peace Corps and teach Tahitians algebra or build water projects in Darfur or help reduce river blindness in Namibia?

And let’s be honest; can a couple who habitually find excuses to avoid visiting friends who live fifty miles up the road because the traffic on Interstate 5 is too stressful really get their act together enough to make a permanent or semi-permanent migration to another area code, let alone another country? Something tells me “no.” Or perhaps more accurately, “heh heh heh…heh heh hee hee hee HA HA HA *snort*”

Ahh, fuck it, self-examination is for the birds (kind of ironic given our current altitude). It’s just nice to be heading home.