The Griffon News

 Readers of Dan’s Opinion Page, I have an announcement to make: I have fallen in love. I didn’t mean to, certainly didn’t want to, but it’s true. I left the country and I fell hard and fast in love with the United States. No one is more shocked than I am, believe me. I’ve traveled abroad before, but mostly to developing countries full of poor, dirty people in bright colored clothing. People who were genuinely happy to see you, even if it was just because they hoped you would spend money at their shop. It was in places like those that I wanted to set up camp forever; but Great Britain, (or, rather, Pretty Good Britain) was a totally new experience for me.

 For the first time in my life I was under-funded, under-dressed, and treated as such. From the moment I stepped out of the Heathrow airport, I felt the locals were glad I was merely visiting. A look would come over the Londoners as soon as they saw my sneakers and denim. It was not a look of disgust or contempt, and probably not something I was even expected to notice, but it was a look just the same. Oh, an American. Not cruel, not expressly disapproving either, just a sort of well, that explains it.

So I went shopping, a curious venture. Once I mastered the enigmatic metric sizes, I found that pants didn’t like my hips, blouses didn’t like my breasts and even shoes were not particularly fond of my arches. And nothing, nothing, is designed for a girl who actually has a waist. Clothing is cut A-line and Empire-like, engineered to cover parallel lines and draw attention to miles of leg instead. There are nice, trim legs all over London, crafted by the miles of gray concrete they walk every day. And it’s all concrete. There are virtually no green places remaining in London, they’ve been paved over and peopled. Every residential window is crowded with houseplants in an attempt to make up for it. During my week in that city, I found that the whole of London’s grass belonged to the Queen. Granted, it was public property and anyone was free to picnic there; but it seems very odd indeed that the city’s parks could all be found in the immediate vicinity of Buckingham Palace.  

Universal comments made about traditional English cuisine proved to be entirely true; (be a smidgen wary of anything a Brit endearingly calls a “pie.”) but there was absolutely no shortage of fabulous foods from all other parts of Europe and further. It is here that I must expunge upon the tragedy of the exchange rate. One English pound equates to approximately $1.97. And it is almost impossible to eat anywhere for less than six pounds, not including the two pounds fifty a person will pay for anything other than tap water. No refills, and they are not particularly fond of ice either. Saying nothing of the abundance of theatres, the marvelous museums, the variety of architecture, the quiet disposition and general friendliness of those I managed to engage in conversation, despite the fact that I really did enjoy myself, it was without too much sadness that I said goodbye to the urban claustrophobia, goodbye to food flavored purely with salt, goodbye to the worst coffee in the world, and goodbye to the city in which every department store window disapprovingly reflected back to me a silhouette of my corn-fed American ass. I belong in greener pastures.