(Aside.)

Somehow I managed to get my boss to give me several audiobooks of Bill Bryson’s travel writing a bit over a year ago; and then I never listened to them. Here, though, I found myself wrapped in blankets on my bed at 16.00 yesterday wondering what to do with myself, uninterested in writing, reading, drawing, or scrolling through miles of tumblr dash--and remembered these books.

I’ve been listening to Notes from a Small Island. Bryson’s writing is always amusing, and I’m consistently impressed with how clever he is and how irreverent but accurate his portrayals of the locals on his travels, the strangeness of foreign customs, culture, slang. As an outsider here myself--to rip off one of his other titles--feeling slightly tired, very cold, and unmotivated, but as interested as ever in hearing someone else’s perspective on this “green and kindly island,” I loaded all fifteen hours of this audiobook onto my iPhone and proceeded to play disc one.

To those of you reading--you’ll know me, that I’m capable of turning any experience into one worthy of an hour or two of brooding over, and while my time in England has been challenging, beautiful, and has lived up to so many of my expectations, it has also been a scary place, full of mist, unforgiving weather forecasts and young people who dress with intimidating precision and instinctual superiority to Californians. Part of it’s Europe, but part of it’s also that I’m just on another planet and someone’s convinced me that it’s still earth.

To hear Bryson’s--often crude, sometimes plainly indecent--but honest and true observations of England, his humorous explanations of the differences between himself and the people he encountered, the specific and only-ever-British mindset of certain demographics has given me a whole new hope for my time here. The program I’m on with the University of California is called “Immersion” because we’re going to school with British students, marked as British students and expected to “immerse” into British culture. And while I hope to partake in British things, see British sights, perhaps dip a toe into British patriotism, which is more prevalent here, this year especially with the Diamond Jubilee and London 2012, than most youth would have you believe; I think what I’ve realized, listening to Bryson’s writing, is that I am American, I am Californian, and what I’m doing here is visiting and living, briefly, in a culture different to mine, lovelier and worse in certain aspects, depending on who you ask--and you’re all asking me. 

It’s okay to despair when I can’t go out at 23:00 and find any markets open. And I think it’s okay to never understand the appeal of pub quizzes, or night clubs, or comedy acts. Or eyeballs on every imaginable piece of jewelry. It’s okay to feel different and out of my skin. 

More than anything, by listening to Bryson’s writing, I’ve realized that because I’m an outsider I have the chance to see beauty here that a local wouldn’t, couldn’t, or won’t--I have a chance to appreciate a noisy, ice-cold train ride, the crowded bustle and shove of midnight central London, the fact that the streets here have been inhabited since 990 AD, since earlier, that buildings in these cities were built sometimes thousands of years ago. And that when I see netting over stone cherubs or telephone lines jutting out of an ancient brick edifice, I’ll be able to appreciate that the people here are keeping it alive, appreciate what they have, even if without thinking about it--this is just the place they live, the things they see every day, their homes, the city hall, the Royal Pavillion, the Courts of Justice--they’re just buildings, where people have been, but really, the strange mash-up of technologized, contemporary structures with old, historical districts, buildings, cliffs, mountains, castles is something that makes both the new and the old more beautiful. At home, we overhaul. Here, I think, they adapt.

In my Shakespeare class, we’re watching and studying Olivier’s 1944 production of Henry V, produced during the second World War, and I felt completely out of body--this isn’t real--that I’m in a country that was bombed, that I’m amongst a strong, good-willed, culturally-grounded people, who’ve really seen the worst of it, and who’ve come back from it; here, I’m learning much more about the things that Britain has done for the world, for America, the inventions they’ve produced--the gasoline oven was mass-produced and popularized here! on this tiny island!--the industry they created. I think at home we tend to think of ourselves, of Americans, as the inventors and the conveyors of the newer, brighter age, and while, yes, in medicinal research, in technology, perhaps, and in the weird things you see on 4 AM infomercials, we’re brilliant at production, at invention, nothing about the way we live or think would be possible at all if the UK hadn’t done what it did, if its people weren’t as resilient and good. 

It makes the quirks, the certain-mindedness, the strange food, the lack of real mustard forgivable, worth it, even, to consider that British culture is probably what kept the country alive and strong through war. We don’t understand it at home. We’re a giant country, and aside from the island territories, aside from the terrorist bombings, we didn’t have a home front. These people did, and I think because of it, while they have a different perspective--their “glory days” have been gone longer than ours have--they have immense wisdom, legend, and perspective to lend us. To lend me.