The evidence of this scene indicates to me two qualities about London that I'm now basing all of my opinions of the English on. 1) Even the homeless in England (who, by their absence here, have confirmed that they do indeed have homes to drink in) drink "properly," meaning that there's a subset of social norms that precludes boxed or fortified wines, among other staples of my distinctly American adulthood. 2) Somewhere in England, probably London, there is a littering homeless person (and his or her +1) sharing a bottle of wine with two fine pieces of crystal glassware that were made in the town of Crabtree. I doubt I'll ever see it.
The town of Crabtree is apparently little more than a few intersections along a motorway about halfway between Central London and Brighton on the southern coast. Its heritage is ancient and unadorned, producing only some shower gel and electrical socket covers. And wine glasses, of course. At my late arrival in England, I felt no kinship with the place of my ancestry, or to the culture that had over hundreds of years scultped the Crabtree family's "sulky, ill-tempered disposition and rotund, Scotch build," elsewhere described as a flock of fat bastards. Crabtree manual labor carries on in factories, shops, and certainly pubs here across the pond, while the rural American descendants edge toward whiter collars, vacation homes, and technology.
I strolled London's curves not as a prodigal son but as a product of America (A-merry-curr in English), having arrived precisely on the fourth of July. The locals claim to have no concept of the celebration of the liberated colonies or the importance of the date of Independence Day (I was asked if it represented the day of the coronation of our first president, to which I said yes). Being in the enemy's camp on a night of national pride engendered a kind of hooligan brashness in me, similar to the spirit that keeps PBR in Mmmurcn hands and "these colors" from running. I was restored to my humility swiftly by an innavigable, cobbled web of lanes. Rather than trust to public transport for a speedy commute or shell out the sheckles (or whatever this money with Darwin on it represents) for a taxi, I hoofed the thirty-minute jaunt from hotel to office. It was along this route that I found the empty dinette on a damp cardboard bed, and then along this route back that I found the cardboard and container removed altogether.
Further down Cromwell, I passed two teenage scamps getting tossed by bobbies (frisked by... bobbies), whose reticense to relinquish their grinder and pot was only matched by the officers' obvious delight in the act. I passed a minor British celebrity with greased hair on a bicycle whose fan base had stopped him to chat about some shoot or other, but not to bend so low as an autographing. An old couple in an upscale cafe (calf in English, thankfully not for the well-to-do calf in American-English) arched their eyebrows in unison at a nearby woman wearing a saari that obscured all but her eyes, then relaxed after she passed.
And so it struck me that England, or at least this "safe" part of London, has all the pretention of large American cities and none of the humor, which I would assert is far more damning than it sounds. I worked with a Scotsman for a few hours (full figure and angry red beard) who slapped backs and knees with the jolliest, and his humor felt so coldly out-of-place that other locals were repulsed by his joy-making. A teeming group of precocious teenagers didn't laugh at each other's awkwardness as they ended their tour of the Natural History Museum, a lifeless affair relative to the same exhibit in Washington D.C. Worst of all, the elderly cashier at Boots, a pharmacy shop, stared with stone-faced incredulity at my remark that the Canadian power converters were aboot like the American ones. I mean COME ON.
England, it seems, is not the fatherland I'd never hoped for or the sophisticated museum I'd imagined. Aside from Top Gear and John Cleese, it's just an unhappy Manhattan.