Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201200211
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
AMERICANS IN LONDON
USING the least expensive air fare-hotel package we could find, we spent Christmas last month in London.At most, I must say, it was only mildly Dickensian. No snow, for one thing: On a latitude with Newfoundland but warmed by the Gulf Stream, southern England was enjoying typical December temperatures: lows in the low 40s, highs in the low 50s.
Brisk enough, if the wind were up - but hardly the scene of snow and bitter cold that Americans have come to expect from various film and theatrical versions of "A Christmas Carol."
Less typically for that part of the world, Christmas Day was sunny. It was, anyway, until the sun set unconscionably early, as is its winter wont so far north. While daylight hours lasted, though, they were a fine time for a Christmas stroll.
We walked the several miles from our hotel in Paddington to the Thames and back. We ambled through Kensington Gardens, where English families were taking in the vapors and feeding the swans, and then through swank Chelsea, where every other residence seems to have been home at some point to a prominent figure of literary or political history.
Strolling was the activity of choice for several reasons, not least because the underground (in American English, "subway") was closed for the holiday, along with almost everything else.
We had been forewarned of same, and also that not a lot more was open on the following "Boxing Day," and so had laid in emergency victuals in the hotel room. Nonetheless, it was awfully nice during the Christmas walk to come across a Chelsea pub open from noon to 3 p.m. No food was for sale that day, but fancy munchies were laid out to accompany one's pint of bitter.
Apart from ourselves, the pub's clientele on Christmas afternoon consisted of neighborhood regulars - not barflies but families, including children, enjoying a spot of socializing. The English have a most un-American approach to strong spirits and fermented beverages: They are for enjoying, as a slowly nursed accompaniment to conversation, rather than for getting blotto.
For another reason, too, strolling was our activity of choice not only on Christmas Day but other days as well: The dollar is not, let us say, what it used to be. That's good for U.S. exporters, not so good for American innocents abroad. (London, reported a newspaper item while we were there, had been rated in a recent study as the most expensive city in the world for business travelers.)
Walking, fortunately, is free - and London, fortunately, is a walker-friendly place, down to the arrows in front of intersections to tell pedestrians which direction to look for oncoming traffic.
It's a mistake, of course, to wax too rhapsodic about foreign climes. The grass is greener, and all that.
We didn't see the still-depressed industrial cities to the north of London. The bombing campaign of the Irish Republican Army - which seems to have the p.r. savvy of Idi Amin - was in only temporary abeyance. The trains don't run as often or to as many places as pre-Maggie Thatcher.
Still, even frivolous foreign travel can be instructive. I came away from this trip wondering: Maybe the issue isn't whether a new world order is a-borning, but what place America will have in it - particularly if it's one where relative power is defined economically rather than militarily.
Granted, Ford automobiles seemed to be selling well. But aside from movies and other pop-culture icons of transient economic value, that was about the only "American" (if you can give national identities to companies with plants and stockholders worldwide) product in much evidence.
We didn't really expect to see Ebenezer Scrooge being miserly to street people, and we didn't. But that wasn't only because Scrooge is a 19th-century fictional character. It was also because of a dearth of street people. Homelessness isn't unknown, and is said to be on the rise in both Britain and the rest of Western Europe. Compared to any American city, though, the problem is still small.
The English gripe about the declining quality of their mass-transit system. They should try America's.
From the Continent to London isn't a long trip; no surprise, then, that French and German were to be heard more often at the touristy places than North American English. Still, it added a certain concreteness to the abstract notion of a European Community, stories about which were filling the London papers.
And where visitors from farther abroad once might have been young Americans out to see the world, it is now young Japanese.
But for all my new worries, it was an older question that popped to the front of my mind on the day before Christmas. The occasion was our visit to Harrod's, the famous upscale department store that's a spectacle worth wandering through even if you're an American and thus can't afford the prices.
There, in one of the huge store's galleries, a choir of nine or 10 prepubescent lads was harmonizing Christmas carols in their boy-soprano voices. I don't know from what school or church they had come, but it didn't seem top of the line: There was a bit of squirming, and more than one shirttail coming loose.
Point is, though, the singing was pretty durn good. When was the last time you heard a chorus of young American children actually sing in tune? What do the English know that we don't?