Thursday May 12th, 2016

Well I have now arrived in the UK and it is only 11 days until I start my coastal drive.  My journey here was excellent, made even more so by the fact that I flew with British Airways on their new Airbus 380.  This aircraft is the largest passenger aircraft currently flying and holds up to 469 passengers.  The A380 now allows BA to operate only one flight per day to Vancouver, rather than the previous two flights.  Having once been a long time gold card holder with BA, I had not flown with them in the last few years, sticking with Air Canada, mainly because of the very poor frequent flier program operated by BA.  It seemed as if seats were never available on dates we wanted to fly, even if trying to book months in advance.  The Air Canada scheme works fairly well and given I flew with them a lot, to and from Montreal and Toronto, I was collecting their points anyway.  However, BA have changed their scheme such that you can use your points to upgrade a ticket, which works for us.  Now they have this fantastic new aircraft, which will presumably allow them to keep their prices down (though probably this will mean higher profits rather than lower prices) BA is a winner.  I have to say that the service on board was absolutely outstanding, with the female crew wearing the once commonly seen jaunty little hats, which gave everything an air of professionalism and a reminder of how good flying used to be.  Hats off to them (but not literally). 

My journey was smooth and effortless, that was until I got to Heathrow.  Heathrow airport Terminals 2 and 3 now provide some of the longest walks from the airplane to passport control and your bags that you will find anywhere.  Now as long as at Gatwick, my least favourite airport.  The at 15-20 minute walk certainly gets the blood flowing after 9 hours in the air, however it does sour the journey somewhat.  To add to this, Terminal 3 passport control (or is it now the same place for all terminals?) does not have electronic passport readers as in Terminal 5, so there was a further long line up for checks for British and EU passport holders.  I timed my wait at 17 minutes.  As I was one of the first people off the plane I hate to think how long passenger number 469 had to wait.  At least when you get to the head of the line, the UK immigration officials are friendly, which is not always the case in North America

As I was travelling into London my option was to take the Heathrow Express, which is advertised as the fastest way into central London.  It is certainly fast at only 15 minutes but it is not, as advertised, into central London.  It runs into Paddington, which I class as west London not central London.  The fee for the Express journey is £22 pounds (about $40) per person.  My wife and I usually travel on down to Exeter from Paddington and the fare for this 2 hour journey is often little different than the Express train from Heathrow to Paddington.  But they are good at selling their services. From the baggage claim area to the station platform there are sited a number of people all trying to sell you a ticket for the Heathrow Express.  However, there is another, much cheaper and less advertised option that also takes you to Paddington and though the journey takes 10 minutes longer, it is half price at £10. This train is the Heathrow Connect and is part of the national rail network.  It runs every 25 minutes as opposed to the Express every 15 minutes, but it depends when you arrive on the platform. You only have a 25 minute wait, if you just missed a train, otherwise it can be around a 5 to 10 minute or so wait until a train arrives.  I decided on the cheaper option for the Connect and was told that the next train would be in 10 minutes or, I could catch the next Express due in 4 minutes, a 6 minute longer wait.  I decided to save $12 and wait the extra 6 minutes.  An American standing in line behind me said that it sounded a good deal and he purchased the same ticket for the Connect as me.  As we stood together on the platform he proudly said, “Hey if I have to wait 6 minutes longer to save £12, I’ve just saved the price of 6 good British pints”.  He went on to tell me that he had come all the way from New Mexico and was planning to see Britain in 10 days.  His journey today was to Waterloo and then train to Andover and Stonehenge.  Tomorrow he was travelling up to Scotland to see Hadrian’s Wall (which is actually in England, but I did not like to disappoint him).  He was planning to travel everywhere by train and his agenda was to go from Scotland to Bath and then perhaps Wales and Yorkshire.  Britain certainly looks small on the map in comparison with the United States so I expect many people assume that everywhere is not far from somewhere else.  I told him that I was doing a similar trip, but I was expecting mine to take five weeks.  He said “Oh that must be because you are driving, rather than taking the train.”  I wished him bon voyage!

The platform filled up with maybe 200 people all waiting for one or other train to arrive.  The bonus came when the announcer said that the Heathrow Express had “technical difficulties” and was delayed.  When the Connect pulled in just a few moments later, the American and I were the only ones, along with some Heathrow employees who also knew the system, to board the train.  So we saved ourselves £12 and got there faster.  We both felt slightly smug!

My arrival into Paddington reminded me just how busy this city is and though it is the capital of Britain it feels more like the capital of the world rather than a city in England.  It felt very strange, as I alighted the train at Paddington, to realize that here I am planning a trip around Britain to remind myself of my Britishness, but coming to London makes me feel a foreigner in my own land. The capital city does not seem not part of Britain at all, certainly in respect of the Britain that I had come to see and knew was out there.  However, Britain is now a spectrum of races, colours and creeds, with a growing proportion of the population having never been born there.  London probably therefore does reflect a magnified microcosm (if there can be such a thing) of what Britain has become so no doubt it can continue to lay claim to being the capital city.  London of course is not alone in its growth in multiculturalism, but because I visit only occasionally, the changes seem stark and rapid.  London seems to be increasingly a melting pot for the whole world and is possibly one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world.  Apparently there are now in excess of one million illegal immigrants in Britain and with the sight of people lining up at Calais to try and get in, the world seems to think that this is the place to be.

Where my hotel is located, it is a 2-minute walk to Marble Arch, Oxford Street and Park Lane, names synonymous with Britain. However the area feels like an extension of the Middle East.  Very close to the hotel, on the corner of Oxford Street and Edgeware Road, is a Turkish café with a number of men seated outside smoking hookah pipes.  A waiter with a bucket of hot coals passes up and down the line of seated smokers topping up their pipes and using the coals to heat the water. 

My hotel, is actually a Club specifically for people who are, or who have, served in the armed forces and their families.  I qualify through my late Father-In-Law.  The rooms are of a good standard and the breakfast is definitely of the full English type.  The menu in the restaurant is very varied and ridiculously cheap.  I chose fish pie, which was excellent.  Unfortunately I did not heed the waiter’s warning that it was very hot and quickly burnt the roof of my mouth.  I had to take a large gulp of the Club’s own brand of beer to cool it down.  At £1 a pint I would hate to have to tell the American traveller that by taking the Connect rather than the Express I had actually saved enough for 12 pints to his measely 6!

I took a short stroll earlier down Oxford Street and went into Marks & Spencer and then Primark.  Both are famous for their clothes, but the latter, which is a chain store that has arisen since our departure from the UK, seems to be the main outlet for the garment industry of Bangladesh.  They sell T- shirts for £2.50 and dresses for £5.  The main buyers in both stores seemed to be Arab ladies, fully dressed in black clothes and hijabs.  They had armfuls of clothes and the line-up at the tills in Primark were huge. However, though there are changing rooms to try on garments before buying, none of these ladies seemed to be concerned about buying without trying.  Either it was worry over having to take off their burkas, or, they had sufficient money that they had no concerns about paying for goods that might not fit.  It was only later that I wondered, if when they go out they are fully robed, when do they actually wear the T-shirts or dresses?

My Mother was born in the East End of London and only left during the blitz of World War 2.  She moved to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, with Smiths the clock makers who had built a factory way out in the country to make aircraft instruments. One week after she moved, her house was flattened by a German bomb!  I wondered if she were alive today, how she would react to the London of 2016.  Today many people born and brought u in London are still moving out, but not because of bombs, for other reasons, many citing the ethnic changes that are happening in London, which is making the City so different from what they had once known.  Perhaps the election this week of Sadiq Kahn as the new Lord Mayor of London and the first Muslim to be head of a large European city, is a clear sign of this change.  Some might argue though that the election of Sadiq had more to do with wanting someone to be the opposite of Boris Johnson, the outgoing mayor, rather than there being any ethnic aspect to the voting.  In 2007 statistics showed that for the first time since records were kept, more London born people moved out of London than the number of immigrants moving into the city.  Ironically my family, have been reversing this trend and my sister’s three daughters and their families and then recently my sister herself and brother-in-law have all moved into London from the country.  My Mother would no doubt be thrilled that they have returned to her roots and are living close to where she was born and brought up.

It is for family reasons that I have actually come to stay in London for the next few days.  One of my nephews is getting married on Saturday in an area known as the Elephant and Castle.  My thought when I first heard the news was that, at 21, he was far too young to be getting married.  However, I was then reminded that this was the same age as when I got married to my lovely wife and so that must be a good sign.  Another coincidence is that the bride to be lives in a small road in which my great Aunt Sarah once lived.  She had become engaged to a young lieutenant who went off to Flanders in 1914.  She vowed that if he did not return she would not marry anyone else.  Tragically he was killed and Aunt Sarah never did marry, ending her days, alone, in a one-roomed flat off the Old Kent Road, the same road in which my nephew’s bride now lives.  At the end of World War 1 many women never married. Some, like Aunt Sarah, had lost the one love of their lives, but for others because the war had taken a whole generation, there were simply not enough men to go around. 

Marilyn, my wife, came over to the UK last week, ahead of me and is travelling up from Devon tomorrow to join me for the wedding and we will have a short-break in London, hopefully taking in a show.  Access to the London stage is one of the things we really miss in Vancouver.  Being in London confirms to me how much I do want to go out into the country and around the coastline to find the Britain that I remember and know is still out there.