December 6, 2010

The picture is of one of the many benches along West Cliff.

Just I suspected, the world without Chalmers Johnson is a much colder place. I’m now home from two weeks in icy London where it snowed on our final day – big soft flakes that made me remember my childhood winters in Indiana, how silently the snow would come and how complete the transformation would be. I had a bit of adventure on my way out of town, slipping over the sidewalks in my laughably inappropriate California shoes, but then a reasonably easy ride to Heathrow, speeding along through underground tunnels. Public transportation! I miss it already. I did not on this trip see foxes in the streets nor parakeets in the commons, two highlights from my last visit. In the absence of real wildlife, my husband and I went to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibit at the Natural History Museum. It was awesomely fabulous. Hugh liked the underwater photographs best, but I was all about the birds. Not that I don’t like fish. But flying is the super-power on my Christmas list this year.

I was forced by circumstances off the internet for about a week, which was bracing and medicinal. Still I spent much of the trip reading Bill Bryson’s book Notes from a Small Island. This means that I spent much of my time too engrossed in reading about vacationing in Britain to notice that I was actually there, doing that. Which is exactly the thing I meant to work on in this blog – the actually being places part. But the people I met in restaurants and subways were not so colorful as the ones Bryson was meeting, and I missed his witty company whenever I was forced to do without. John Crowley, on a trip to read at UC Santa Cruz, mentioned this exact thing to me – the syndrome of being more moved and engaged by the representation of the thing than by the thing itself.

As conditions go, this one sounds pretty harmless. And then I read recently, (somewhere on the internet so it must be true) that people prefer the reality of reality tv to actual reality, which I think must be partly a preference for plot, for a clear narrative. And also explains why so many prefer Fox news to actual news. Look what I just did – from harmless to poisonous in one quick paragraph. I hear that it’s still snowing in London. I hear the winter wonderland enchantment is already wearing thin.