Category: Well I thought it was neat!

My wife and I recently spent the day crawling about London. The rest of the country is clean enough to eat off of, but London is a dirty city. It always has been, all the way back to the days when the Romans ran the place and called it Londinium.

It’s really not their fault. A lot of people live here, more than they can reasonably manage. Even today, when it rains a lot the sewers back up into the Thames. I’d be reticent to swim there.

A Most Remarkable People

In the 19th century, the English were the finest engineers on the planet. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in 1806. At his apogee, he stood some 5 feet 2 inches tall. For obvious reasons, he was forever underneath a top hat. That guy was a freak of nature. He could build anything.

Born in England, Brunel learned at his father’s knee. His dad, Marc, was Belgian and was also a leading engineer of his age. By his eighth birthday, Brunel was fluent in French and had mastered Euclidian geometry. He designed the Great Western Railway and, in so doing, both revolutionized rail travel and transformed the world. He designed suspension bridges as well as a prefabricated military hospital that could be shipped to the combat zone during the Crimean War to support British operations there.

Brunel designed the Thames Tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping. These are two actual British places. Others include Bitchfield, Great Snoring, Crackpot, Shitterton, Barton in the Beans, Giggleswick, and Crapstone. The Underground tube stops at Waterloo and Bakerloo are particularly amusing as loo obviously means bathroom over there. The Thames Tunnel was the world’s first tunnel bored underneath a navigable waterway. Within three months of its opening, more than a million people had traversed it.

In his free time, Brunel designed and built ships. The Great Western first proved the viability of trans-Atlantic shipping, and the Great Britain was the world’s first modern steel ship. Prior to her launch, ships had been made from wood. The Great Eastern, at 700 feet long, was the largest ship on the planet at the time.

Isambard Brunel has been designated the second-greatest Briton of all time, right behind Winston Churchill. Seeking out his surviving works took us near Greenwich in the Docklands east of London. While there, we ate at The Mayflower. This ancient pub was so named because that’s the spot from which the Pilgrims launched. As in, the real Pilgrims, the ones who colonized America. Everything in England is breathtakingly old.

Curious Details

The approach to the Mayflower was oddly dichotomous. Traversing that neighborhood was like walking through Yemen. I’m not judging; I’m just making an observation. Many to most of the women wore hijabs. They had, no doubt, gone to great lengths to make their way to the UK from wherever they came from. One guy had his full Islamic beard dyed bright orange. I have no idea what that was all about.

Greenwich is also a pretty edgy place. Walking down the street, it wasn’t unusual to see half-naked women strolling alongside their counterparts in eye-slit-only burqas. Once again, not judging. It just seemed strange.

A Most Remarkable Meal

The Mayflower had some simply superb fish and chips — some of the best I’ve ever eaten. We chose a table outside for the view of the Thames. It was crowded, and lots of folks smoked. Cigarette packages in the UK sport bright color pictures of diseased organs on the outside, but nobody cares. It was fascinating to see people fish their coffin nails out of a little box with gruesome images of rotten lungs splashed across the outside, oblivious to the obvious cause and effect.

At a nearby table was a curvaceous young lady in a microscopic leather tube top and matching go-go boots. Right next to us was some fat dude with really hairy legs who was dressed like Madonna circa 1982, replete with a poorly camouflaged thong, fishnet stockings and ample eye makeup juxtaposed alongside a pretty respectable beard. C’est la vie …

Working Lunch

Believe it or not, the weirdest bit was the trio of military-age males one table over. In hushed but audible tones, they were hammering through the details of their drug-running business in Bulgaria. One guy went into great detail, explaining potential criminal penalties for various aspects of their enterprise. They resolved issues of processing, transportation and distribution over steak and kidney pie. They used the word liquidity fairly often. At least it wasn’t liquidate. It was as though they were peddling t-shirts or live goats.

The three guys chain-smoked homemade cigarettes they rolled at the table and looked like they would flat-out kill anybody who showed any undue interest. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but the details were nonetheless pretty obvious. It was all just so surreal.

Different Spaces

Our waitress was Ukrainian. Ukrainian flags are displayed everywhere, but many of them are looking shopworn. The Scandinavians all look like elves from “The Lord of the Rings.” I saw a couple of dolled-up Italian girls who made the 1980s-era Cindy Crawford seem homely by comparison. Asians of all flavors, Africans, Arabs, Americans, Canadians and sundry Europeans all wandering about jabbering in the native dialects make London arguably the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

A small London military antiquities store had tantalizing stuff like a PIAT round and demilled Mills bombs. However, their signage made it clear that there was no way to ship such stuff to the States. They had an MK III Sten, an M1 carbine, and a variety of military-surplus handguns, all demilled to UK standards. I’ve seen the results of this process up close, and there is no reactivating those things. However, it was odd seeing a Sten gun for sale with its receiver intact.

My wife and I had a ball. We saved up for years for this trip, and I just got to write a portion of that off on my taxes. I also got to share a meal with a group of real-deal gangsters. And this was just day one …