On Hadrian’s Wall!
At Hadrian’s Wall
Hadrian’s garrison troops’ armor (pretend)
At Trinity
The Trinity photo belongs to the Dublin end of our travels, where Chiara revisited some sights of her native city, including this tender sculpture outside Trinity College.
Earlier, on our way back down south from the Highlands, we visited Hadrian’s Wall. Beautiful weather; very impressive; gorgeous countryside. We stayed the night in Carlisle, where we were treated to startling scenes and sounds of urban violence on a Tuesday night – the city center resounding with rollicking, drunken cries, and a hotel guest arriving at the front desk as we checked in, protesting that there was a bloke with a gun on the loose in the hotel. “Yes, yes, just a moment,” said the very calm young man handling our check-in, as if guns were business as usual, “I’m just dealing with these people, so if you’d kindly wait…”
Britain has become a desperate place for those without money. Soup kitchens abound in London; people are leaving London by the ten thousands per week, to seek life in the suburbs or beyond. Soon, it’s said, only the rich will inhabit London itself. In London, police sirens sound continuously – but clearly inadequately, since the Met have officially announced that they will investigate no more burglaries. They’re too busy investigating cases of child abuse, they proclaim. There was one attempt by the West Midlands Police to maintain vigilance and investigate burglaries – but only at houses with even-numbered addresses. No joke. Only even-numbered houses. Apparently it was an ‘experiment,’ which yielded interesting results: no change in the number of burglaries reported. (Are burglars not paying attention? Or are investigations so feeble that it makes no difference anyway? In my young day in Britain burglaries were always treated with weary compassion by the cops: don’t hold your breath, we’ll never get your stuff back. Honestly, we don’t have the manpower.) Same today, evidently, if not worse. As for the even-numbered experiment, no comic writer I can think of could have thought up this beyond-Pythonesque development; not even Spike Milligan; the only one who could have conceived of it perhaps is J.B.Morton, the genius who wrote for the Daily Express under the name of Beachcomber.
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