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| For Britain’s farmers this year’s April has been the cruelest month ever. Probably entering the country on meat illegally imported from the Orient, hoof and mouth disease entered England in the North East and spread, well, like the plague. Within days rather than weeks it had blotted the landscape with several distinct regional pockmarks of contamination.
A TV did the job anyway. Since we all derive satisfaction from the misfortunes of our neighbors those images were satellited round the global village. Overnight the world seemed to believe that the Black Death had fallen upon London again and the very fires of Smithfield had been rekindled again at the city’s heart. Tourists by the thousands canceled their bookings. April was as cruel to the hotelier as the farmer. This utterly false total disaster scenario was not helped by Tony Blair’s ringing declaration that Britain was ‘open for business as usual’. Apart from putting down such billion pound UK industries as IT, Finance, Shipbuilding, you name it, by implying that Britain is only a theme park, such support did tourism a distinct disservice. Whenever politicians ringingly declare – witness President Bush Jnr's. commitment to environmental conservation being uttered in the same breath that reneged on Kyoto – we cannot but suspect the opposite is true. Britain must be going up in smoke. Not at all so. The overwhelmingly major proportion of Britain remained free from (the now curtailed and receding) hoof and mouth epidemic throughout: countless rural attractions never ceased to be accessible. Now, June upon us, virtually every scene of beauty, place of interest, is easy of approach. This web site is not an adjunct of the British Tourist Authority but if Life Balance is proper to concern itself with the equipoise of individuals, it must not neglect the equilibrium of Nation or Truth. Bottom line is that there are some great deals now on offer in Great Britain for bargain seeking, crowd-avoiding holiday-makers. Let me mark your card. Manicured for centuries, Britain’s landscape has nothing of the elemental grandeur of Monument Valley, say, or The Grand Tetons. But, almost infinitely variable, square mile by square mile, it is unfailingly lovely. And, from whatever vantage point you gaze on it, the breeze that tugs at your hair seems to blow from out of the past to station a Saxon or Celt, a Cavalier or Roundhead almost beside you just beyond the edge of vision. It is a landscape populated with the ghostly figures of two plus millennia of recorded history. And yet so available to the present! An hour’s drive from any major city takes you to what seems its heart and back to eternal patterns guaranteed to refresh the spirit. Church, manor house, tollbooth, market square confront you with the centuries and, somehow, with your better self. Another way of rapidly winding down beneath the tourist surface is to take in a big (or not so big) country house. Every corner of every county bristles with them and, as you tour Duke or squire’s family seat, every object tells a story of a different age’s different mind-set. Dedicated anglers and golfers come to Britain with itineraries cannily pre-planned. Fine art lovers already know that London has galleries rivalling Paris, Florence, Madrid, New York. But they may not know how much the new Tate Modern deserves a visit in its own right. So does the Tate’s Northern satellite on the Liverpool dockside. The Burrell Collection is mandatory for any visitor to Glasgow – a city as culturally vibrant as it is tough – and the new Lowry Gallery in Salford, Manchester is another instance of fascinating paintings in a knock-out setting. The British Museum never lost its charm to begin with and the splendid new treatment of the Reading Room courtyard now enhances its appeal. But you may find the jewel box of the John Soane Museum a few blocks south enchants you more. Music? The U.K’s your oyster. The provincial orchestras and opera companies rival the capitals. Pick of the bunch, however, may be the English National Opera at London’s Coliseum. For a fraction of Covent Garden prices you can hear main stream repertoire sung in English in productions of unfailing wit and style. The ENO’s orchestra is better – to these cloth ears – than the Royal Opera’s and, if less famous, the singers are scarcely less inferior in voice and clearly superior actors. They also regularly show up. Big on history but short on time? A day at Greenwich or Cambridge (not Oxford) will give you a quart in a pint pot. Fine buildings from six or so centuries standing randomly cheek by jowl will bounce you back and forth across eras and Pepys and Captain Kidd and Drake and Miles Standish and Newton and Milton will tug at your sleeve. If, on the other hand, you’ve a couple of hours to idle away, then, either by village green or at a major big city ground, take in a cricket match. Don’t try to understand it – just sniff the atmosphere. Because Lord and peasant played cricket together side by side, England, they say, escaped its French Revolution. And at full Imperial sway England used the game –“it’s just not cricket, old chap” – to brainwash those whose territories it had seemed thoroughly ‘cricket’ to usurp. Entrance to the pro games is casual in the extreme. Just turn up in mid-session, pay and sample until replete or too splendidly confused. If you elect to do this at the world’s Mecca for cricket lovers, Lords, another bonus awaits you – the rose-pink pavilion redolent of Victorian grace or, as someone may explain, Grace. Shopping in Britain is not an especially smart move. Prices are high. But all the major labels – Burberry, for example – now operate ‘factory shops’. Ask around. A ten-pound taxi fare to a suburban back street may save you hundreds. Places to avoid? Stratford is a gridlocked tourist trap designed in Hollywood. Catch your Shakespeare at the RSC in London whose theater needs no further urging. Carnaby Street was always drech and Oxford Street is Hollywood Boulevard writ tacky. Royal occasions such as the Trooping of the Colour are best sampled as highlights on TV. Don’t go to any of the scattering of dedicated Theme Parks or to Madame Tussauds – they are all pitched on the hamburger hell level and America does this sort of thing better. The Albert Hall with its own over the top pomp and circumstance is worth the price of admission for any event except for The Last Night of the Proms when the English are at their insufferably braying complacent worst and to be avoided like the hoof and mouth. Which brings us back full Stonehenge. Never within two hundred miles of Bow Bells, the smouldering pyres of cloven-footed carcasses are gone entirely. Britain is restored as a green and pleasant land where sheep may safely graze….and tourists most happily browse. Enjoy your trip. |
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Draconian policy of culling was put in murderous train. On the Scottish Borders, in the Lake District, North Wales and the West Country scenes of medieval primitiveness disfigured the countryside as, so as to create disease-free buffer zones, millions of slaughtered sheep and cows were piled high and torched. By night the skies glowed red as if cities had been sacked. It looks as if Sherman had marched through Somerset and hired Hieronymus Bosch to record his handiwork.
