Poverty No-Name

      I read a profile recently of Ophelia Dahl, one of the founders of Partners In Health. For over thirty years, this organization has tried to establish health systems in poor countries. PIH attempts to get the local governments to expand the projects the organization starts. The governments are good when there's a crisis, but when things stabilize, the government will often cut funding.
     This is frustrating to Dahl. "Think about the airline industry," she says. "Can you imagine how complicated it is to run a passenger air system across this world?" She wonders why the same sort of thing can't be done with health care for the poor. The author of the article gently points out that the airlines operate on the profit motive.
     Here's my modest proposal to alleviate poverty. Let poor people sell their naming rights to companies as a form of advertising.  Half the annual fee would go to the individual and the other half to their country's health care system. There'd be lots of little Amazons and Coca-colas, but any company large or small could tap into this tax write-off. The poor could sign up for multiple names and whole swaths of the population would look like NASCAR drivers.
     Even us people in the first world can help. We'll sell our personal naming rights and donate our fees to the poor. We could search out names similar to our present names. I wouldn't mind being Joe's Crab Shack McDonalds if it would help eliminate poverty.
     

The Rocky Road To London

(Part Three of Three Parts)

     We were down to the final few days of our three week trip around England. I have a friend who fills every minute of her travels with stuff. Much as I admire her stamina, I can't handle that kind of death march. I'm good for four to six hours of sightseeing per day, max. After two hours in a museum I can't absorb any more. I move on to plans B or C (Bed or Café).

     We had spent a week in the Cotswolds area and another on the Cornwall Peninsula. Now we would head east to Portsmouth and then back up to London and home. I wanted to see Lord Nelson's ship Victory at the Historic Shipyards in Portsmouth. 

     Portsmouth was 200 miles east of Penzance where we had been staying. The city of Exeter was about halfway to Portsmouth, a good place to spend the night. There was a big cathedral there so we could check "ancient cathedral" off our list. We had also been encouraged to get a cream tea while in England. A friend said the best cream teas were in Devonshire and Exeter was in Devonshire, so we could kill two birds with one stop.  

     Liz, our hostess at our Penzance B&B printed out directions for us which was helpful since there were over twenty roundabouts on our 100 mile trip to Exeter. We were booked into the Telstar B&B. in Exeter. With twenty rooms, the Telstar was more of an inn than a true B&B. I confirmed that there was no pub downstairs. Exeter was an even bigger city than Bath. I realize I've been complaining a lot about the driving here. but it was the elephant in the back seat. Teresa has a better sense of direction than me, but I'm a better map reader, so she should have driven while I navigated, but she declined to take the wheel, so we had the worst of a bad situation. Finding our way around a strange city was tricky. Whenever we took a wrong turn, which we often did, we had to pull over and study the map on the iPad and work our way back. This is exactly what it took to find the Telstar B&B. As I pulled into the narrow driveway of the Telstar I noticed the street we had been on got super narrow. Glad we don't have to go up that way, I thought. 

      I asked the manager if the Telstar was named after the communications satellite. He said no, it was named after the 1962 hit song that was named after the satellite, and pointed to a poster of The Tornados on the dining room wall. Our first job, once in our room,  was to log onto Wi-Fi and find ourselves a Devonshire cream tea.  A cream tea is not tea with cream in it (a sacrilege), but tea with a scone and clotted cream. And clotted cream is formed by slowly warming cream until it forms clots. It's more delicious than it sounds.  I googled "best Devonshire cream tea in Devonshire" and was directed to a cream tea website. There was only one tearoom listed in Exeter, located about a mile and a half from our lodging. This involved a walk through the busy, gritty  downtown area. On the plus side, there were numerous charity shops which of course we patronized. According to the iPad, our tea shop was across the River Exe, an area even grittier than downtown. In fact it was downright industrial. We passed a giant auto body shop. I could see a long line of wrecks inside. There but for the grace of God.... Teresa was beginning to doubt my map reading skills. A tea shop in this area started to seem improbable to me too.
      We recrossed the river and spotted three women having tea at the back of their apartment estate. They told us the best Devonshire cream tea was at a café across the green from the cathedral. As so often happened, we could not find the landmarks the women had given us. Luckily we could see the spire of the cathedral and we were able to guide ourselves by that to the aptly named Café on the Green. Our cream tea was excellent and now we wouldn't have to be ashamed if people asked why we had skipped cream tea when we had been right there in Devonshire.

Best in the world

     Revived by our tea and clotted cream, we headed over to the cathedral. There are several big cathedrals in the U.S., but the European models are in a different class. For one thing, gravity has been trying to pull them down for several hundred more years. And I may be romanticizing here, but they seem imbued with a more intense faith than their modern versions. Many of the cathedrals go back to the Norman period in the 11th and 12th centuries. The style then was Romanesque or rounded. When the buildings were expanded in later centuries, it was in the Gothic or pointy style.
     The 20th century added the guest welcoming area where you make your donation. Seniors get a couple of pounds discount. Sunday services are free. Near the entry was a large tent which housed the beginnings of an enormous Lego model of the cathedral. For a pound, you could buy a lego block to help complete the model. It's expected to take five years to finish. They've had to order some special blocks from Lego headquarters in Denmark.
   What's most striking about Exeter is the lack of pews and the ceiling vaulting overhead. There were a couple of baby carriages with mirrors instead of mattresses that you could push around to inspect the ceiling without craning your neck. Exeter has the longest uninterrupted vaulted cathedral in the world.

Grab a baby buggy, save a crick.

     One thing we noticed in most churches in England was that the faces of ground level saints and angels had been smashed in. When Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, and 100 years later during the Civil War, certain disgruntled people expressed themselves by picking up sledges. Cultural revolutions are always hard on icons.
     An employee invited us to stay for evensong at six. The organ had been warming up in a thrilling way, and we took our seats in the choir, an area of tiered seats in the center of the nave. Another thirty or so tourists and locals joined us. Promptly at six, the choir filed in, a mix of children and adults, mostly men, but with some women and girls. They all wore gowns and the kids had ruffs. The choir director was extremely lively. I could have heard the music just watching him. The singing was ethereal. It said the angel smashers would not prevail. As we left the church, we read a sign saying one of the side chapels had been hit by a bomb during  WWII. Modern angel smashers.
    Next morning, we studied our maps over breakfast at the Telstar. It wasn't going to be easy escaping the tentacles of this ancient city. At the second roundabout Teresa told me we were already off course. I pushed on a bit, and now we were being forced through a narrow passage with rumple strips, the kind I had trembled at yesterday. In fact, it was the other end of that self same passage, and there was dear old Telstar. I pulled into the driveway. People looked out from the dining room. Let 'em look! We studied the map again, and resolved to do better. It was nip and tuck for awhile, but soon Exeter was in the rearview mirror and Portsmouth was just 100 miles away.
    Much of the route to Portsmouth was on divided motorways so I could relax a bit. We spotted a McDonalds up ahead. McDonalds let's you use their bathrooms without buying anything, but we helped them out by getting apple pies. Taste of home.
    In Portsmouth, my goal was to see Admiral Nelson's ship Victory at the Historic Dockyards. I had booked a room at a B&B a couple of miles from the ship. This B&B only had two parking spots for its ten rooms so I planned to grab one early and walk to the ship. Victory is a major  tourist trap and they charge accordingly. My guidebook said I could save a few pounds by buying my ticket at the D-Day Museum on the side of town close to our B&B.  I figured I'd buy our tickets then park the car and hike over to Victory. It was raining hard now, and for the life of us, we could not see the D-Day Museum. I pulled into a parking lot and ignored the sign that said "Buy a Parking Ticket, Even If You're Lost and Just Looking for the D-Day Museum." I walked around trying to spot the museum but no luck. We drove to a fish and chips place and got vague directions, then tried another restaurant for more vague directions and finally pulled up to a bunker like building that had to be the place, except there were no signs saying "you are here." There was a guy in a van outside eating his lunch. "Is this the D-Day Museum?"I asked.
"Yeah, but it's closed for repairs."
"Are you working on it?"
"Yeah. It'll be open in the spring."
"Next trip," I said.
    By the time we got settled at the Blue Star B&B, Teresa decided she'd spend the afternoon visiting local charity shops rather than walk two miles in the rain to visit an old ship at great expense. "You'll enjoy it more than I would," she rationalized.
    After a quick snack, I headed to the dockyards. The rain had quit but there was a strong cool wind blowing in off the sea. I did not have Internet access, but my phone showed me as a blue dot traipsing through the town. Even with all this technology I still turned the wrong way. How did I find things in the old days? I would have used a paper map and a compass and a less torpid brain.
    You could spend days exploring the Historic Dockyards. I just wanted to see Victory, and mercifully, they let you buy a reduced ticket for just that part of the place. Once I arrived at the ship, I was glad I had come. It was immense. The ship has been in drydock since the 1920s so I could see its entire great bulk.  A cathedral of the sea. Victory was launched in 1765, but she is famous for her part as Lord Nelson's flagship at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. This battle put an end to Napoleon's ambition to rule the seas and to the possible invasion of England itself. Nelson was killed during the battle by a sharpshooter in the rigging of a French ship.

Where Nelson fell. He lived another three hours, bidding farewell.

    After the battle, Victory began a long period of decline. A couple of times the Navy wanted to demolish the ship. It was obsolete and there was no money for maintenance. Public outcries preserved the ship and Queen Victoria put in her oar too. It wasn't until 2005 that the ship was restored to it's look at the time of the battle, and it will be a few more years before all the rigging and topmasts are back in place.
    There are over 350,000 visitors to the ship each year but only a dozen of us were aboard on this cool, rainy weekday. Once aboard, I noticed the other visitors all had headsets and tape players. No one had offered me a headset, not that I would have taken one. They always cost extra and I prefer to read the explanatory cards. But the cards only said things like "Nelson's Stateroom, push #5." All the information was on the tape! Fortunately my father had taken us aboard the USS Constitution and to various nautical museums as kids, so I knew my way around a man-o'-war. One thing intrigued me though. Why was Nelson's bed placed between two cannons just outside his luxurious stateroom? Was he such a heavy sleeper it took a cannon to rouse him?  The German bomb that landed next to the ship in 1941 would have awakened him. The Germans claimed they had destroyed the ship. The British said, No you didn't.
     As I walked back to the B&B a young man approached me. "Excuse me sir, can you tell me the way to the barber shop?" Tall and thin, with a goatee and an umbrella, he looked like a character out of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. I gestured back toward the city center where I had passed a couple of shops. Teresa and I had noted that England has an inordinate number of beauty salons, open late into the evening, and usually filled with  men and women sipping glasses of wine as they awaited their turn. Very civilized.
     After Portsmouth, I had just one more item on my list: Jane Austen's house in Chawton, forty miles south of London. There were no B&Bs in Chawton so we booked a room in the nearby market town of Aldon. Jane's father had been a clergyman and the family had a comfortable life, but when he died, Jane, her mother and her sister were left in genteel poverty. Fortunately an older brother had been adopted by a wealthy childless couple, and the brother offered a cottage on his estate to his mother and sisters. This "cottage" was a large brick house and the Austen women had servants to do the heavy work. Jane spent the last eight years of her life in this place (she died at 41). Once settled at the cottage, Jane had time to revise and publish her first three novels, one of which was Pride and Prejudice. She also wrote her final three novels here. Just before her death, she moved twenty miles to Winchester to be close to her physician. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
     Jane's mother and sister continued to live in the house until their deaths. The house was then used as lodging for farm workers, so there was no impetus to upgrade and alter the place. The house became a museum in 1947 and was restored to it's early 19th century look. Gathered in the house are many items from Jane's life including her small writing table. Seeing things like this is my idea of fun.

Jane left some big shoes.

    The Austen Museum gets a fair number of visitors, but nothing like Stratford-upon-Avon or Victory. It's close enough to London that tourists don't have to spend the night in the area, but we did. We spent two nights in fact. Alton was a fine little town and we felt we were seeing real English life away from the tourist track. The Swan Inn had reasonable rates and our room was much more spacious than at a typical B&B.
    The next day we ran over to Winchester to see the cathedral and Jane's grave. The drive over was not bad, but the streets in the town were narrow and confusing, and as soon as I could, I pulled into a small pay lot. I had not yet learned to pay initially for five or six hours right off and be done with it. I just paid for two hours and figured I could run back if we needed more time. I tried to memorize landmarks as we went so we could find our way back. "There's a Marks and Spencer store," I noted. "We're right down the street from that."
     We checked out the ornate city hall and admired the enormous statue of  Alfred the Great who lived in these parts back in the ninth century. He was one of the good kings. We walked along the pretty River Icthen and explored the ruins of the bishop's palace. As we headed to the Cathedral, we noticed the cathedral used bookstore housed in a large shed was just opening for the day. Wow! I love England. We each got a couple of books and the elderly cashier told us of his travels around the U.S.
     Once inside the cathedral, we claimed our senior discount ("concession" they call it). I wanted to see Jane's tomb, but Teresa thought we should join the one hour tour that was just setting off. I reminded her that our parking time would be up in 45 minutes. She suggested I stay for a half hour of the tour then run up and put more money in the meter.
     Roger, our guide, was an elderly gentleman dressed in suitcoat and tie. I believe that in his younger days, Roger had written a multi-volume history of Winchester Cathedral. It's amazing how much history can accumulate around a single building. We had only made it to the baptismal font near the back of the church when I had to leave. Roger was on a tangent about the carvings on the base of the font when I told Teresa I'd be right back.
     You know those dreams where you start off from home, sure of where you're going, but with each step you get more lost? Well that's what my search for our parking lot was like. I was totally disoriented.  I saw a Marks & Spencer logo in the distance. "Excuse me," I asked a woman. "Is that Brooks & Spencer?" "You mean Marks & Spencer?" "Yes." I said. "I'm trapped in this nightmare and wonder if there's a parking lot down the street from there." She said, "Yes, just turn left at the store and you'll come to the lot." Whew. I turned the corner and spotted the big blue P. Saved! But when I arrived, it was a much larger lot than the one we had parked in. I asked a man if there was another lot in the area. He directed me to another lot, but as I headed the way he pointed, I looked back and saw our original lot. In my frenzy, I had walked right past our lot. Talk about situational unawareness.
     By the time I returned to the cathedral I figured the tour would be well over, but Roger was still going strong, and the tour was only half way up the nave. People in the group seemed to take my return as a chance to fade away. Soon there were only three of us. I wanted to ask Roger where Jane's tomb was. The other member of our reduced group asked about an odd floor tile. Roger said an American tourist had broken through the floor here last year. Now this sounded interesting. Cavities under the floor. But before we could get the juicy details, we had to hear a dissertation on medieval tile making. There was never a pause or break in Roger's discourse. It was like falling through the floor with nothing to grab onto.
     Finally we broke away and headed for a group of tourists by a big plaque. At last the famous writer's tomb. A bunch of the tourists were standing, disrespectfully I thought, right on top of Jane's slab. What sort of acid would she have used to describe that? No, she would have seen the humor.
     In the gift shop I restrained myself from asking for a CD of the song "Winchester Cathedral." We had a pleasant lunch in a busy pub, then enjoyed our usual stomach churning drive out of town and back to Alton.  The highway itself was fine, but I never did master driving the narrow city streets. I needed a couple of more months.

Her words live on.

     Alton was not touristy at all. It was just a typical English market town and we liked it a lot. There were many charity shops to engage Teresa.  As we were walking along the quiet high street that evening, a vanload of lads drove by and one of them yelled "Oi," loud enough to make Teresa start, as the van swerved on down the street. Up to now, everything had been perfectly well mannered. This was a faint echo of Britain's dark side, of the likes of Jack the Ripper, football hooligans, Boris Johnson....
    When planning our trip, we hadn't made any provision for visiting London. Now, after seeing most of the things on our list, we still had two days in hand. I made reservations at a small hotel near Heathrow for the two nights before our flight home.
    What shall we do now? Windsor Castle's not far away. Nah, we're sick of castles and of paying a ransom to get in 'em. I saw on the map that there park on the west edge of London. We could go for a hike. We experienced our first traffic jam of the trip on the way to the park. Someone had told me the M-25 around London was always jammed. We left the motorway and headed to the park. On the way we noticed a gigantic flea market. Quite a comedown from Windsor Castle, but we decided to check it out. Parking in a big grassy field was three pounds; two pounds after noon and only one pound after two p.m. I pulled out a pound coin, but the keeper waved me on. Many of the vendors were packing up to leave, but there were still plenty of rags and bones to look at. This was the place to go for a cheap mattress or the materials to make a mattress. There were also tables of household goods and antiquities. One guy had a table of free stuff. I got an ancient egg beater that was probably used to mix up eggnog when Dickens was in charge of Christmas. I don't know where people get off saying London is expensive. I had just scored free parking and a free antique.
     We checked into our hotel and walked a mile to a pub for supper. Heathrow airport takes up a gigantic piece of land, but is surrounded by several small villages. Next to the Anchor Pub where we ate was a little field with two sheep grazing. You won't find grazing sheep two miles from LaGuardia or LAX.
    Our plan for London was to take a two mile bus ride over to the airport, then catch the Tube (subway) to the city center. But when we read the bus schedule that evening, we learned the bus did not run on Sundays. I confirmed this with a passerby. He said we could walk two miles to the bus terminal and catch another bus to the airport. I called a cab company. Twenty bucks! We decided to walk to the airport, though I didn't know if you could walk into Heathrow. Google didn't know either. Sunday morning we got an early start and saw there was a gate through the fence around the busy perimeter road that services Heathrow's five terminals. And there was a bike path next to the road. Most civilized!
    We had to dodge buses and trucks as we made our way through the parking garage and into the terminal. We bought our tickets and headed down to the Tube platform. It was only 12 miles into the city, but the trip took over an hour because of the many stops. At last we arrived at Piccadilly Circus. The 'circus' refers to a roundabout that's no longer there. There used to be a shop there that made piccadils, or frilled collars. That's gone too.
    We had breakfast in a crowded café. The meals are not more expensive in London than elsewhere, you just get less food. We made our way to Trafalgar Square, much of which was fenced off for an Indian festival. Many of the great museums are free, but we had no time for museums. We would just wander around goggling at icons. Then we saw Yoda, the first of many street performers we were to see. Yoda was levitating one foot off the ground. His feet were not visible, but the bottom of his robe rippled in the breeze of a little fan. He held a staff in one outstretched arm.  How did he do it? If you threw a pound in his basket he would nod to you, but speak he would not.

He never spilled his beer.

    We crossed the Thames on a pedestrian bridge. It's mind expanding to walk through sites you've seen on TV or read about. There was Parliament, and Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey, and, and..., what's that big crowd about? It was another performer, letting two members of the crowd wrap chains around him. This had obviously been going on for a while, and he dragged it out another 15 minutes, priming us to put money in his basket when he finally shed the mass of chains. "A five pound note would be brilliant! I've got  kids to feed back home in Australia."

All the other tourist were striking poses, why not us?.

     The bells of the Abbey were ringing joyously. Teresa recorded a bit on her iPad. On the other side of the Abbey we ran into our first fellow Minnesotan, a young woman from the Twin Cities. She had a map of Minnesota on her sweatshirt so it wasn't hard to make the connection. She was studying in Spain and hadn't been home in months. She said we made her day. Nice.
    We passed the heavily defended 10 Downing Street, and the Horse Guards parade ground, then back to Piccadilly for lunch at the fifth floor café of the amazing Waterstone's, the largest bookstore in Europe. We strolled through the funky Soho area. Teresa found a popup charity store and the manager brought me a chair to relax on while Teresa aided the children of Afghanistan.
    We made our way along Oxford Street to Covent Garden enjoying the street performers and the very diverse crowd. I had read that the old London had disappeared, but I kept spotting ancient pubs nestled under newer buildings. London still seemed to have plenty of old stuff.
     We found the Covent Garden Tube stop to return to our hotel. There was a big crowd at the elevators so we took the spiral stairs down to the platform. Right away we met some exhausted looking kids, then nothing. Round and round we went. Near the bottom was a sign. " Stairs for Emergency Use Only! 193 steps, Equivalent to a 15 Story Building." At least we were going down.
     As we walked back along the perimeter road to our hotel, we popped into a Subway Sandwich shop, attached to a gas station. The shop was exactly like Subway at home, except one of the options was chicken tikka.
     We felt completely acclimated to England as we watched the Great British Bake Off show while enjoying our takeaway supper. Teresa had been careful about her purchases at the charity stores, but it still took a couple of hours to get packed. I had bought a new pair of shoes and had to leave my old ones behind. Perhaps they'll end up at the London flea market.
     It was only four miles from our hotel back to Hertz. I planned our route extra carefully. No screw-ups on the last day. As we pulled into the car return area we gave each other a high five. We had just navigated a thousand miles of the world's most dangerous roads without a scratch. Yes, I could have made our lives easier with a GPS and an automatic transmission, but where's the glory in that? The glory was in getting out and about, seeing all kinds of beautiful and strange things, hobnobbing with the locals, and having any prejudices washed away. It was great!
     I do have one last question though. Why do they give you half a pint of milk to put in your tea, while the ketchup packets don't contain enough to cover half of one French Fry, I mean chip?

Flowery Kingdom