Yes, I'm in the UK now. I got into Sweden last week, for 6 days. I was at the UK-QSAR meeting today on the Novartis campus in Horsham and flew out yesterday to get here. It was a comedy of errors. I thought the meeting was on Thursday, not Wednesday, and had planned to visit AZ on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday morning I check the schedule and realized my mistake. Ryan airlines is cheap and getting tickets wasn't bad, even for the day before. When I showed up I was 8 minutes late. Check-in closes 40 minutes before the flight. Had to get a new ticket. Oops! Still, a new ticket (one way) was about $100. It was cheaper flying later, but it messed up my schedule.
You see, I didn't have a place to stay. I was expecting to come into Horsham with 4-5 hours to spare and look for a room. The pre-conference dinner was at 7:30 and I arrived in Stansted at about 4:30 then had a long wait through immigration. Last year immigration control took about 1 minute. Here the line was 30-40 minutes long. Blah. I think they centralized it
so they could lower the number of people staffing the desks. Last time I think there were different immigration controls for each terminal, and coming from the EU meant there were a lot of EU people who didn't require much processing. I was one of the few non-EU people on that Ryan flight.
I got to the restaurant about 15 minutes late as it was. I was helped by a navigational computer, sometimes. GPS controled with a map of the UK. I told it where I wanted to go. It wanted to change the routing frequently - the rush hour traffic gave it the heebie-jeebies. Today I figured out how to turn it off temporarily when it gets annoying ("Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?"). Trouble was, it put me into a car park and said the street I wanted to go to was a special traffic area. Meaning that it was for pedestrians only. It took me a while to figure out what that meant.
After dinner I tried finding a place, with help from others at the conference. Andrew Henry (from CCG) had a mobile phone with web support so looked up a few web pages for me. It didn't help enough so I haded to Crawley, a bigger town nearby. Got there around 11pm. First place - booked up. Second place - the same. They called another place, also booked. "If they are full then there's no place in town."
Others from the conference dinner suggested that if Crawley failed me I should go up to Gatwick for an airport hotel. I did not heed their advice. Sounded too boring. Drove down to Brighton instead. It's about 15 miles away, which in the UK is further than it sounds. First place was locked up for the night. Second place was open. Checked in just before midnight. Guy behind the desk as Mohammad Ali. I kid you not. He's a British citizen from Egypt. Lived in the US for a while, specifically in New York. He was rather hopeful that I knew NYC but as I've only been on the ground there there for about 3 hours I couldn't talk about the place with him. Nonetheless we chatted a bit about other things.
Like that most of the taxi cab drives in Brighton are from the Sudan but if you ask them they say they are from Egypt. Mohammad thinks it's because they don't like telling people they come from a very poor country and would rather claim they come from Egypt. I wondered if it's easier to say "Egypt" then to explain where the Sudan is. Eg, "I'm from Miami" "Really, so am I - which part?" "Ft. Lauderdale" "But that's not Miami." "But people know where it is."
This Friday I'll visit friends in Oxford. The extra day gives me time to travel. I looked on the map and decided to head eastward today to Hastings and see what there is to see of the old 1066. Arrived just at sunset. Pulled into a car park on the boardwalk and went down to the beach. It's a gravel beach, with what looks like river gravel. It has a lot of sea barriers I think to prevent erosion, so I don't think it's the real beach. That's a lot of gravel then.
It reminded me of my high school English class where we were forced to read Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Edgar Prufrock". I hated that was a passion. It made no sense to me, I understood none of the analogies, references or allusions. The only memory I have (besides agony) is of a references to waves crashing onto a gravel beach, and something about Dover. Which is nearby. As I'm on the beach overlooking the Channel (touched the water too, to say I've done it) I wondered about the poem. Did it describe this scene.
I walked on down the promenade and espied the Grand Hotel, with wi-fi and rooms to rent. En suite for £35. The innkeeper knows his facts. He knew right away that Santa Fe was the capital of New Mexico and that it's at about 2000 meters. He didn't know the population though and guessed it at 1.5 million. He was surprised at the 70K number, which is smaller than Hastings. I mentioned Prufrock and he got T.S. Eliot right way. He mentioned some BBC report as news of some economics professor's fantcy that within 1000 years there will be two races of humans. I mentioned the Eloi and he mentioned H.G. Wells. Is that type of knowledge commonplace for British inkeepers? Has decades of experience with pub quizzes kept the mental skills of the UK public in tip-top shape? Find out more as I experience life on the road in the UK.
I looked up Prufrock on the web. There is no mention of waves on gravel. The closest is
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
for my memory of the waves is tied with crabs or lobsters. The sound of claw clattering like gravel rattling? I don't know why I thought of it. Perhaps my teacher had gone to England and recounted being here? I checked "The Waste Land" in case I got the reference wrong but again found no reference. The closest there was "If there were only water amongst the rock".
Freeman Dyson, who is close to being a personal hero, wrote an autobiography titled "Disturbing the Universe". Profrock contains the line "Disturb the universe?". Perhaps I should try again to understand that poem. Dyson is wicked literate. And there's my early 90s slang again.
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