Hark! Hark! My Dogs, They Bark!

We are certainly becoming well-travelled during our stay here in London. It's a walking city, unless you're a fat lazy fuck like me, in which case you still have to walk quite a great deal or enjoy forking over the equivalent of $15 for a journey of less than a mile.

I conclude though, that people who live here and own cars are insane. They drive, of course, on the wrong side of the road, and badly, especially so on streets that were, in many cases, designed and built before the Renaissance. Or farther back, in areas that survived the Great Fire of 1666 unscathed.

And yet the British are masters of transportation (and dilettantes at it, I'm told, compared to the continental Euros). Ilse and I took a trip out to the far reaches of southeastern London yesterday to get a gift for my friend BlackdogRed, who likes putting research in to determine the sketchiest areas of London to which he can send me without actually getting me harmed.

He was less successful this year than last; last summer, as I marched down the Fulham Road in search of the club shop of Fulham FC so that I could get BDR a Brian McBride jersey, I very nearly feared for my life, both because of the neighborhood and because it was a hot summer day and I am, after all, a fat greasy pig. I erred in my research and went, quite reasonably I thought, to the Fulham Broadway tube station, which turned out to be located in a shopping mall right next to the Chelsea football ground. The folk at Chelsea were quite helpful in suggesting that I take three buses down the Fulham Road and keep a sharp eye for the shop. They were helpful beyond the call of duty in that they were also laughing their asses off at the thought of anyone, a Yank especially, visiting the Fulham Club Shop. Unwilling to risk actually riding a bus with the masses, I trooped off down the road, drenched after 300 yards, and walked for a little over a mile, where I found that the Fulham FC Shop is right around the corner from the Putney Bridge tube stop, two stops down the line. Oops.

This year, BDR wanted a jersey from Crystal Park FC. A bit of research showed that I'd have to take a train to reach that part of London, and I was lucky enough to think to phone ahead to discover that the Crystal Palace FC Shop is nowhere near the Crystal Palace train station. Instead, it is near a town called South Norwood, and near a village that verges on the Norwood Junction train station. In short, we got the jersey in about two hours' travel, by foot and rail.

But the trains...they're amazing. Norwood Junction is on a little suburban line (it's actually within what is called Greater London). Trains run to the line's terminus from one or another of the London terminals every five minutes or so, some of them stopping at tiny places like Norwood Junction, most of them expressing on through. Think about it; two- or four-coach passenger trains running five or ten times an hour--out one suburban axis. There is corresponding service along the other axes. That's unheard of in the United States, even in New York City, the commuter rail capital of our country. We made our journey for about six pounds eighty pence, a little over twelve dollars. It would've been close to a $100 cab ride one way. Clearly, the British--and, I'm told, the rest of Europe--know something we don't about transport.

Today has been harder on our feet; we're taking a mid-day break, having taken the subway to Saint Paul's Cathedral: more church, more magnificent, more dead people in the floor, including the Duke of Wellington, and more memorials, many of them to the same guys to whom we saw memorials over in Westminster Abbey, my favorite being that notable loser Lord Cornwallis who, we learned today, got his fat ass sent to Bengal for losing the War of the American Revolution, and died there sweating and malarial. Also buried in Saint Paul's would be Admiral Lord Horatio Viscount Nelson, a spectacular prig, the memory of whom is a nationwide masturbatory obsession. Despite the 20th Century, it appears that the memory of kicking French ass is still a very fond one around these parts.

We also went to the restored Globe Theatre, which is pretty cool, so much so that I'm having trouble formulating any decent mockery of it. Damn you, Globe Theatre.

More later. Now, it's naptime, and later we're off to the Tate Modern to look at modern art. Tomorrow, our last full day here, we'll do War Day Part Two, hitting the Royal Air Force Museum at Colindale and, we hope, the National Army Museum. Until then, please keep jacking up the Sitemeter.