Whenever I come to the UK I think of the album Atlantic Crossing despite it being one of Rod Stewart’s less worthy offerings. It’s mainly notable for the song Sailing which was recorded at Muscle Shoals at 10.30am while Stewart was, unusually for the time, singing, stone cold sober. He didn’t want it released as a single, but it became the theme song to a ten-week BBC Series about the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and his best-selling UK release.
The song was originally by the Sutherland Brothers, two folk-music playing brothers, whose lyrical genius is shown by the fact that the second verse of a song entitled Sailing contains the lines, ‘I am flying, like a bird, across the sky’. They later combined with rock group Quiver to tour and record the undemanding pop song ‘Arms of Mary’. Quiver’s other claim to fame is that they were the first band to play the legendary Rainbow Theatre in London.
So, a song with a misleading title, by a folk/rock combo, sung by a sober Scottish singer and on the album under protest becomes famous because of an aircraft carrier. It may not be the strangest tale in the history of music, but it is as whimsical as some of the experiences of an itinerant Englishman. And Atlantic Crossing was Rod’s first effort to make his mark after moving to the US so I feel a certain empathy.
My latest sojourn to England has been enjoyable as ever but has shown that I am rapidly becoming out of touch with the ways of the Angles. It’s not that I have totally forgotten everything that was handed down by my forebears, but I have found myself doing things that only a tourist does. It’s very unnerving but a reminder that I am visiting rather than coming home.
I have forgotten how to cross the road without endangering myself and every driver in the area. I keep looking the wrong way and stepping out full of confidence that nothing is going to hit me. After a few tries I have found that the only way to be safe is to approach the road with my head swivelling like an owl in a barn full of field mice.
After eating I keep asking for the check (and yes in America it is a check even when it is a cheque). Restaurant staff are too polite to ask me if I am just being ironically trans-Atlantic or just influenced by too many shandies. I usually blush and stammer, ‘oops sorry, I meant bill, but I live in San Diego now….’, before trailing off under a stare that suggests they really don’t care.
Arriving without an umbrella was also not my best idea. I had forgotten how much it rains in England and how, even when it is not raining hard there is a misty, spitting sort of precipitation that leaves you damp. All of this not helped by the reality that older English hotels are delightful but not endowed with ways to get warm or dry.
The good thing about the weather is that I have been freed to have more baths in seven days than I have in the last seven months. At first, I was timid because I had got used to a shower routine that is vital in a place where it doesn’t rain for nine months of the year and the water bill makes H2O seem more valuable than gold. Once I got over my culture shock, I plunged into a routine of baths both morning and night and have every intention of squeezing in three during the last 18 hours before the plane.
I have lost the ability to deal in the coins of the realm and had an uncomfortable moment in the supermarket where I kept trying to feed the automatic checkout with a fifty pence piece that wouldn’t work. The shop assistant who came to my assistance was surprised enough to blurt out loud that her grandfather had “some of those antique coins” in his collection. I reverted to paying for everything with notes to save time and embarrassment but am left with a bag of metal for the charity collection on the plane.
It has been lovely to hear people speaking in accents and tones that are as redolent of my youth as Manchester United getting relegated to the old second division. Both these features have mixed memories because for every Norfolk burr there is an estuary sentence full of glottal stops, dropped aitches and foul language. And for every memory of the glorious recovery under Docherty and onwards to Ferguson there is the sadness of watching incompetent management buy Ian Ure from Arsenal, who became my constant nemesis as the worst player in United’s history.
Difficult to get this far without mentioning Brexit. Truth is that it is difficult to know what to say and this is not the place for a political rant about the ineptness of a referendum for such a significant change to be based on a 50/50 vote. Neither is it helpful for someone with their interests in another part of the world to question the right of a minority government to drive legislation that will change the future for millions.
Almost everyone I have spoken to has been sad but resigned to leaving the European Union. Some of the Scottish and Northern Irish seem steely eyed about taking a new opportunity for statehood, independence or realignment that places them back in the European fold. The Brexiteers, my favored name for the ‘Leavers’, continue to sound like a raddled, sulky, deceitful, agit-pop band, but seem uncertain about the “sunlit uplands” that await and even less sure about the veracity and quality of the politicians leading them.
Next time I return I believe it will be to a nation that is making its own way in the world. That was how it was when it became the land of the ‘mother of parliaments’, the lone defender against fascism and the leader of cultural and technical innovations that continue to influence creative enterprises around the world. My fingers are crossed that its future allows it to rediscover its courtesy and civility, be a beacon to the ambitious and the oppressed and, above all, a place to be proud of.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay