Last week I shared pearls of wisdom gleaned during my family's week-long sojourn in Eireann. Today I move on to the second half of our trip, the week we spent in London, England, and share some things I observed there.
- London is much larger than Dublin, but no less an image of the U.N. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the tourists were a lot easier to pick out – maybe I was just getting better at spotting tourists.
- Unlike Ireland, which has one national rail service, British rail service is divvied up among several private rail companies. This makes figuring out how to take the train from London to, say, Dover more difficult, because first you have to figure out which rail carrier goes there, and then figure out the schedule from there. If you are starting in without any knowledge of what rail companies go where, as we were, this is not easy – even with the internet to help.
- London still uses the “famed black taxis” celebrated by Donald Bain. They are truly a breed of automobile apart. They are still mostly black, although a growing number now sport flashy advertisements splashed across their sides. The rear compartment for passengers is so roomy because the seats are all the way in the back of the vehicle, where the trunk ordinarily would be. In addition, there are fold down jump seats, one behind each front seat, so that up to four people can share one cab in cavernous comfort.
- I was very, very glad that I was never called upon to drive a car in London. Those who do drive there must have great courage to do so – between the bus lanes, the rotaries (“circuses”), and the reckless behavior of bicyclists, motorcyclists, and scooter riders, it looks very complicated and hazardous, definitely not for the cautious or faint of heart. On the whole, it seemed to me that driving in London was harder than even driving in Boston, and for those who know what Boston traffic is like, you know I do not say this lightly.
- London is scattered with parks, some of which are quite large. Regents Park and Hyde Park, for instance, are huge, much larger than I pictured them being, and it takes quite a long time to walk across them.
- England, at least the parts of southern England that we visited, seemed more densely populated than Ireland. Nevertheless it too is a place of great beauty that I very much want to visit again. And next time I want to make a point of going to Scotland as well.
MSW episodes set in England:
- Sing a Song of Murder (season 2)
- The Corpse Flew First Class (season 3) – well, most of this episode took place on a transatlantic flight from Boston to London, but it ends up at London’s Heathrow Airport
- It Runs in the Family (season 4)
- The Szechuan Dragon (season 6) – while most of the action was happening in Cabot Cove, Jessica was periodically checking in from London, and solved the murder from there
- Tinker, Tailor, Liar, Thief (season 8)
- Murder in White (season 10)
