Why is it, exactly, that the pronunciation of Edinburgh leaves out quite a few vowels and then adds in some syllables? This is one of those mysterious things about the Old Country. Even if this is hardly MY old country, it's somebody's, so it's reserved the right to be stubborn, idiosyncratic, and blithely mysterious. Something about wandering a city that has seen both the Bubonic Plague and Eurovision 2023 seems to make a place where anything is possible. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Monday is the day we finally leave the unreasonably warm city of London to a city that absolutely no one outside of a 19th century returning exhibition of the Canadian Arctic, would consider warm, Edinburgh. It's down the sauna like stairs, to avoid the sauna (without saftey controls) like elevator, finally out into the clear air of morning London. Which, actually, yeah, this isn't Sherlock Holme's London, nobody is dying from consumption of miners lung here, it is p...
We took a train from the air port to London. If there is one m lasting idea thatI came away with about the English countryside. They used a whole lot of brick. Brick houses, brick stations, brick post offices. Everything was made to stand the test of time or a resurgence of Viking raiders. Gotta get the iconic "double decker bus, brick, and just a bunch of fellas working the Doordash gig" shot in there. We have never gone on this thing. But with the weather, it'd be subjecting ourselves to a very slow, very hot greenhouse Nelson's column, or, as I explained to my son, he was like their version of Admiral Thrawn. We get to King's Cross to try and drop off our bags. Now to a North American, every single station in London sounds like a place alive with tea parties and cheekily misunderstood double entendres. Perhaps a bit of a comedy of errors here and there and an overly polite cop in a high vis vest going about his business in an environment where you can be pret...