England Sucks! A Love Story

By

Adrian Cole

I have not lived in England for fifteen years, and so I suffer from occasional attacks of nostalgia: visions of summer fields of wheat; the raw, early music of Billy Bragg. But nostalgia is a form of temporary insanity, and I have found a cure which involves simply going to England.

A couple of years ago I was returning to the US from Rome, via Heathrow. It was a Sunday and this, I discovered, is a bad thing when traveling in Europe. On the way to the terminal Four, we encountered an enormous blockage, a line of sweaty and fractious passengers. We could not see the cause of the inconvenience, but we stood shuffling forward, wondering what the hold up was. Milanese models fiddled with their cell-phones. A group of ragazzi, started their ragazzi routine—slicking back hair, oggling women. An old English couple bowed their heads, ready to accept whatever meager service this airport was able to give them.

As I rounded the corner and saw how long the line was, I was filled with horror: the line doubled back on itself numerous times as it crossed a large foyer. But what provoked pure rage were the eight x-ray machines, only one of which was in service. They were processing hundreds of passengers through one machine while seven others stood unused! Why was it that Heathrow, one of the world’s biggest international airports, could not treat its customers with respect? Having us line up here like the cattle that the English were, as it happened, busy slaughtering by the thousand, entailed a massive act of disrespect, and I stood there, a light sheen of sweat on my brow, wondering why we all accepted it. Britain, while not in the same league as, say, France, nonetheless still lagged far behind the US in its understanding of customer service.

As I approached the machine, I looked at the employees who were standing around with no clear job description. One of them, a thin man with graying hair and a pointed nose, was arguing with a passenger about cameras. The passenger was obviously exhausted from the flight and the long wait in the corridor. He was speaking halting English, and the employee was treating him like a moody child. He stepped back from the passenger to stand next to his idle colleague, and muttered something like, “Oh do whatever you want then, I don’t give a damn. I’ve only been ‘ ere ’alf an hour and I pissed off already.” They both stood looking on moodily at the cows passing before them, and had they been equipped with automatic weapons they would, no doubt, have opened fire on the crowd, men women and children all.

I was next to them by now, and could feel a confrontation brewing.

“Perhaps if you opened up another machine you could speed things up,” I said, trying to achieve a lightness of tone, although inside I was seething. The nose turned to me, his face reddening absurdly, and in a high-pitched whine he said, “Oh bugger off, won’t you?!”

I was stunned. How could a representative of an international airport use that tone with me? But instead of lunging at him, as my hormones suggested I do, I turned away, denying all physical and emotional urges (isn’t that what makes us civilized?), shaking my head at the pathetic state of the English nation. Another employee said, as if excusing his rudeness, “Well its Sunday, you see, they can’t get no one to work, they all want to be home with their families.”

As I walked to Terminal Four, I was still in a state of chemical alarm—my imagination had leapt upon the sallow individual, and hurled him through the X-ray machine. How could he have used this tone with me? In England there seemed to be no boundary between professional and personal spaces. Idiosyncrasy and childishness, therefore, was allowed to seep into relationships between service-provider and customer. Only this would explain why customers are treated like a sub-human species, why someone hungry for lunch in a restaurant is a nuisance ruining the waiter’s ciggy break.

But without knowing it, the airport employee had triggered something far greater than the annoyance of an unsatisfied customer. He had connected with something deeply English in me which had become buried under layers of acculturation to the US. There was, I realized, a part of me which sympathized with his dilemma, something which revolted against the commodification of the human and the subordination of the family to work. And as we took off, and I looked out over the neat rows of Victorian houses displayed beneath me in dreary conformity, I felt a longing for the kind of thinking that gets irate at the thought of having to sacrifice one’s Sunday for a job, at the human logic that finds it offensive to prioritize work over family. And then I felt a surge of resentment against my adoptive American homeland, one that makes demanding, exacting ogres out of us, one that deified business, sacrificed the human to the super-human. And as we wheeled over Ireland and left its rocky shores behind, I realized that whatever our experience of our homeland, it remains embedded in our minds and bodies in such a way as to be impossible to remove; its imprint stays with us for ever making us always essentially nostalgic for it. Then I impatiently pressed the flight attendant button and demanded to know where my drink was.