Friday Grab Bag: Last Days of Saigon Edition

Ever tried to put 50 pounds of, um, anything in a 20-pound bag? Then you know exactly how our packing is going for our imminent return to the States. We brought too much with us when we came here 10 months ago. We bought a bunch of stuff while we were here. British Air reduced the weight of luggage passengers may bring. And now we're trying to pack.

We're in a triage situation. If it's an article of clothing that hasn't been worn in the last year why should we ship it back? In the giveaway pile it goes. Then there's the fashion eugenics: Tiny hole in a sock or a pair of underwear? Sorry. Your services are no longer needed. Such is the decision made between who will live and who will die.

We're resigned to mailing a few suitcases back but we're also calculating whether it would be cheaper to ship it or buy it new in the U.S. Oh, and we also have to clean the house for the final inspection.

So, grim, panicky hours around here. The Viet Cong are at the door. The chopper's on the roof. The clock is ticking....

BritNews RoundUp
Just some quickies (and, oddly, none from the Daily Mail): The Cerne Abbas Giant, an ancient monument carved in the chalk of a Dorset hill, is in danger of being obscured by vegetation. The problem: Not enough sheep are grazing away the weeds to reveal the white outline of the priapic fellow. Maybe they could get Viagra to sponsor a few sheep.

The BBC says it's not dumbing itself down, even though it bought the rights for a UK version of a popular Japanese game show that pits contestants against each other in madcap exploits. Writes the Telegraph: "BBC executives are said to have been particularly excited by a segment of the show known as 'human tetris.' A celebrity contestant is required to contort himself to fit through a shape cut out of a moving wall while dressed in a tight silver jumpsuit. If he fails to pass through it, he is knocked into a pool of water." (Check out the link with the Telegraph story. Looks like fun.)

A BBC spokeswoman said: "We are obliged to have something for everyone. Some people accuse us of being too highbrow."

Speaking of the BBC, a police helicopter in Cardiff gave chase to an unidentified flying object after nearly colliding with the UFO near a military base. "They are convinced it was a UFO," said a South Wales police spokesman. "It sounds far-fetched, but they know what they saw." What's this have to do with the BBC? Well Cardiff is where the sci-fi shows "Dr. Who" and "Torchwood" are filmed. Surely this can be incorporated into upcoming episodes.

Oh wait, we do have an entry from the Daily Mail: You can slice cheese with Keira Knightley's collarbones. And that's not good.

Gargoyle of the Week
St. Michael's Church in Ballinasloe, Ireland, is made of the gray limestone that runs through that part of Eire like the bones under Keira Knightley's skin:

The church features some particularly muscular gargoyles:


At least I'm not trying to pack a gargoyle, though it seems like we have to squeeze just about everything else into our suitcases. So, back to that. I'll try to pop in over the next few days, before we take a jumbo across the water, but if I can't, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Beer, Glorious Beer: Touring Hook Norton

"Do not put your hands in any tubs of liquid," said Nick, our guide, as we entered the Hook Norton Brewery last week. Sensible advice anywhere, really. Putting your hands in strange tubs of liquid is a good way to lose your hand. It's also a way to get you kicked off a brewery tour. And since the whole point of a brewery tour is to get to the end of it so you can sample the beer you've just seen being made, that would be a Bad Thing.

My Lovely Wife and I toured the brewery the day after we toured the Mini factory. The effect was, quite literally, like going from the 21st century to the 19th century. If the Mini factory is all robots and laser beams, the Hook Norton Brewery is all bags of malt and tubs of liquid. Oh, there's also a steam engine: a 25-horsepower number believed to be the only one still in use for its original purpose, that original purpose being moving things--mainly water--around the brewery, since you don't really need a steam engine to make beer.



The steam engine has a seven-foot flywheel and its original 109-year-old drive belt. I don't know where you'd go if you needed a new belt. It would probably have to be custom woven from sheep intestines, kapok and gutta percha.

There were 11 of us on the tour and that was about twice as many as we actually saw working in the brewery. Occasionally as we climbed a narrow staircase or pitched up on a landing there'd be a casually-uniformed employee. A scientific-looking woman in a white lab coat was visible behind glass in one office, an array of test tubes in front of her. But otherwise, the place was almost deserted, imbued with the languid feeling you get after your third pint on a rainy day.

For a rainy day it was, absolutely pissing down. We'd taken two buses from Oxford, the first a double-decker to Chipping Norton, the second a tinier coach to Hook Norton that the driver piloted as if it were a Zodiac inflatable full of commandoes. He plowed through the narrow, twisting, flooded roads, pedal to the metal, spraying great rooster tales of foam behind us. By the time we alighted, trembling, in Hook Norton I needed a beer.

The brewery building itself looks Dickensian, and I suppose it is. They've been brewing beer in Hook Norton since 1849 and the Victorian tower brewery looked like a workhouse or asylum, steam curling up from various chimneys:
It reminded us of the building in the Japanese anime film "Spirited Away," a living, breathing thing. Inside was the best technology the Victorians had to offer: copper vats and toothed gears, sprockets and cogs and belts. It was like being inside a massive pocket watch.





Some of the cogs--as big around as dustbin lids--had wooden teeth. You never want metal against metal, Nick explained, since if the cogs seize up it's a horror to get them unstuck. If one cog has wooden teeth you can just knock them out with a hammer, pull the assembly apart and replace them. I don't know what this guy is doing, probably putting goose fat on the gudgeon ring or something:

I don't understand the chemistry of brewing beer. I have a better grasp on the consumer end of things. I believe the process involves water--called "brewer's liquor"--which at Hook Norton is pumped up from an underground well. Malt--which is roasted barley (who knew?)--is added. Hops do something important. Yeast helps things ferment. We couldn't go into the fermenting room--a stray bacterium can ruin the whole process, evidently--but Nick opened the door and swung it back and forth to waft the odors to us as we crowded outside.

"Oooh, that's lovely, that," said an older woman. "You're in the pub."

The process from start to finish at Hook Norton takes 11 days, or about as long as it takes to make 9,000 Minis.

Back in the little tasting room in the brewery's museum Nick pulled us half-pints of the various Hook Norton offerings: the malty Hooky Dark, the golden Hooky Bitter.... He opened a bottle of Cotswold Lion, a seasonal beer that tasted faintly of citrus. They were all very nice but I confess I'm partial to the beer I order whenever I'm down the pub: Old Hooky. "Beautifully balanced with a well-rounded body," is how it's described.

Like beer, like beer drinker, I say.


Can't make it to Hook Norton? Try a virtual tour instead.

Factory Fresh: Touring the Mini Plant

I suppose it makes sense that if people want to act like robots, robots might want to act like people. After all, robots are built by people, to do the things that people do, but to do them more precisely, uncomplainingly, and without ever tiring.

That's one of the conclusions I came to after touring the factory where they make the Mini. The human workforce is impressive, of course--some 4,700 "associates" work at the plant in Cowley, south Oxford--but it's the robots that prompt existential thoughts. They seem alive.

The original Mini was born in 1959 and it's been built in Cowley ever since. The iconic design--a low, wide stance that calls to mind a smiling, pop-eyed bulldog--made it the automotive symbol of Swinging '60s Britain, owned by celebrities and immortalized in such films as "The Italian Job." The Mini was never the success in the U.S. that it was in Britain, Americans seeming to prefer the similarly idiosyncratic VW Beetle. There are still plenty on the road here, though, and it's a shock to be reminded how small they are. The "new" Mini--itself a wisp compared to typical Detroit metal--dwarfs the old one.

We own a Mini and thus we had to visit the birthplace of all Minis--at least the ones made since BMW took over the factory in 2001. It's to the Germans that we owe the current Mini gestalt. Mini advertising, Mini showrooms, official Mini souvenirs--all of it is impeccably art directed, right down to the factory itself, the entrance to which features the reversed sans serif lettering of the print ads:

The production area covers 45 hectares, or about 110 acres. It sounds like a lot till you realize that's half as big as it was in the days the old Mini was built there. That's progress for you: the ability to do more with less. Advances in technology means bigger cars can be churned out in a smaller space. And for that we must thank the robots.

Body panels and sub-assemblies come from a plant in Swindon, about 30 miles away. The engines are made in Hams Hall, near Birmingham. It all comes together in Oxford, starting in the "body-in-white" building. When I was there, workers were moving around pallets of panels--"LH Sill Inner Assy," was stenciled on one. Others were feeding the panels to the robots, which would grab them as easily as you or I lift a cafeteria tray. The production line inched along, orange robot arms applying spot welds in a shower of sparks. The robots moved with purpose but also with a kind of grace, never deviating from their programmed path. Some robots did more than one thing: A massive arm would finish a weld then swing over to near where I was standing and dip its "hand" down into a trough, shrugging off whatever tool was at the end of its appendage. It would raise up a few feet then plunge into another trough, where, with the whir of an air ratchet, a different tool would be attached, RoboCop-like.


It wasn't all robots. They're not quite dexterous enough to put the doors on. Two men positioned them with the help of a jig while another welded the hinges on. And then the body rose up into the ceiling to continue its journey.

Odd little enclosed bridges connect the buildings at Cowley. Inside, the aborning Minis trundle along like so many ants. After the bodies have been assembled it's time for painting. As with the difference between a construction worker and a portrait artist, so as between a welding robot and a painting robot. The paintshop has the quiet antisepticism of an operating theater. No percussive thuds or spark eruptions here. Even the robots look more refined, their arms swathed in red fabric, as if Christo had paid a visit:


Each little platform that the cars moved on had a barcode indicating what color the Mini was to get. The robots--their white paintheads looking like cows' udders--would squirt into a chamber to clean themselves then rise, birdlike, and dance over the body. It was altogether less frenetic in the paintshop than the bodyshop. When the robots finished spraying a car they would pull back, appearing to rest as the next Mini moved along. The painted Minis themselves looked like an assortment of gumballs:



The last stop was the assembly building, where the shiny Minis were gripped in yellow metal slings that looked like huge calipers:


The windscreen, the dashboard, the seats, the trim, the electrics, the engine--it's all inserted here. After getting their own paint the doors are re-attached. There was even a point, walking along, when I got a whiff of something familiar and wondered if there was a cylinder marked "New Car Smell" squirting in that unmistakable odor.

This seemed the most human-centric part of the process, or at least human-friendly. (It's all Mini-centric.) Two humans eased in the cockpit, standing on a wooden floor that moved along with the car. Another popped in a headlight. A black ripstop nylon bag was plopped on the floor of each Mini. It looked liked another fashionable Mini accessory--a large cosmetics bag? weekend valise?--but it contained the car's entire wiring harness, soon to be snaked through the body.

The motor, transmission and front axle rolled as one along on a conveyor built and were lifted by two orange robot arms to the waiting body above:


Then, the mating. Two workers on a platform did something--to be honest, I couldn't see what, just heard that blaaat of ratchets--and, engine installed, the car floated to its next stop. Total time to install engine: 55 seconds. I thought of the 12 hours I once spent replacing the clutch on my MGB GT, a process that required removing the engine. When it was over I was as physically spent as it's possible to be.

Not so the robots. They never tired of lifting, welding or screwing, moving with an economy of motion that was simple but balletic. When--tires on, fluids filled, fuel squirted in--it was time to start the car for the first time and drive it away, a buzzer sounded and the line stopped. It was time for the humans to eat.

Morris Dancing
It takes about 24 hours to build a Mini. They can build up to 800 a day. Every modern Mini you've seen was built in Oxford, its riot of options--body color, roof color, rims and seats--coming together on the high-tech assembly line. It's the latest incarnation of an automotive tradition that dates back to 1913, when a bicycle racer named William Morris built his first car in Oxford. Morris went on to become Lord Nuffield, remembered in Oxford for the hospitals he funded and the college he endowed.

I find it endearing that cars are built in Oxford, this city of dreaming spires and gowned undergraduates. It's as if the Chevrolet assembly line was a stone's throw from Harvard Yard. The Mini plant is open for tours, though you must book well in advance. If you're interested send an e-mail to Oxford.Plant-Tours@mini.com. Or take a virtual tour. My thanks to BMW Group Plant Oxford's Rebecca Baxter for showing My Lovely Wife and me around the factory and for the photos of the assembly process.

Get Your Motor Running

I like old cars, interesting cars...any cars, I suppose. In Europe, and in England especially, you have a better of chance of seeing something cool than you do in the United States. Here are a few that have captivated me over the last eight months.

An old Skoda in Prague:



A Fiat 500 in Rome:


A Smart car parked outside the Ferrari dealership in Berlin:


A Citroen that parks around the corner from my house:


A Skoda, in a Prague shopping mall:


A Trabant, Prague:



A Bentley decorated for a wedding, Wenceslas Square, Prague:



An Armstrong Siddeley parked on my street last week:



And here's how I get around:

The 71 Roundabouts

You'd think I would have learned my lesson. After traveling from Oxford to Cambridge by bus last year I did it again this week. It's a punishing trip, not dissimilar to the Middle Passage that ferried kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic. Three-and-a-half hours and only about 20 minutes of that are on roads of anything wider than two lanes. I wrote before about the nausea-inducing whipsaw motion the bus takes every time it goes around a roundabout. And there are lots of roundabouts.

How many? Seventy-one. I counted them:



There are big roundabouts of the sort that funnel vehicles onto and off of a motorway. There are tiny roundabouts, just card table-sized raised white circles on the tarmac. There are about 10 roundabouts in Milton Keynes alone. Or, rather, the bus goes around roundabouts 10 times. Some of them are multiple passes at the same roundabout, like a bull repeatedly circling back on a toreador or a pinball pinging between posts.

I don't begrudge the English their roundabouts. It's part of what makes this country great. I had an epiphany, though. Many well-traveled English people I've met talk about how they crossed the United States "on a Greyhound bus." They have fond memories of this life-changing journey, describing it as if it was something out of Bob Dylan or a Creedence song: This is the real America. I realize now that, though they may not know it (these things operate on a subconscious level), what they are reacting to is a bus ride without roundabouts. It isn't the sharecroppers' shacks sliding by in the Deep South or the Rocky Mountains marching majestically to the horizon or even the anomie of American ex-urbia that makes such an impression, it's the fact that the Greyhound isn't continuously lurching back and forth like a drunkard looking for a dropped coin.

Seventy-one roundabouts. Between them the bus would pick up speed and the rapeseed fields would flash by, their yellow blossoms making it look as if extra sunlight was pouring down from the sky. I listened to the people around me. A group of teenage apprentices behind me unwound after a day at technical college in Bedford. They were joking about their ineptitude--the roofs they'd fallen off of, the carpet they'd cut wrong--but under that self-deprecating veneer was a new pride. One boy told his friends about the tools he used, his own tools, not rented ones, tools he'd bought with his own money. "If they got nicked I'd be out of pocket well back," he said. There was a girl on the bus sporting a wristful of polished wooden bracelets. "I could make them," he told her. "I'm a carpenter. It's my job."

The boys traded drinking tales--the bartender who knew they were underage but served them anyway, the friend who bizarrely only drank top-shelf liquor, the vomiting, the hangovers.... When they talked about booze they were loud and boisterous, but when they talked about sex--about a girl they knew or wished they knew, about whether "she did or she didn't"--their voices dropped to a whisper. They talked softly for a while, comparing notes, filling in gaps in their knowledge, then the talk turned to football and they were shouting again. "I was playing this kid one-on-one," said a boy. "He says, 'I had a trial with Man United.' Man United must be hard up 'cause I won 5-1 and I'm useless at football."

The bus stopped at one village and a laughing woman with an arm in a cast got on. She nodded to a man weed-whacking his front garden. "He said you'd gone," the woman said to the driver. "I asked if the bus had come and he said it had. If I'd been talking to him you would have gone right by. It wouldn't have been your fault."

She sat down behind me and told the story to everyone around her, how she'd almost missed the bus and how it was her good fortune that she hadn't.

German Engineering

One of the benefits of travel is that it makes you appreciate the place you came from. But another byproduct of travel is that it makes you question the place you came from. While it may be true that there's no place like home, it's also true that home can sometimes use a little improvement.

That's what I decided after spending the weekend in Berlin. Clean, efficient, cosmopolitan--the antique intermixed with the modern. A subway, trams and bicycle lanes. I think Washington could benefit from a bit of Berlin style.

It probably helped that the weather was great. All of Europe seems to be gripped in the throes of beautiful climes. Parachute anywhere from London to Gdansk and you'll find blue skies and warm temperatures. But it was more than that. I find Berlin incredibly art-directed, with an attention to style that stretches from the way its people dress to the typefaces of its street signs and posters. I suppose it might grate after a while--perfection can extract a painful price--but thinking of the room Washington has for improvement, Berlin definitely had some appeal.

I compared the shopworn and crowded Smithsonian museums to the tidy German History Museum. It was wonderfully empty, leading me to wonder if that's because the Germans already know their history, don't want to know their history, or just would rather spend a gorgeous spring day outside rather than in.

It was probably the latter. That impulse is the same wherever you come from. And after we'd returned to England and were on the coach back to Oxford, I was reminded how achingly green and beautiful this country can be. The verdant landscape rolled by outside the window looking like a ripe fruit begging to be bitten. That's what nine months of rain does. What am I doing sitting here?

Mother of an Invention
In honor of Mother's Day, The Washington Post Magazine yesterday published my story about Daisy Breaux and W. Clark Noble, a pair of wacky characters from the 1920s who attempted to build a memorial to America's mothers. The final design looked like something from Batman's fevered imagination and the whole thing ended just the way we journalists like it: in recriminations and lawsuits. I'll be answering questions about the story online today at noon Washington time; that's 5 p.m. England time. Click here to join the conversation at washingtonpost.com.

Citizen Bane
Kyle MacRae founded Scoopt, the service that pioneered putting citizen photographers together with newspapers and magazines. Now he blogs about citizen journalism for the Frontline Club. I provided a guest post last week outlining some of my thoughts on the issue. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that the whole thing is becoming less consequential to the mainstream media, not because it isn't important but because so many things are battering newspapers, for example, that they barely have the time or energy to think about it.

Confessions of a Travel Writer

There's a bit of a to-do over a new book from a travel writer named Thomas Kohnstamm. In "Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?" Kohnstamm admits to various bits of trickery and corner-cutting while working on guidebooks for Lonely Planet. Among the allegations are that he gave a good review to a Brazilian restaurant after having sex with a waitress on a table ("the table service is friendly," he wrote) and that he wrote a Colombia guidebook without ever visiting the country. The former seems to be true, the latter not.

I haven't read his book, but Kohnstamm seems like kind of a smarmy guy, willing to take Lonely Planet's nickel and then diss himself, and by extension them. I was in the guidebook game for a while, rewriting most of the Fodor's travel guide to Washington when I was a freelancer in 1989 and then updating it for the next few years. I never got to have sex with a waitress on a table, though I did French kiss Ling-Ling, the giant panda, behind the National Zoo's snack bar. ("The pandas, a gift from China, are not to be missed," I wrote later.)

I think guidebooks are better now than they used to be. Fodor's, part of Random House, encouraged me to be quirky and conversational in my tone, to divide the city into walking tours instead of alphabetical lists of attractions. Other, narrower guidebooks are on the market now too, with Rough Guide, Access, DK and Lonely Planet earning fans. But there is a bit of sameness to any travel guide, as opposed to a travel memoir.

That's because the first thing you do when assigned a travel guide is read all the other travel guides, just to make sure you don't miss anything. If you think something's a waste of time--Hillwood in D.C. springs to mind--you can't just leave it out. Your travel guide would be lacking. Also, you're not paid that much--or at least I wasn't. I was a lowly freelancer, happy to get the job. I think I was paid $3,000 to write eight walking tours, update the entire front of the book, pull together a history of the city and compile a list of nightlife. My friend Jeanne did restaurants and hotels. I probably earned something like $5 an hour.

And I made some rookie mistakes. I wrote the book on a tight deadline in the autumn and it was published the following spring. I remember visiting some part of the Mall the summer after the book came out and noticing that a view had changed. I had said something like, "Note the uninterrupted vista from the memorial to the building off in the distance." Well when I wrote it was uninterrupted, but that was because there were no leaves on the trees. By summer you couldn't see a thing. I fixed it in the next edition.

There was one cool thing, though: I saw a family using my book, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I wanted to walk up to them and introduce myself, but thought that would be weird. At least they didn't look lost.

The Canterbury Tales, or: Easter Charade

Where better to spend Easter Sunday than inside the hallowed confines of Canterbury Cathedral? Wait, don't answer that. There are probably plenty of better places, most of them involving sun, sand and fruit-based alcoholic drinks. But we weren't in one of those places yesterday. Instead, we'd made a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Rowan Williams was set to give the Easter sermon.

If you weren't in the cathedral you can be excused for not really knowing what it was the archbishop spoke about. "Archbishop warns 'greedy' nations" reads the BBC's web site. "The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned in his Easter sermon against nations' greed for oil, power and territory," the story began. While Williams did mention that, it was in the context of a sermon about death (and resurrection, the themes of Easter), not a sermon about greed and avarice.

Williams started his sermon talking about how fingernails and hair are the only things that keep growing after you're dead and buried. Kinda gross, but attention-grabbing. He was at pains to point out that death is real: "It is a full stop to human growth and response, it is night falling on everything we value or understand or hope for."

He did say that some people grasp at material goods as a way of taking their minds off death, and that this doesn't do any good, but it was just one observation in a sermon that to my ears (and those of the rest of my family) was more about death than greed. And yet every radio, TV and newspaper article about the sermon that we've encountered since then has stressed the filthy lucre angle. Why? I thought of a few reasons:

Journalists didn't want to confront their own mortality. Unlikely.

They were making a political point, highlighting an aspect that fit with some kind of agenda. I hope not.

They were following talking points provided by the Church of England without reading or watching the sermon. Probable.

They simply didn't understand the sermon. This is entirely possible. I grasped some of what Williams was saying--we die, it's final, I get it--but he was short on specifics. Easter is full of symbolism--rebirth, fecundity--but symbols don't pay the bills. After we die, what then? Is there a heaven? Are we reunited with old family pets? Can we finally play the piano? Is there broadband?

Williams seemed to be saying that the only thing that survives death is god: "When we look at death, we look at something that can destroy anything in our universe -- but not God, its maker and redeemer." Well good for Him. The rest of us are screwed.

It could also be that I didn't understand the sermon. Still, I know the angle I would have taken if I'd been covering it: "'We're All Gonna Die,' says Archbishop." A little depressing, but at least it'd be accurate.

Easter Parade
Actually, I'm glad we spent Easter where we did. The English do pomp and circumstance very well. It was snowing (!) as we entered the cathedral an hour before the 11 a.m. service and found seats with a good view of the pulpit. At about 10:50 local dignitaries trooped in, an amazing assemblage of cloaks and frock coats, breeches, tricorn hats, powdered wigs, brocade, military uniforms, medals, ceremonial staffs, chunky gold mayoral necklaces.... It was like being on Main Street in Disneyland for the costumed-character parade. (I was this close to Goofy!)

I mean that in a good way; it was wonderful. And this was all before the ecclesiastical posse came in: choirboys in stiff, high-collared shirts and purply-red robes, tented-finger prelates, the Archbishop himself with his pointed hat and shepherd's crook.

Williams's sermon was delayed by two protesters who waited till then to pull out signs reading "No to Sharia Law" and "Support the Persecuted Church" and stand under the pulpit. They were hustled away and charged, I learned this morning, with violating an 1860 law which makes it an offense to disrupt a cathedral service. I wonder how many crying babies that's been used against.


I shook the archbishop's hand on the way out.

The Madrid Building Boom

There's nothing worse than looking at other peoples' vacation pictures so I promise not to bore you with too many tales of our recent Madrid trip. Seventy-five percent of the Kelly family went to the Spanish capital last weekend. The final quarter was in Barcelona with her Spanish class. She forbid us from being in the same city with her, but couldn't stop us from going to the same country.

Spain is the perfect antidote to England, which is probably why so many English people move there. It was sunny and warm for our visit, with glorious blue skies. The streets swarmed with beautiful, smartly-dressed people. One afternoon we sat at a coffee shop near the Plaza de Canovas and just watched as dozens of handsome couples emerged from an underground car park and strolled down the street (to a wedding? to the opera?). The men were in nicely-cut suits, a few in white tie and frock coats. The women were perfectly turned out, elegant without going overboard: ensembles of rich purple, green or gold; seamed stockings and high heels; heads topped with compact hats, often a single, long feather curving down and accentuating a comely cheekbone. The couples walked with an unhurried gait that was almost a parade. We could smell their perfume and pomade. It was a lovely promenade.

We'd found a very cheap hotel--65 Euros a night!--just a few blocks from the Prado. The fact that it had room and was so inexpensive may have been because it was across from a construction site. But even that provided entertainment. I don't know how all buildings are built in Spain, but this is the one across from the Hotel Mexico on the Calle del Gobernador:



You will note that there are three construction workers. Not pictured are the guys operating two cranes off to the right, who would swing their hooks back and forth in a desultory fashion. We never saw more than a half-dozen workers there at a time. Their main task seemed to be picking up pieces of wood and rebar off the muddy ground and tossing them into piles. Sometimes they would use a torch or saw to cut a little length of rebar off a bigger piece of rebar and then toss that into a pile.

The first thing I would do upon waking was to open the curtains and watch them. I spent half an hour one morning watching as they argued over how to move that long rebar mesh thing that the middle guy is kneeling on. They appeared to be trying to affix those rectangles of sheet metal then use a crane attached to the sheet metal to lift it all up. But the metal kept popping out. They would cut bits of rebar off, then weld bits of rebar on. Then one of the men dropped his hammer into the middle of the metal birds' nest and had to lean in to retrieve it.

I kept wondering why there wasn't a big hole. Isn't that the first thing you do when you build a building? Dig a big hole? But there was no hole, just dirt and metal and timber and five guys with three hardhats among them. They would start work around 8:30 in the morning. The amazing thing was that when we'd return to the hotel around 11 p.m. they'd still be there. A few lights would illuminate the scene, the mounds of wood and metal would have been moved around, a pile driver in the corner would be hammering away. Like most of Spain they'd probably taken a two- or three-hour lunch, but even so, they wouldn't knock off till around 11:30.

That white sign indicates that construction was approved in 2006 and work began in April 2007. I expect they'll be done in 2037.

Please don't think I'm accusing Spanish construction workers of being lazy or inept. They produce some pretty fine work:


And as I said, Madrid was incredible. We only had about two-and-a-half days, so we sped through its main attractions. Racing through the Prado was like taking part in a speed-eating competition: Oh, another room full of Goyas, Picassos or Velazquezes. We never got bored with it, though. I hope we'll go back to see how that apartment building is coming along.

Water, Cool Clear Water

When I was a boy my father used to sing me cowboy songs. These songs often involved cowboys coming to bad ends: bleeding to death after a shootout or dying of thirst out in the desert. You know: cheery little ditties perfect for pondering as you drift off to sleep. I decided early on that if ever I were to become a cowboy I would carry an extra canteen and a styptic pencil.

The best song was "Cool Water." Like many good cowboy songs, it's sung to a horse. Mirages tempt a cowboy and his trusty beast, Dan, as they trudge through the range: "Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water, cool clear water." The listener can't help thinking the pair are going to give up, their bleached bones discovered years later when the interstate is put through or the Sizzler steak house thrown up.

I thought of Old Dan and the cowboy when I saw this story about how restaurants in Britain are being urged to serve tap water, rather than charge for bottled water. (Or, as I'm convinced happened to me the other day, charge for tap water they put into a bottle.)

In a country that puts the "surly" in "service," the restaurateur's disdain for free tap water is what bugs me the most. Ask for nothing and you will receive nothing. Ask for water and you will receive a bottle of water (one pound fifty at the last restaurant I ate in: $3). Ask for tap water and you will be given a withering look of disgust, as if you just wet yourself. In a country almost comically obsessed with "being green" it's strange how people would rather drink water out of little bottles with a big carbon footprint than quaff the liquid that comes out of the pipes.

Well, perhaps this campaign will make a difference. Old Dan and I will do our part and stick to tap water. Either that or cut the top off a cactus and suck the juice out.

Come Don't Fly With Me
Dueling announcements from various governments about making flying "safer" make me consider using a rowboat to next cross the Atlantic. Yesterday the Guardian had a story headlined "Bush Orders Clampdown on Flights to U.S." (Putting "Bush" in the headline is guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of Guardian readers.) The European Union is upset at American demands that armed U.S. air marshalls be allowed on flights originating in Europe and that passengers provide detailed information even if they're just overflying the country.

Today's front page news in The Post that European countries may require fingerprinting for U.S. travelers almost sounds like a tit for tat but it's more tat for tit, given that the U.S. already requires fingerprinting and photographing. Treating everyone as a suspect will continue to do wonders for America's standing in the world. Why don't we just tell people we don't really want them to visit?

More Cowboys
Now I have cowboy songs on my brain. "El Paso" by Marty Robbins is a good one. The song about an ill-fated romance with lovely Mexican beauty Felina has that great lyric: "Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel a deep burning pain in my side." (Or, as Marty Robbins sang it, "my siiiiIIIIIiiiiiiiide.") Yes, unnamed protagonist, that means you've been shot.

Then there's one of the saddest songs my father used to sing, "Streets of Laredo." A cowboy--"wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay"--lays dying in the street. It's a cautionary tale, as the dying hand admits to his misdeeds, tells the passerby to notify his next of kin and even makes his own detailed funeral arrangements.

Cowboys really knew how to live back then and they sure knew how to die.

Greetings from Glastonbury

I'm sitting in the parking lot of of Glastonbury Abbey in southwest England. We've just come down from Glastonbury Tor, a huge hill topped by a 15th century monastery (above). The monks are long gone, of course, but it's a two-pound bus ride from town to the base of the hill, and then a strenuous climb to the summit. The sun was burning off the clouds as we arrived and below was the English countryside, pastures cross-crossed with hedgerows.

We were without Internet yesterday, while staying in the tiny village of Dinder, a collection of stone houses outside of Wells. We were at a B&B called Middle Farm. It turned out the owners, Francis and Liz, used to live in Oxford, on the same street we now live on. Small country; small world.

Have I mentioned we have the dog with us? Charlie's cramped our style a bit but it's broadened his mind. He'd never ridden on a bus before. Or seen a cow. Or climbed a tor and entered a 15th-century monastery. I think it had a profound effect on him. Here he is surveying the landscape below and contemplating his own mortality. Or he could just looking for a place to poop:

We have thousands of years of British history to learn about today, and what is my family doing? They're off shopping. Between the supposedly New Age powers of the tor and the rock festival that's held here every year, Glastonbury has a collection of funky shops that they couldn't resist. Ah, here they come now.

We're off to Tintagel, supposed home of King Arthur. Charlie is dying to see it.