Brighton and Easter Weekend: It is odd that a country this a-religious would have a four-day Easter weekend. I suppose I can understand making Good Friday into a holiday, since this was (historically at least) a very Christian country (although if you prayed the wrong way at the wrong point in time, you could be in deep trouble). But the Monday after Easter? I can only assume that the labor unions negotiated it as a holiday at some point and it became wired into things.

We decided to spend part of the weekend in Brighton. It is only an hour by train from London Bridge Station and the trains run all the time. Good Friday was a beautiful day and the trains were just packed. We thought maybe lots of people would get off at Gatwick Airport, but it turned out the masses were going the same place we were. After dropping our luggage at our hotel facing the beach, we wandered about. Calling Brighton’s sea shore a beach stretches the definition if you consider a beach to be made of sand. It is mostly large pebbles and there was a big construction project going on along the top of the beach, in front of where there a string of restaurants and pubs built-in underneath the promenade. All eateries were jammed and we ended up at place that had service that went from terrible to awful to infuriating to “Fawlty Towers”. (You literally could not have had worse service if you were scripting it to be intentionally terrible. Which kind of saved the meal, since it would have otherwise been so annoying that it might have spoiled the whole day. We left more amused at their utterly spectacular incompetence than angry.)

We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through the cute little streets of the town (The Lanes and North Laine), which were mobbed with shoppers and gawkers on a sunny day. (Although it was in the mid 50s℉, a lot of the Brits treated the sudden appearance of sun and relative warmth as a chance to wear shorts and tee shirts.) There were all sorts of little stores and places to eat and drink. There is along pier that is sort of a poor man’s Coney Island, which we walked along to view the sunset and take too many pictures. We found some nice pubs and a very snazzy wine bar and ended the night at a lovely seafood restaurant.

   

The next day, we went to visit the Royal Pavilion, a summer estate built by King George IV (and started while he was the Prince Regent) as a sort of pleasure palace. It is quite a spectacular and eccentric design, with a number of onion-shaped domes and increasingly ornate rooms, all designed in a “Chinese” style. It was set up for George and his friends to have endless parties. Poor George was stuck with a crazy father and indifferent mother, was forced to marry a woman he ended up despising and ended up grotesquely overweight and miserable. He became so heavy that he had to have a special bed constructed to slide him out and he had a tunnel dug to his stable there because he was embarrassed to have people see him walking over to see his horses. His only daughter, who he did love, died in childbirth (or we’d be referring the latter half of the nineteenth century as the Charlottean Era.) His successor kept using the Royal Pavilion, but Queen Victoria had no use for it since it was designed for a dissolute bachelor and not a proper queen with ten kids. So she stripped everything of value out of it and sold it to the City of Brighton. They eventually restored most of it (although the work is still going on) and a few of the original pieces have been lent back for display by QE II. There were a number of contemporaneous paintings of it, so it is an accurate reproduction. The renovation of the Music Room was in process when it caught fire in the 1970s and, just when it was almost re-renovated, the top of the dome over it broke off in a huge storm in the 1980s, crashed through the dome and ornate ceiling and embedded itself in the floor. But it is now done and you can lie on the floor and look up at the ceiling.

   

Saturday had turned into an extremely blustery day by the time we left the Pavilion and most of the big crowds were gone. I guess they had mostly come down as a day trip. We had a spectacular lunch at a place called Riddle and Finns (as wonderful as the prior day’s lunch had been comically bad), overlooking the beach and the bundled up Brits walking through the gale (although there were a few hardcore loonies who were sill in their shorts and tee shirts). Then it was back to the train for our return to London where we met Jenny (visiting from Montclair) and Phil Saunders for a relaxing dinner.

On Easter (the next day), we went out to Pleshy to visit Jane and Paul Gee and their family. It was really very nice of them to invite us to another family  occasion. We were a bit late because I decided we needed to bring something and and had to make some bruschetta, which ended up tasting and looking beautiful. We were further delayed when we learned that the train we normally take there had been closed for repairs. (This happens all the time. So much so, in fact, that British Rail and London Transport send out a weekly announcement detailing which lines are going to closed or delayed on which days.) Lovely lamb roast, too many cakes and some nice wines (in particular the ’03 and ’04 Chateau Batailley). During post-dinner tea, we watched “The Race”, which is the crew race on the Thames between Oxford and Cambridge. It seems to be a rally big thing here (or maybe it only is if you went to schools like Oxford or Cambridge). Still, it is televised extensively, with replays and analysis and summaries on the nightly news. We closed the day with a stroll to the Leather Bottle for a “cleansing ale” and then returned to London (via the Stansted Airport train).

Sports on British TV: Writing about the boat race on the Thames, which is treated like March Madness, reminds me of just how different sports coverage is here. There is no hint of the NCAA Tournament and no one seems to know about it. It is never even mentioned on the news, even the fifteen minute wrap ups shows. And I guess it is possible to watch some NBA games if you have the right cable package, but I don’t. It also gets no coverage and it will be interesting to see if the NBA Playoffs gets any attention. As for ice hockey–really, are you joking? Baseball gets no coverage either. American football (“gridiron”) is covered in some detail, as is the PGA (golf being a British thing after all).

So what do you get on British television? Well, there is tons of soccer, a lot of it not even good soccer. In addition to Premier League coverage, there are minor league games, games from various European leagues and from Scotland and Wales, replays of past games, highlight packages, reminiscing about past seasons or stars, and even MLS games from North America. It reached the point where I was flipping through the channels and found Sky Sport 5 covering two guys paying the FIFA soccer computer game! When soccer isn’t on, it is lots of rugby (a number of tournaments and leagues from around the world) and cricket (test matches, one day matches and the current innovation–20/20 cricket). And cricket is a summer game, so there will be more to come. There is professional netball (imagine women’s basketball without backboards or dribbling), professional badminton, endless darts tournaments and snooker contests and lots of golf and some tennis. I have at least yet to be subjected to lawn bowls, as I was in Oz, but maybe that is just in the summer. Oh and the British seem to love boxing, which is a dead sport in America, so there is lots of boxing and professional wrestling televised, but, mercifully, mixed martial arts has not taken hold here yet.

Talking about television and sports reminds me that Joe Garagiola recently died. If you are a baseball fan of a certain age (like my age), this has to have some resonance for you. He really was the voice of baseball for a period in the 60s and 70s and he went on to do some important things. For me it was a moment to be noted and it reminded me of something that I read from Garrison Keillor about living overseas. The problem with living overseas, he wrote, is that you find out that your favorite player, Harmon Killebrew has died and you can’t find anyone who even knows who Harmon Killebrew was. So it was with  Joe Garagiola: a minor moment of introspection and slight grief/memory moment that could not be shared since the common cultural background was missing.