The day before we took off for a weekend in Italy, I went to the Frieze Fair. It is huge modern art show in a gigantic tent (or, more accurately, series of tents) in Regent’s Park (originally appropriated by Henry VIII to be his hunting ground). There is actually a companion show, Frieze Masters, in another monster tent in a different part of the park. I only went to one, partly because the admission was so expensive (£35 for one show and around £55 for both). There was a sculpture garden in the park that was free. Frieze Masters does not limit itself to new works and has stuff going back to antiquity. Everything at both events is for sale, at least theoretically. But at the one I was at, the art was “on sale” only if you wanted to spend thousands and thousands of pounds on works that were generally large and often strange.

The whole thing reminded me of a cross between the Whitney Biennial and the SOFA shows at the Park Avenue Armory we used to attend. Just a mix of glorious and beautiful art and pieces that you look at and think “Really? What were they thinking?” I’ll include a few photos at the end of this post to give you an idea of the show, although it was so incredibly varied that I’m not sure I can do it justice. Watching the mix of outrageously dressed art types and clearly wealthy collectors was part of the fun as well. It was set up by spaces rented to galleries (like SOFA), so the whole thing wasn’t exactly curated, since what you saw was ultimately dependent on what the galleries chose to present, which presumably was dependent on what they thought would sell. Most seemed to go for flamboyant.

As is often the case when I go to these sorts of things, I wander around wondering how is it that these particular artists and their works were chosen. Why them and not Tom Nussbaum or Karen Fried, for example? Some of the works are done by people who are obviously talented. But many are works where, I am convinced, it was the artist’s rap about his or her work, and his or her self-confidence and self-promotional ability that makes the difference. The Art World is a mystery to me, I guess. There was a lot of money sloshing around there, looking for something to buy. It was a fun day and I got to speak with a fair number of artists and gallery reps. The place was a madhouse and I went on a Thursday. It must have been wall to wall people on the weekend.

One of my other takeaways from my day looking at incredibly varied art was that I need to try to be freer in what I do. I feel like I have been timid so far, painting between the lines too often. The works I was most drawn to were frequently the ones that seemed to have been dashed off quickly. They may not have been and the look was undoubtedly the result of years of practice.

On the way home, I stopped in Clerkenwell to attend the gallery opening of a collage artist from Bloomfield, NJ, who I met through Judie’s Montclair meditation teacher. His work was interesting and there were a few I suppose I would have considered buying if their price was right and I was at home. (His stuff was too small in scale for a place like the Frieze.) But again, I was thinking as I walked around, “These are nice, but the people in my Art and Soul covenant group do things that are just as nice.” The gallery was in a wonderful little part of Clerkenwell that we didn’t see when were looking for flats. Maybe it is out of our price range.

Frieze photos follow:

This past weekend we went to Italy. Judie’s sister Robbie was touring the country and was ending up in Rome on Saturday and we were thinking of meeting them there and then one of Judie’s favorite clients invited us to visit her in a villa she had rented on the Amalfi Coast, so we decided to go. It was our first experience with the two budget airlines in Europe, Ryan Air and Easy Jet. Because we waited until the last minute and were traveling on the weekend, we didn’t get the bizarrely cheap that you hear about, but it was still pretty inexpensive. It was also extremely no frills. They charge you to print a boarding pass, the seats are close together and don’t lean back, you can only bring one bag on board with paying a hefty fee, you can’t even get a glass of water without paying for it and they fly in and out of Stansted Airport (which is kind of up in the direction of Cambridge), rather than Heathrow. It was a lot like taking a long bus ride only with lots more security. All in all, for a two-hour plane ride, which is about how long it takes to get the Rome or Naples, it wasn’t too bad. And now we know how it works for future flights. Actually the worst part of the whole trip was trying to get back into England. The customs machine couldn’t read my fingerprints and we ended up on the Group W Bench (although without the father rapers and mother stabbers) for a while until they could figure out what to do with me and eventually decided to just let me through.

The place on the Amalfi Coast was incredible. It was in this pretty obscure, beautiful fishing village turned tourist location named Marina del Capitano located between Sorrento and Positano. You basically had to drive over two mountains, up and down switchbacks with lovely views, until the road ended. (Great way to get back behind the wheel after six or seven weeks–and in a standard no less.) We were really glad we had the GPS, but we never would have found the villa without specific directions. The photo above shows Judie sitting by the jacuzzi overlooking the bay and the village. Cheryl and her family were in Capri for much of the afternoon on the day we arrived, so we go to just lounge around this impossibly gorgeous house, sipping white wine. That night we went to dinner in the village at wonderful seafood restaurant and, because the season is over, we were the only ones there and had a private feast.

The next day we drove up to Rome to Meet Robbie and Bob. On Sunday, we almost killed ourselves walking around Rome. It was a nice day and Rome is so scenic that it is hard not to keep going. Robbie and Bob love gardens and we found some lovely ones up on one of the hills near Quirinale. I was reminded of one of the things I had learned in prior trips to Italy: No matter what you have planned, some of what you want to see will be closed or under repair. This time the Pantheon was closed on Sunday morning (who knew they still had Church services there?) and the Trevi Fountain had been taken apart as part of a renovation (so no coins to toss). But it hardly matters because just walking around is so much fun. We’ve been to a lot of the major tourist sites on prior trips, so, while R&B went toff on a tour to the Colosseum and the Forum, we went to Castel Sant’Angelo. It was originally Hadrian’s Tomb (also Marcus Aurelius) and was build around 135 AD. It was destroyed in the sacking of Rome and then used to build other buildings. (Hadrian’s remains are long gone.) It is close to St. Peters and the Vatican and over time, the Popes took it over and made it into a fortress. There is a wall with a passage between the Vatican the Castel that allows the Popes to escape attack (which one of them actually had to use during the 1527 sacking of Rome). Pope Paul III, who was also responsible for Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, did a huge renovation and had a papal apartment built, along with a store-room for papal valuables. There was also a museum inside and a spectacular panoramic view at the top.

We had two delicious meals (of course). One was at Trattoria Il Tulio, a sophisticated restaurant recommended by and Italian lawyer who Judie had just interviewed about possibly moving to Bryan Cave. The other was Il Bacaro, a more romantic spot which would have been even better if the weather had permitted us to eat al fresco.

One of the things we had planned when we decided to move here was to take advantage of the ease of seeing other parts of Europe. We are already puzzling about where our next trip should be. Vienna? Lithuania? Greece? Morocco? But first Judie leaves on Thursday for Las Vegas (with stop in New York).

They are announcing the Mann Booker Prize tonight (Tuesday), which is for the best fiction published in Britain the past year. The BBC has live coverage of the event and has been having stories about it for the last week. Can you imagine any American network giving any coverage at all to a literary award–especially one where a none-American might win?

I am part of a small group that is trying to introduce “Standing on the Side of Love” to the UK. It can’t be a simply Unitarian thing, since there are pathetically few Unitarians here. So It will have to be a coalition. It is a daunting challenge and one that I suspect may fail, but it is exciting to try to start a movement.

I actually watched the entire Met game on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. After about the sixth inning, I told myself that I’d give up and go to sleep if the Dodgers scored another run, but they never did. And then LA took out Kershaw to start the eighth, so it seemed like the Mets might have a shot. But it wasn’t to be and I ended up crawling into bed at around 4:00 AM. If I try to watch all of Game Five, I won’t get any sleep, since the taxi comes to pick us up at 4:00 to go to Naples.

Remember the scenes in “Harry Potter” with the night bus? I didn’t really appreciate the significance until we moved here. The Underground stops around 1:00 AM and the only way to get around London after that is to take the sporadic night buses, which I assume are not exactly like the ones in the books. They keep talking about extending the tube service, but the management isn’t crazy about the idea since that is when they do all the repairs to the system (which apparently needs lots of fixing all of the time) and the union guys want a pay increase if they are going to work in the middle of the night and occasionally go on strike to make the point even though it is unlikely to ever happen.

Here is a picture from the other day at Old Spitalfields Market. This group of old ladies in red were there for some reason and they were so cute that everyone wanted to take their picture. The didn’t seem to mind, so I joined in.

One of the reasons that they stood out so much is that it sometimes seems like everyone here wears black–the hipsters in their black jeans and leather jackets, the businessmen in their black suits, the police and just everyone else. It is sometimes a little monochromatic. In Elizabethan and other old times, wearing black was a sign of wealth, since they really didn’t have good black dyes and black clothes were specially made with imported dyes. If you weren’t rich your black clothes quickly faded to gray and if you were poor, you wore brown. Of course, it is not a sign of wealth now, just conformity.

Last night I got up again to watch the Mets play. I’ve got a streaming service with MLB.TV, which works great, especially after midnight. I can recall staying up late to watch sports from the other side of the globe when we lived in Australia, but I don’t remember it being this difficult. Of course that was about 25 years ago and I guess I bounced back from lack of sleep better when I was younger. When the Mets fell behind in the second, I was thinking “I’m killing myself to watch them lose again?!” I’d watched them lose the Utley-Tejada game on Sunday morning and I was beginning to worry that I was bad luck. But they came back and built such a big lead that I felt OK going to bed a little after 4:00. I figured with a 10-3 lead after six innings, the lead was pretty safe and if they did manage to blow it, I really didn’t want to see it. I’m hoping that they win tonight to give me a break. If the Mets end up in a Game Five, I will end up staying up all night on Thursday night/Friday morning until the taxi picks us up at 4:15 to take us to the airport for a flight to Naples. The Mets are clearly trying to kill me.

Of course, the baseball playoff get absolutely no media attention here in England, just as I am sure that the Rugby World Cup, or the Ashes cricket matches before it, are utterly ignored by the American media. I wonder if they will make note of the World Series? (My guess is that they will have to if the Cubs are in it since that is such a great story.) Actually there is a British Baseball Federation, with its office in London, which runs some sort of national competition at a variety of levels. I suspect it is something like the Australian Baseball Federation, which ran amateur baseball when I was there and was run by a group of marginally competent stuffed shirts who mainly tried to screw things up for George and the ABL whenever they could. The parallel to my Aussie experience jumped out at me when I found the internet site and I don’t doubt that I could get involved in that organization. But their season just ended, I’m not going to be here that long and I really don’t want to have “deja vu all over again”. (Farewell Yogi…..)

US Football (‘gridiron”) does get pretty significant coverage here. The NFL plays a couple of regular season games here, which has to help and Sky TV shows NFL games on TV, although Sunday. Monday and Thursday Night Football games all start after midnight. They also show a few North American (MLS) soccer games on the “telly”, which is more on indication that the English can never have too much football (soccer). They also show most of the Premier League games, various friendlies and games somehow involved in World Cup qualification and games from leagues in Italy, Spain, the Champions league and others I am unable to even identify. It doesn’t quite reach the saturation point of college basketball in the US, but it is close. I’ve started to look into getting tickets fora Premier League came when the kids are here (especially Alex who actually pay attention to it) and have discovered that most of the games are sold out. To get Arsenal tickets, you have to pay to “join” the Arsenal club to even have the opportunity to buy tickets that season ticket holders cannot use. (But Arsenal is apparently like the Yankees, so maybe I’ll go for West Ham or some other team.) I suspect that there is a UK version of Stub Hub that I will have to use.

I am told that the NBA also gets a lot of TV coverage here (although I think it might be on a different cable service) and they play some games here as I recall (although they may just be exhibitions). I’d be surprised if there is much hockey coverage, although there are some ice rinks in London and if you Google the issue, you do find hockey clubs of some sort. There seems to be zero interest in American college sports, which is fine with me.

Judie and I had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Friday Night, after my finishing-the-hat day, I met Judie in Shad Thames for dinner. Shad Thames is a beautiful area of renovated warehouses on the River, just East of Tower Bridge. We looked at flats there back in July and the whole area was so lovely that we really thought seriously about living there. But visiting on a Friday night made me realize that we’d made the right choice. There just isn’t that much to do there and that it would have been a real pain for Judie to get to her office. But it sure is pretty.

After doing very little for most of Saturday, we remembered that someone we met at the New Unity Congregation was performing in Soho, so we called over and bought tickets and then went to the West End. The show was called “Vesper Time” and was a one-woman show by Stacy Makishi, a standup comedian/performance artist originally from Hawaii. It was interesting and strange, sometimes moving and often very funny, containing elements of Moby Dick, Demi Moore, the movie Ghost, Tracy Chapman, pop songs, sodomy with God and stories about her life and faith. At one point, I got pulled up on the stage for a portion about her relationship with her father, who had left her family when she was little. (I had an intuition as she started talking about her father that I was going to end up in the show. Well, Judie has been after me to do some theater while I am here.) It was a fun evening. Soho is a madhouse on a Saturday night. Everything just spills out into the streets. We went to a seafood/tapas restaurant at which you are presented with an iPad when you are seated and place your orders by clicking what you want and sending your choice to the kitchen. Someone them brings it out to you (wine and drinks works the same way). So we didn’t really have a waiter. It was a little odd, but it worked pretty well for tapas. The ceviche was very good and they had olive stuffed with tuna and then deep fried.

On Sunday, after church, we went to the Columbia Road Flower Market. It is pretty near to our flat, in an area where I’d never walked. Flower markets are inherently lovely. One of my best memories of my trip around India with James was visiting the flower market in Calcutta, which was incredibly huge and vibrant. The Columbia Road market is only held on Sundays and ends a little after 2:00. We had been told that if you get there near the end, the vendors start reducing their prices to get rid of their flowers. Since we couldn’t make it there until close to 2:00 because we’d gone to church over in Newington Green, we got there at the right time to find out that it was true. The flowers and plants were all very inexpensive and the scene was great. All these guys yelling “Flowers for a Fiver”. The problem was that everyone else seemed to know about the cheap prices at the end of the day and the place was impossibly packed. The flower stalls line both side of a narrow street, with maybe four feet behind them on the sidewalk so you could get into the stores. The result was that there was a pathway up the middle of the street that was no more than  six to seven feet feet wide in some places (maybe even less), down which hundreds of people were jostling, shopping, haggling, taking pictures, lugging plants and looking for bargains. It was pretty crazy, but worth the effort. We ended up buying three bunches of flowers, a heather plant, a lily plant and a cyclamen plant, all for £20. (We also bought a butter dish in one of the stores. Butter doesn’t come in sticks here. So the butter dishes are shaped differently to permit them to hold the larger rectangles of butter.)

Later in the day, we went to the Ace Hotel to see the end of Philippe’s Hip Hatchet tour. He was playing a one-hour set in the lobby (in exchange for a room) and, unlike my prior visit there that I wrote about earlier, not everyone in the lobby was lost to the reality around them, staring into their laptops (although some were). People thought we were Philippe’s parents and gave us seats, which was amusing. We hung around, drinking too much beer and talking to Philippe’s friends after he finished. (Judie tried to go back to the flat to do some work, but Commercial Street was completely closed due to a car accident.) It was nice to spend some time socializing with people.

Finishing the hat
How you have to finish the hat
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat

This is from Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and is one of my favorite songs of all time. The song, sung by Georges Seurat, perfectly captures those moments of obsession that come over artists when they are working on their art and nothing else matters. I used to have those moments when I was designing and I would look up and hours would have gone by. In law, the only finishing-the-hat moments came when I was writing a brief.

Today was a finishing-the-hat day for me. I had kind of been working on two paintings, one a sort of a portrait that I’d been fiddling with for a week or more, sometimes frustrated, rarely satisfied. Then in the middle I had an a idea for something completely different. Suddenly, today, I just felt like I had to finish them. So I alternated working on them. Here they are:

This portrait is based on a photo I took of Philippe Bronchtein when we went to see him perform at a club in Camden Town. I liked the composition of the photo and because the light wasn’t great, the photo looked like a painting from the beginning. Like my last representational painting of the two guys in the museum, I am not certain that I am done. I think it could be improved (so in a sense I haven’t really finished this hat), but I don’t think I have the technical skills to do much more to it. I’m planning to take an art class (that was one of the things I meant to do today before becoming obsessed), so I may come back to this when I’m feeling more confident in my techniques in acrylics.

The second picture I did pretty fast. It is very loosely based on a couple of paintings I saw at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, one by Picasso and one by someone whose name was Nicholson (I think) and who lived with Barbara Hepson around 1930. I like the way it turned out. It owes a lot to my graphic design background and I probably could have just done it on the computer and printed it out (and in fact, some of my initial playing around with the main idea was done in Adobe Illustrator). I’m not sure the color is right in this photo. That part that looks gray (at least on my computer), is actually a light blue. But you get the idea.

I’m not sure what comes next. Maybe I’ll take a few days off.

The biggest television show in England this year is “The Great British Bake Off”. It has gotten the biggest audiences and is on the front page of the papers. It seems so very British (there is not much of a chance of “American Baker”). The really cool thing is that is was won by a Muslim woman in a head scarf named Nadia and that everyone seemed to be rooting for her. Since I drafted this yesterday, the New York Times has had an article about Nadia, so she is now an international phenomenon.

The Conservatives have been having a conference in Manchester this week. I’ve been going on and on about British politics lately so I won’t go into details, although it was bizarre with Cameron lurching to the left, while other members of the cabinet lurched to the right. It seems like Cameron might have made a tactical error by announcing that this is his last term. It appears to be leading to a lot of posturing by potential contenders (with five years to go!!).

At noon today I went into the Ace Hotel, the extremely hip hotel on Shoreditch High Street. Philippe is playing in the lobby there on his last night in England to conclude his tour and I figured I would check it out as I was walking past. There must have been 30-40 people in the lobby and all but about five had his or her head buried in a laptop. There was a long table that you would think would be for lunch, but every space was filled by someone looking at their laptop. See the photo. Very strange and oddly quiet. No WiFi in the rooms???

The Underground here uses something called Oyster card, which are like NYC Metro cards with a brain. It work by some sort of radio transmission, so that you simply touch it to a reader at a station or on a bus and it deducts the right sum of money. And if you register your card, you can set it up so that you can direct it to reload the card when you touch the reader or automatically reload when you touch the reader when your card has less than £10 on it. Pretty neat technology. And then I lost my Oyster card. But no worries. I just had to buy a new one for £5, then go on line and cancel my old one and move the balance on the lost card to my new one! This has the Metro card completely beat!

And finally, Full English Breakfast! (Except I made it for lunch.) Actually, this is a light version, since it doesn’t have sausages or potatoes.I  guess in America, we would substitute pancakes for the baked beans, which might be the only thing you could do to make this more fattening.

 

I went to the Royal Academy of Art today to see the Ai Weiwei exhibit. I’d heard of him as a famous artist and dissident in China and I’d heard enough about his work to know that he was some sort of conceptual artist whose art made political points. But I really wasn’t sure what to expect and I really wondered if I would like it at all. I did. His work is certainly not beautiful, but it is thought provoking and it was presented fabulously. As part of the admission, you receive an audio guide, which, as you might imagine, is crucial when you are dealing with conceptual and Chinese political art, since you need to know the story behind the work. The tour included the curators and Ai Weiwei himself talking about his work and his life. A few examples might give you the flavor of the Exhibit:

One of the themes that keeps coming up in Ai Weiwei’s work is the recycling and repurposing of objects. He collected pieces of old temples and their furniture as they were being knocked down in Beijing in favor of new developments and saved them, using pieces of them to create art. When the earthquake stuck Sichuan in 2008, there was a suppressed outcry that much of the carnage (including the collapse of twenty schools) was due to substandard construction. He somehow clandestinely purchased tons and tons of the twisted rebar from these collapsed buildings and had it hauled off to his studio, where he employed a large number of workers to laboriously straighten each piece using sledge hammers. At one point, he was arrested and hauled off to prison, but the work continued. It took six years (!) and eventually led to this gigantic undulating work, entitled “Straight”, consisting of some impossible number of tons of rebar. While all this was going on, Ai Weiwei was outraged that the government refused to release the names of the over 5000 students killed in the earthquake, so he set up a cooperative that went out and spoke with people in the area and discovered thousands of names which were published in social media. On the walls of the room where “Straight” was displayed were the names of thousands of these students.

in 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested and kept in a secret location for 81 days. He had two guards in his room with him at all times and the lights were never turned off. For reasons that were not explained, all of the furniture, including the toilet, and the walls were covered with foam and tape. Although he was forbidden to discuss what had happened to him and was on parole and without his passport, he nevertheless commemorated and protested his incarceration by constructing six huge, extremely realistic dioramas of him in his jail room, sleeping, being interrogated, walking back and forth with the guards, eating, taking a shower, etc. The dioramas were large black boxes with holes so that you peek in and see the scene. Some of the holes were on the top and you had to stand on a box to look down. If you can see the wallpaper in the background, that was designed by him and consists of surveillance cameras, handcuffs and birds.

The exhibit went on and on like this and was really quite fascinating. Ai Weiwei’s parents were dissident poets who were arrested for reeducation when he was one and he was forced to spend part of his childhood living in a hole in the ground covered with sticks as his father cleaned latrines. So it is no wonder that he is at odds with the Chinese Communist Party and the Government. He is so in their face that it is kind of a wonder that he has survived. I guess he became too famous to kill and all the Government can do is just harass him constantly and make his life as miserable as they can. One thing that was unsaid, but which occurred to me is that he must have some benefactors with some serious money behind him. He has a whole complex of studios and workshops outside of Beijing, where the things he collects are stored and a large number of carpenters and other kinds of workers construct his pieces. He is quite a character.

I had to walk over to Moorgate this morning to visit the Vodafone shop to check on my mobile phone. I’d been getting odd texts from them saying things like your account is cancelled or you’ve used up your minutes. Then when I checked the website, it wasn’t true. And someone who called me mentioned that their phone said that they were calling Russia. Can a phone be hijacked somehow? The guy at the store fiddled around on the computer for a few minutes and said it must be a “computer glitch”. I wonder….

On the way back, I passed a guy in a monkey mask and a suit, carrying a large paper banana (about three feet long, followed by six more guys in masks and suits carrying a coffin. They did not seem to be willing to tell anyone what they were doing. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by grief. See the photo. The I got back to Old Spitalfields Market and discovered that it was London Cocktail Week and that the entire market area was being converted into twenty or more bars, each selling £5 drinks and publicizing different brands of booze. It may be a wild time in Shoreditch the next few days.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of politics here and the difference between the Conservative Party in the UK and the Republican Party in the US: Imagine a party that is not beholden to the Religious Right, largely because this is an essentially areligious country, and the issues of abortion and contraception and evolution are simply irrelevant or of little importance in getting elected. Imagine a party that is not anti-intellectual and anti-science and whose leaders, in fact, often have Oxford or Cambridge degrees. Imagine a party not controlled by an unreasonable gun lobby, since there really are no guns and everyone seems to like it that way. Imagine a party that, while completely in the pocket of big business and the wealthy, still believes in the value of government, since it is needed to protect the property of the wealthy, prevent fraud and things that would hurt legitimate business and provides a reliable vehicle for settling of disputes. That is the Conservative Party. (I picture the reverse being said by Rod Serling: “Picture this. A political party controlled by religious extremists and gun nuts, that is anti-intellectual and anti-science and that actually wants to tear down government. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.”

Of course, just because the Conservatives did not have to make Faustian pacts with groups like the Religious Right and the Tea Party and the NRA to get themselves elected, does not mean that they are not pretty awful in a number of ways. They may not be crazy, gun-toting, God-loving, fear-mongering racists, but the Conservatives are clearly aiming to push things back at least one hundred years. The want to cut taxes for the rich and for businesses. This is already a country without many regulatory protections (to help the free market) and their elimination will probably continue. They aim to smash labor unions once and for all. They want to cut every hole in the social safety net that they can, claiming that this alleged austerity will somehow help the economy. Image the editors of the Wall Street Journal having a chance to run a country and you’d have a pretty good idea of what they are like.

The one significant difference between the Conservatives and the Republicans that they don’t have issues like women’s health, guns, evolution, marriage equality or racism to use to scare and energize the middle and lower class, who, objectively have little reason to vote for them (although the whole immigration/fugitive thing will be interesting to watch). So they are forced to have some policies that go beyond looking out for rich people and corporations if they want to get elected. For example, they do not want to get rid of National Health Care. They are willing to spend money on infrastructure, which creates jobs (and is good for business). They are willing to come up with other bits of other bits of window dressing, especially since they think that the Labour Party is incredibly weak right now and that they have a chance to crush them and govern for the next decade. They may overreach and you can already smell the hubris. The right wing is certainly ascendant here right now. I suspect that a party like this would crush the Democrats next year in the US, but the Republicans have so lost touch with reality that the Democrats may survive.

The English rugby team lost to Australia the other day (it wasn’t that close) and will not advance in the Rugby World Cup. I think this is the first time that a host country has not gotten out of the group stage. This is, of course, deeply humiliating to the English team, who seemed to me to lack the quickness and cleverness in passing that the good teams have. Wales is moving on and Scotland and Ireland might. It also has to be a blow to pubs and the entertainment economy in general, which has invested a lot of money in publicizing the World Cup and showing all of the games every night. With England out, I assume that interest will wane and a great deal of money in beer will not be drunk. There is also a whole social element to this. Rugby is apparently a game of the upper class, played at private schools (it is telling that the most notable Rugby Union fan is Prince Harry) and the Rugby powers that be hoped that a good run by the English Rugby team would create long-term good will and fans among the lower classes. I suspect that they may have spent too much time watching the Matt Damon movie “Invictus” since I think those class distinctions run pretty deep and the idea that rugby could ever challenge soccer (football here) in popularity probably had as much chance as baseball challenging cricket, but regardless, that plan has gone down the gurgler.

Boris Johnson is the extremely colorful Mayor of London (not the Lord Mayor of the City of London, but the real Mayor of the whole thing). Jon Stewart loved him and he was a guest a number of times on The Daily Show. He has been Mayor since 2008 and will not be running for reelection next year. He is a controversial and somewhat divisive figure, so I ‘m not sure if he has worn out his welcome or is just sick of it. It should be an interesting election. The Labour Party has nominated Sadiq Kahn, the son of a Pakistani bus driver who was raised in a council estate (public housing), a former human rights lawyer and a practicing Muslim. Meanwhile, the conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, is actually a billionaire (yes with a “b” and in pounds). However, does not seem to be a clueless rich guy in the Mitt Romney mode and is actually at the leftish wing of the Torries, which I suppose makes him more plausible as a candidate. It could end up to be an election about class divisions. There are going to be a bunch of other candidates, including the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats, but the voting system here has you vote for multiple candidates and rating them in preference, which works against a recount. Since London’s Council has recently switched from Conservative to Labour, you’d have to figure that Kahn is the favorite at this point.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the potential collapse of the Northern Ireland government because the Protestants and Catholics seemed to remember that they all hate each other. Today, there is an article about it on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times (at least I think it’s the Op-Ed page–it’s hard to tell in the digital version). It is a longer explanation of what is going on, but amounts to the same analysis, except it says that they never really stopped hating each other.

Somewhere back there I also wrote about going to the Unitarian Congregation on Newington Green. I’ve met with the Minister, trying to see what I can do to help them. What I’ve learned is that the culture here is very different. Unlike the US, this simply not a religious country. Polls show only 6% of the populace goes to church and those are mainly the elderly and immigrants. So how do you attract people to Unitarianism when the idea of practicing religion isn’t even on their radar screen? The idea that one’s children need to have some level of religious education, which is certainly a major factor underlying UU membership in the states, simply has no real relevance here. It certainly makes one wonder why this has happened, whether you regard religion as an opiate of the masses or as a valuable provider of community, social action and faith. Could it be that the Anglican Church, centered on the monarch, lost its reason for being and philosophical underpinnings as the monarch becomes an essentially irrelevant figurehead and tourist attraction? Or perhaps it is the agony of going through two World Wars, in an up close and personal way that America was spared, followed by the brutality of Thatcherism, had some deep-seated impact on the British psyche? Or is there a long-standing tradition of the acceptance of scientific thought here (unlike in the US) that leads to a cynicism about religion in general?