Moving away from rants, I return to High Literature. The last book I finished was *Queenan Country,* by Joe Queenan, subtitled "A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country." He reports on his glorious findings and his glorious hatings with equal glee.
He loves the British for their "arch phrasing, infectious understatement, and delightful euphemisms." He also describes Paul McCarthy as "choochy," and John Lennon as "not choochy." He loathes the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Greyfriars Bobby. He advocates visiting the small town of Berkely because "you can be in and out of the village in two hours flat" and have covered "history, art, religion, regicide, tomfoolery, plague, ornithology, revolution, Norman ecclesiastical architecture, home decor, gardens, state-sanctioned sodomy, and Saxon mortuary in a single visit and can devote the rest of your trip to gambling, the theater, alcohol, or napping...it is also the site of the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. So put it on your list now."
He moans that London can't be seen in a weekend, a week, fortnight, or even a month, and advocates seeing it before age 65, because your feet can't take it and you will have to take your chances with your next reincarnation. I'm putting London back on my life-time goal list, even if I have to make it with a walker.
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