Text-based days

This present moment is the period of my journey in which I don't have a ton of scenic photos to post.  I'm in and out of London for a few days, with trips to Oxford and Cambridge, to see friends and to be amongst the literary folks.  I don't feel comfortable posting images on the internets of friends I'm spending time with, and I'm not really sightseeing, except incidentally as the sights I may see are near the company I'm keeping.  Consequently, this travelogue is, at least for the moment, more text-based than image-based.  

I have spent a decent amount of time in England--more time in Cambridge than anywhere else, but even then, in my early 20s, I visited London from time to time.  And I will not lie to you:  I hated London.  Found it busy and loud and impossible to navigate, which took all the fun out of exploring it for me.  I hated getting lost in London, which I did every time I visited London, and I hated that I felt at the mercy of everyone from taxi drivers to corner shop proprietors just to find the way from point A to point B.  London is not what you'd call master planned--not all that surprising, given its long, long history, which saw the city develop from disparate and disconnected centers of human activity slowly into an enormous metropolis.  

So it was with true surprise that I spent time here during the fall of 2023 and discovered, after decades of innumerable passings-through, that I loved London.  

(The Royal Albert Hall, which we now know how many holes it takes to fill)

Do not imagine, friend, that this newfound affection is due to my finally having become sophisticated enough that I find myself at home in an enormous metropolis.  No, there is one single feature that has changed my attitude about London utterly:  the smart phone.  

As many know, I was a late adopter of this technology.  It was only when E went to college that Jay dragged me to Best Buy, saying, "You need to be able to stay in touch with your son."  Jay's thinking was that if E was going to be in touch from college it was more likely to be by sending images than by calling every day.  Jay was absolutely correct, and I'm deeply grateful that his foresight has kept me in good touch with E, and then B, across state lines (and now continental borders).

But a surprising side-effect of that desire to be tethered to my kids is that I have (as we all now have) a map! In my pocket!  That tells me the way from point A to point B!  And this technology has made London far less impenetrable to me.  I no longer spend my days here walking in circles trying to find the little alley that leads through to another alley that ends up at a cool museum.  I just let the phone do the work!  I let the phone tell me which Tube station is the nearest to my intentions.  I let the phone tell me whether that little Egyptian takeout in Covent Garden has enough vegetarian options to make it worth walking all the way over there. (It does, and you should: Koshari Street.)  

I know, I know:  this is pretty much what we all do now, and even though it feels miraculous to me, everyone around me is capable of the same miracle.  I'm just saying that London is a kind of emblem of the ways that this device in my pocket has re-formed what we expect out of our lived experience, and though I have spent the last several months interacting with cultures that were foreign to me in both geography and language, using the electronic map to navigate and the translate app to make myself understood (not to mention those video communications apps that Jay intuited would keep me connected in a more intimate way with my dear ones), it's in London--in some regards the least foreign foreign place I have traveled--that I am most able to see (in before-and-after fashion) the changes that common technologies have wrought in our daily lives.