I was just becoming aware of pop music as the Beatles were coming to an end as a band and as a cultural phenomenon. But the very first album I actually bought was indeed Sgt Pepper and I do vaguely remember the fuss about that final rooftop concert in central London at the time. I also clearly remember the excitement of later buying the Let it Be album with its boxed packaging and the lavish booklet nestled within, as well a wistful sense of disappointment that this was to be their last offering.
So, I was excited to dig into the documentary series by Peter Jackson on Disney+ to be able to observe the Fab Four at length and to see what childhood memories might be jogged. Strange choice of channel for this event, by the way, and one I can access only because I re-upped my mobile contract to find it was included in the package, along with Apple Music, ESPN+, all under the descriptor: “Free stuff we are giving you now in the hope that you won’t look at your credit card bill until at least three months after you started unknowingly paying a monthly subscription for each”.
I loved watching the documentary, but even as a relative enthusiast, I confess that I didn’t watch the whole nine hours. I persevered through most of the first episode of banter, busking and badgering; skipped the second one entirely, and then watched pretty much all the last one which covers the glorious final rooftop gig on that memorable, grey January lunch hour above the streets of London’s West End.
My takeaways:
If you want to get the best out of a creative team, give them a deadline and put them in a room together to figure it out on their own.
You just know that Yoko would have been on her mobile phone ALL the time, if such a device had existed then. She’d have been texting John constantly, recording conversations, dropping insider Insta stories and sampling whale noises to add to the evolving compositions.
I spent the early periods wondering how the hell they had agreed to let Michael Lindsay-Hogg anywhere near them to oversee the original documentary. And then when the footage of the performance started, and we saw him direct the cameras and capture the songs, the policemen and the people on the street…ah. Got it!
The clothes! Those boys liked their fashion, especially George and Ringo, who turned up to rehearsals in a series of ever more outlandish Austin Powers outfits.
The disconnect between watching the Beatles as modern performers and personalities on the roof in Savile Row, to the interviews with the public in the street below was unreal. It was as if the camera was panning down fifty years as well as fifty feet.
There was plenty more to absorb that I missed, I’m sure. And I may go back to dip into a missing hour or two. But the privilege of watching iconic songs emerge from these great musicians as they combined their unique talents to the collaborative good, was worth the price of the soon to be remembered Disney+ subscription, for sure.
I was still at college when I first left Greensboro, North Carolina. My friend Chris and I had run out of money traveling the east coast and we had one phone number – that of a fellow camp counselor – who lived in Greensboro. If we could make it there from Florida, we could stay at the family home and his father would give us a job for a few days at the handbag factory he managed. We came, we worked, we partied and, as the day arrived to head for NYC and our return flight to eighties Britain, we decided to try and save our few bucks and hitchhike all the way to JFK. It wasn’t a success. We did get a roadside photograph of a sign that read something like Durham 34 Oxford 10, which was a hilarious inside-rugby joke to share with our Durham University teammates when we returned, but it turned out that our one ride was from a tobacco farmer who took us to an auction and then dropped us at the Greyhound bus station later that same day, with a look on his face that said “you boys are lucky my serial killing days are over”. Not that we’d have understood a word he said, mind.
Some decades later, it is time for me to leave Greensboro again, this time after a longer stay – one of nearly seventeen years. Leaving is harder than the first time, on the one hand from the purely practical reason that the pandemic has rendered the downtown living experience registering but a faint blip on the desirable real estate market radar and secondly, because of the significant and additional emotional investment.
It’s not a city that makes an immediate impression on you, Greensboro. If you arrive by car, there isn’t a route that takes you into town that doesn’t scream “our better days might be behind us” or “we have an annual competition to create the ugliest sprawl of car dealerships and convenience stores and the winner gets the City Center sign off of Interstate 85”. Arriving by air, which I did in June of 2004, I got to marvel for the first time at the curiosity of a small regional airport that somehow survives periodic economic downturns and to encounter a venue that would become so familiar that I would get to know every square inch and become on first name terms with many of its employees.
It’s a city that doesn’t immediately sit up and welcome you, showing you its best face, its tallest buildings, its fanciest parks, its swankiest neighborhoods or even its busiest highways at first blush. It perspires invitingly in those summer months, luring you into a series of neighborhoods that, over time, you will come to know and appreciate and even cherish. Greensboro unfolds its charms slowly and gradually and you never really know whether it is beguiling you or messing with you. “Bless your heart”, it murmurs sweatily in your ear. And it’s up to you to decipher whether it’s being ironic or truthful. I came to believe in the true version.
The job I came to do had a difficult start and a traumatic finish but the meat in the sandwich lasted for more than a decade and, in that time, I led the transformation of a business that had made the majority of its money selling advertising in airline magazines into the leading specialist agency in its category worldwide. We brought the senior leadership of Fortune 500 companies from all over North America to visit our squat, ugly and old-fashioned building where we won famous clients and recruited great talent locally and from around the country to move, work and raise their families here. Along the way we opened offices in New York, Dallas, Bentonville and San Antonio and established a significant presence in San Francisco.
Joining the board of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce was a surprise, an insight and a privilege. Marketing a region turned out to be as challenging and rewarding as positioning and marketing a business. We “won” the National Folk Festival for Greensboro and worked hard to present our community as a place where businesses could thrive, and families could find a good and affordable place to live and raise their children. I got to see at first hand the passion, commitment and energy that goes into creating future growth opportunities.
The downtown area revived during my time, with the opening of parks, restaurants and an impressive Arts Center and, even if the city center is not the most picturesque in the country – or even the South, the sense of place and of history – of the textile industry, the tobacco industry, the furniture industry – offers up the yearning of a community searching for its new place in the world and with enough past success and pedigree to afford optimism and hope for those who live here now.
That past is also represented by the landmark International Civil Rights Museum, home of the Woolworth sit-in of the 1960’s; two blocks from where I lived and a constant reminder of the recency and the legacy of the racial divisions that pockmark and disfigure our country.
It was hope and optimism that brought me to Greensboro both times I arrived here. I met some of the nicest, most generous, most decent and talented people I could have ever hoped to meet – on the floor of the handbag factory all those years ago and in my day-to-day life in the Piedmont Triad (that’s the region, not the gang), all these years later.
Greensboro undoubtedly won’t miss me but I will assuredly miss watching this sprawling yet small-town city continue to grow and prosper. And I’ll particularly miss the people and the friendships that made this not-charmless, but not quite charming southern city so much a part of my life.
I hope all is well with you. I just saw the press coverage of the Group balance sheet write-downs. I think the phrase “impairment charge” is a bit harsh, but I guess this is what the opposite of goodwill sounds like in the financial pages!
I hope that our agency wasn’t too much of a contributory factor and you’ll be happy to know that our full restructuring plan will be on its way over to you for approval later in the week.
In tackling our structural issues, I’ve been taking a good look at the marketplace and it feels like we may be a bit out of whack. While being mindful that a lot of the success of Lifeforce has been built upon the shoulders of the senior team – and that team (and my leadership) is what OmniMedia purchased a couple of years ago – I’m also conscious that “time waits for no man” and we need “action this day”. So, I was struck by a couple of factoids:
One of our competitors was recently boasting that the average age of employees in their Group is “under 30”.
A recent IPSOS survey revealed that while 45% of adults in the US are over 50, only 6% of employees in ad agencies are in that demographic.
I believe we need to more fully mirror the make-up and cost base of our competitors and at the same time increase our diversity and it feels that this could be a win/win in terms of perception, headcount and costs.
Obviously, we’ll need to pay the “going rate” for new talent but given the overall personnel reductions in our industry and the fact that we’ll be trading for a younger, more diverse workforce (dare I say, lifeforce, lol?), I see this as a great opportunity for us and the Group for the future. I’ll need some help from your HR gurus at HQ to finesse the exits from a legal pov, but I don’t foresee much pushback on the client side as long as I remain at the helm.
Having a new team will also put more of a management burden on me and it’s one that I’m very willing to take on. Once I have these plans in place, we can discuss my own compensation package, as the cost reductions will undoubtedly give us more headroom for incentives.
May I conclude by applauding you for the position you’ve taken in advancing the digital capability of the Group? The new app software company OmniMedia has acquired in Myanmar is extremely responsive and appear to work with military efficiency, even if the time zone wrinkles still need to be worked out. Your leadership in this as well as every other area is very much appreciated.
Looking forward to a much-improved year.
Yours,
Elliott DeBeer, CEO, Lifeforce Agency, part of OmniMedia Inc.
It started with a simple mistake on my part. I was planning an overseas trip – the first for some time, obviously. The airlines and the hotels had kept in email touch during the lockdown months: “We are preserving your status as one of our preferred customers. You will maintain your gold/platinum/preferred level for 2021. Thank you for your continued loyalty”.
So, there I was, busily planning my trip to Europe, burning points and taking advantage of my supposedly elevated status at the travel companies with whom I have spent the last 25 years freely spending personal and corporate money. I completed my London booking on the Hilton app, getting a great deal for points and cash at their wonderful Conrad St James property and moved swiftly on to the Marriott app for three nights at their flagship hotel in Edinburgh.
It was the AmEx alert on my mobile for the large transaction that sent me scurrying back to the Marriott booking. Apparently, I hadn’t booked the room with a combination of points and cash – I hadn’t had enough points for all three nights and, because they held my credit card details, I’d been docked for the purchase of an extra 100,000 Bonvoy points to the tune of $1,237.50 – more than the cost of the three nights if I’d simply paid cash and kept my existing points intact for another day. No problem, I thought, I’ll clear it up in the morning.
Well, not so fast, smug, formerly frequent business traveler! It was the tone of the phone conversations more than the intransigence of the Marriott position that shocked me. It soon became clear that they were not giving way on this. I was contractually obliged, I needed to go back and read their terms and conditions, there was nothing they could or would do – mistake or no mistake. I spent hours on the phone and exchanging emails, getting madder and madder and slowly beginning to understand that the decimation of the travel industry during the pandemic had changed the balance of the game. These guys needed cash. They’ve done their math. They know that there will be no return to the former state anytime soon. The confidential internal memo had gone out – no mercy, maximize rates, maintain politeness if you can but we are backing you, our frontline sales team, to help get us out of this hole and if you piss off a formerly important customer segment, so be it.
My complicated flight arrangements with American Airlines (two bookings to be reinstated with a mess of flight credits and vouchers to be redeemed) underlined the sea change in the industry. It seems that the value of the business class seats that had been booked and paid for pre-lockdown were now worth about half of their purchase value. I clearly hadn’t read the fine print here either – that the value of my investment could crater as well as go way down. Well, you know in advance with American that you have no chance of success in a conversation about fares, but you used to be able to have a pleasant chat with a customer service operator in Winston Salem about the unfairness of it all and who would offer up tactical advice for better routes, prices and upgrade opportunities. But that too had passed into recent history. I didn’t have the chance to chat about the grandchildren in Wilmington, nor talk about the load factor on the CLT-LHR route as compared to my PHL booking. Instead, I had a perfunctory conversation to confirm that my formerly business class assets were now measured in premium economy currency and that my chances of purchasing an upgrade with some of my many miles on this journey were somewhere between none and zero.
The final confirmation of this new state of play took place in the Hertz parking lot at Edinburgh airport about two weeks later. The harassed manager of the office glanced at my proffered card: it’s a collectible item, the Hertz Platinum Card. It is the non-fungible token of the loyalty world. This card has inspired a look of awe and immediate attention from every Hertz branch manager in many countries over the years; causing them to drop everything, usher you out of the plebian Gold Plus line and escort you personally to a hugely upgraded vehicle and to earnestly wish you bon voyage as you disappear in a cloud of turbocharged exhaust fumes onto the highway to heaven. My Edinburgh branch manager grimaced at the sight of my formerly magical card. “I only have one car, I’m afraid” he said, “I have no staff, so here’s your paperwork. It’s just the way it is right now.” And he left to deal with the growing queue of impatient and possibly formerly important customers simmering behind him.
What a major hospitality company, one of the biggest airlines in the world and arguably the best-known name in car rental do have in common is that they are all struggling to get their businesses back to profitability. The customers that previously drove both their volume and their profits – the frequent business travelers – have largely disappeared from view as employers reevaluate both the purpose and efficiency of all those sales calls, conventions, face-to-face meetings, off-site morale boosters and the like.
So, is the currency of this segment – the points-driven loyalty program – dead? Well, looking at the numbers, you could think so. Between them Delta, United, American, Southwest and JetBlue are sitting on $27.5 billion of rewards program liabilities according to a recent report. That number represents the value of the earned and unclaimed rewards of their customers sitting on these airlines’ balance sheets. But on the other hand, you may have noticed the increasing number of ways these airlines are now encouraging you to earn points and miles on items other than their core travel services – from credit cards to wine clubs. During the pandemic a few of the airlines used the future cashflow of their loyalty programs to borrow money. American, Delta and United between them raised $26 billion in this way to shore up their cash positions. According to The Harvard Business Review the valuations of the mileage programs of American Airlines and United Airlines exceeds that of the parent airlines themselves.
So, maybe the current strategy of the travel business is a continuation of what many of us cynically thought was the original premise of the points-based loyalty programs in any case: encourage the earning of points by offering status and priority treatment but discourage and make as difficult as possible the future redemption of said points. But why this dissing of the customer segment that could help them climb out of the hole? Is it just chronic staff shortages or a cold-eyed look at the immediate future? It appears that the hotels, the airlines and the car rental companies would rather have any full fare paying customer than a former frequent business traveler trying to redeem points and score deals. And the thinking may be that if the road warriors start to come back in droves, there’s plenty of time to readjust.
So, the absence of that business guy at the front of the hotel or gate check-in, impatiently waiting to board first while finishing the conference call at the top of his voice may be a relic of a former time – and that looks like it’s good news for the travel companies as well as other travelers!
Starbucks has always had a special place in my discretionary spending column. I remember the incredulity in my partner’s face when I told her what I thought my approximate annual spend might be (I never dared to accurately tot it up, even though it was probably sitting there waiting to be uncovered like a guilty secret on my Gold Card app).
I discovered Starbucks in Times Square on a business trip to New York from the UK in the late nineties. It was love at first sight and taste. The convenience, the experience, the politeness, the efficiency, the whole late nineties empowering the customer, pleasing the customer vibe completely bowled me over. I got back to my office in London and asked my business development manager to call Seattle and ask about franchise opportunities. I was infatuated and knew this was the future. Unfortunately, there were no franchises at that point – they were all owned stores – so I carried on in the media business and became a superfan instead.
When I moved full-time to the US in 2004 and settled in North Carolina, Starbucks became my “third place”. That description wasn’t just wishful brand hyperbole and marketing speak for me – my local café was an integral and tone-setting part of my day. My family hadn’t settled, and we were in the painful process of reconfiguring our lives and constantly on trans- Atlantic planes, LaGuardia shuttles and trying to resolve a complicated career, school, family, relationship, geography equation. When my car pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the store, the baristas were on it. The triple grande non-fat cappuccino was in the works and by the time I got to the counter, Ginny or one of her colleagues, was in full flow – how are you, how are your girls, are you traveling this week? It sounds lame now, but these were important moments before the working day for someone whose job it was to lead a business single-mindedly and to shut out all distractions.
They closed that local Starbucks, I guess in 2008 or 2009 when the recession was biting. There was a store closing party and I told the regional manager how much her team had meant to me. It wasn’t the end for the associates – they found spots in different locations for all their folks, and I felt glad for them and grateful to Starbucks. The staff seemed to love working there – they enjoyed the benefits, so unusual for hourly workers – and I believe they got a kick out of selling food and beverages that clearly delighted most of us on the other side of the counter. I carried on visiting the various stores – spreading my favors around the Piedmont Triad like a super-caffeinated Daddy Warbucks, or Daddy Starbucks in this case. As franchises opened in airports, my constant business trips gained an additional layer of planning – which terminals had the Starbucks stores and did my layover allow me time to grab a coffee? I could tell you the options at SAN, DFW, XNA (none), LGA, SFO, SEA, ORD and many, many others. If the pub trivia quiz had had a section on Starbucks store locations in North American airports, you would have wanted me on your team.
When we made the full-time transition to our home in Manchester, Vermont and they opened a Starbucks a year or so later I truly believed that the CRM folks at Starbucks HQ had figured out my move from the downturn in sales in North Carolina and the Google search algorithm from southern Vermont.
So, when did it all start to pall? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it. I’ve always had my own old-school espresso machine at home. I buy Illy beans. I traded in the stainless-steel milk jug for an electric milk frother oh, a few years ago now. But I never consciously considered trading the home grown for the store experience. My addiction needed both sources.
And I’ve never had a bad, customer-service experience remotely similar to my recent Marriott meltdown (READ THE RULES, SIR!! YOU MADE A PURCHASE, THERE ARE NO REFUNDS!!).
I think COVID may have played a part. There was nothing sadder than walking in, masked-up, to see boxes of cup and coffee deliveries standing where the line to be served should have been. The Perspex half window between me and the masked college kid didn’t help either. Then the triple shot cappuccino began to vary startlingly in quality. “This is a latte, I’m afraid”. “Did you use non-fat milk?” “Are you sure you have the extra shot in there?”
I ordered on the app on my birthday this summer – and my drink, instead of being free – was charged. Big deal, get over it. And then last week I watched the poor, overwhelmed barista try to fulfil mobile and drive-through orders; pulling order tickets from the machine that was spitting them out like the jackpot on a one-armed bandit. When I got home, my drink was bland, lukewarm and, well, very average. I said to Cindy, surprised at myself: “That may be my last ever visit to Starbucks.”
L’affaire est terminée. Starbucks, thank you for all the good times.
The news that American Airlines is pulling the plug on its venerable in-flight magazine, American Way, appears to bring us a step closer to the sounding of the final death knell for this once vibrant media sector.
The pandemic seems to have achieved what the recession of 2008/09 failed to do, despite some warning signs at that time. The lockdown led to a shutdown of travel and therefore a need for on-board magazines – and the absence of air travelers combined with the lack of a compelling reason to restart the publications allowed some major US airlines (American, Delta, Southwest Airlines) to shut down their inflight magazines and thus reduce some admin costs as well as to claim a modest environmental win (fuel burn could be microscopically lower and – don’t they make paper out of trees?). It’s not necessarily the end of the strangely compelling ritual of the airline glossy “in the seat pocket in front of you”, but it certainly asks some hard questions of a sector not necessarily renowned for its innovation.
This is a media category entirely dependent on advertising revenue for its health and survival. These magazines had their heyday in Europe and Asia’s case at and immediately after the time of duty-free and the steady flow of high-spending upscale travelers. Many in-flight magazines boasted impressive national readership numbers and gained national advertiser support. Air France’s magazine proudly displayed the country’s famous fragrance, brandy and champagne brands. Swissair had its watches and chocolates to punctuate the editorial pages. And British Airways at one time had High Life near the top of every national magazine readership survey and separate magazine titles for business travelers, Japanese and Arabic speakers, Concorde passengers, its German subsidiary, its low-cost airline and more.
In the US, ironically it was the dotcom boom of the late 90’s that fully oxygenated the sector. Business advertisers found a receptive audience of businessmen to help achieve visibility and credibility. The lack of digital alternatives meant that steakhouses, dating services, plastic surgeons and assorted destination advertisers packed the pages of these suddenly muscular editions.
And so, as the sector entered its mature phase the business model began to change as publishers moved from a revenue share with its airline clients to a fee-based model. The visibility of these healthy looking magazines spurred more competition among publishers – even the New York Times briefly entered the fray – but ultimately the advent of a requirement by the airlines of a revenue guarantee as well as a say in the content of each edition (those welcoming letters from the CEO didn’t write themselves, you know), added to the growing necessity of some sort of scale on the media sales and publishing costs side of the equation, as well as having a publisher with client service skills and attitudes.
The downfall of the in-flight magazine sector – if indeed this is the beginning of the final chapter – will not be because of the withering of the value of a print magazine that’s going on elsewhere. If there’s one place where a printed product should continue to thrive, it’s in the space where people have time and the opportunity NOT to connect with their digital devices. The three hour-flight, with its cocooning rituals, cocktails and (literal) opportunity to decompress, is the space in which a beautifully written, produced and presented magazine can insinuate its way into your consciousness.
In the terrestrial world, print magazine sectors have found extended life by using the unique attributes and strengths of the printed product and harnessing it to the addressable and trackable superpowers of digital media, or the immediacy, visibility and results of live events and their hybrid virtual cousins. In the airline world, the magazine publisher is rarely even the same company that provides the inflight movies and entertainment channels. There is little history of an integrated media opportunity, despite the narrowness of the sector and the fuselages of its auditoriums. For those international advertisers, like HSBC, who saw the value of the audience and wanted a media mix as well as a global reach, it was very hard work to put together a program across multiple airlines and media types.
The role and ultimate salvation of a print magazine in an airline environment should be to dovetail with and complement the digital and entertainment channels that reach the airline’s customers and potential customers every day. Those emails exhorting us to resume our travel schedules and those reminders to keep up our loyalty or we may lose our status and points might benefit from some of the very content approach that has created vast readership numbers on board its aircraft. Could those airline websites give us inspirational ideas as well as prices and schedules? Once I book my flight, can I have ideas and suggestions? Book restaurants and tours, as well as hotels and car rentals? To be sure, there are examples of all these things happening sporadically.
But for the in-flight magazine to actually and finally fulfill its potential ( and I would strongly argue that despite its decades of apparent success, it never has), it needs to be part of an integrated package of all of each airline’s marketing and communications arsenal. And its effectiveness and influence needs to be measured and valued within that ecosystem accordingly. Thus it may turn out that the role for the magazine is not in the seat pocket of every aircraft, but in some. Or mailing it to high value customers might provide a better return than having a Porsche take them individually to the gate. Unfortunately for the airline magazines, their previous financial successes that allowed them to be “free” to the passenger and to the airline has meant that estimating their real value in marketing and relationship terms has been virtually ignored.
So, good luck to all those airlines who are continuing to publish and let us hope that the current hiatus allows for experimentation, innovation and evaluation of ALL their marketing and media assets, as well as integration with the communication and marketing programs that engage with us – the currently cautious but optimistic airline customers wanting to be wooed, enticed, reassured and then transported safely to all those places we’ve continued to dream about.
My grandfather took me to my first rugby international, Wales against England, when I was ten years old. Although I was born in Wales, went to boarding school in Wales, and my parents met, lived and married in Wales, my father’s side of the family were English, and I have never made a home for any time in Wales itself. How then, every year when this sporting fixture rolls around, am I suddenly transformed into this die-hard, bordering on fanatical, supporter of a national rugby team with whose nation I only have a bloodline relationship?
The answer is only partly in our tribal instincts as humans – our wanting to belong to and identify with a group of like-minded people. And when I thought hard about it, in the case of Wales playing England (and also with the other Celtic nations, Scotland and Ireland, playing against England), the passion for a win against the English is also sometimes fueled by a sense of deeply held and dimly perceived grievance. An annual and tribal sports tournament allows room for, in this case, conjuring up centuries of accumulated injustices. Half known historical facts – of famines, oppression, unemployment, exploitation – are exhumed to support the positive aggression of the day (“let’s beat the buggers”) with a more visceral and passionate loathing.
I’ve always found this hard to understand. A good friend’s husband is Irish, he hardly knows me, but he hates me. Or rather, he hates everything that he thinks I stand for (ironically, he thinks I’m English) – colonialism, snobbery and every large and small injustice that has ever been visited upon the Irish nation by the British slash English.
Nowadays my allegiances are even more congested – I’m a US citizen and proud Vermonter. Vermont has weathered the COVID storm much better than most States in the US through a combination of sensible policies and sensible, salt-of-the-earth people. But the winter weather has brought plentiful snow to the VT ski resorts and, with that, an equally plentiful number of visitors from nearby States. Our COVID cases spiked to all-time highs in January and February and with it, a growing sense of antipathy towards all visitors being spotted in cars bearing license plates from Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. These folks were obviously not following quarantine regulations, weren’t wearing masks, were being rude to storekeepers and clearly had no clue about navigating a rotary (roundabout). Our frustration with the pandemic was fueled by our willingness to transfer that feeling into a hostility towards another group – of people who are plainly not us.
And so it goes with national politics. Two months into the new administration, it’s weird (and probably premature) to suddenly realize how quiet everyday political life is becoming. When each day doesn’t start with a rant against some statute, nation, group or individual – government seems, well, boring. It’s just a bunch of officials getting on with the business of enacting the policies for which they were elected. And the danger is, of course, that after four years of reestablishing what many people consider the “norms” of this political behavior, there will be a reassertion of divisiveness underpinned by this general sense of grievance. I’m not naïve enough to think that there are no real issues and no grievances – there are many – and that’s what a democratic society is there to tackle.
My hope is that we can focus on these real issues and those real injustices – not the ones we manufacture to fuel our passions and our prejudices.
Now let’s go out on Saturday and smack those English bastards!
There will be no souvenirs or outrageously priced Burberry scarves finding their way into my luggage from London’s Heathrow Airport tomorrow. That’s for no other reason that there are no stores open in the UK other than supermarkets and coffee shops. We are a month into the latest lockdown here with no firm date for a new Brexit, this one from purgatory.
The “spirit of The Blitz” (the supposedly cheerful, gritted teeth and nonchalant attitude that our parents’ generation showed when the Germans were bombing the shit out of the major cities here in the Second World War) largely prevails in 2021 England (The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish have similar but different lockdown rules in place). Those rules here are supposed to mean an hour a day out of the house for exercise and only “necessary” trips to the supermarket.
My last three and half weeks in the beautiful cathedral city of Salisbury has been mostly devoted to taking care of my mother who has not been at all well, but now appears to be making steady progress in her recovery. When you hear me waxing eloquent and misty-eyed about the National Health Service and “socialized medicine” in the future, you’re allowed to remind me of my experience in taking my mother into hospital over this period. Yes, there should be a system where the wealthiest nation on earth looks after its sick without destroying them financially, but this is not, on current evidence, the model to follow, despite the heroic efforts they have made to treat the rampant strains of COVID currently ravaging this Sceptered Isle or Perfidious Albion, take your pick.
So, the reason for this ramble is that I have spent my one allowable hour a day out of the house exploring Salisbury and, as a medieval Cathedral city, there’s plenty of history to explore. The cathedral itself is closed (except as a site for COVID vaccinations, believe it or not) and this 13th Century masterpiece would have taken up my whole time if it had been open. I knew St Thomas’s Church nearby to be interesting as well as slightly older (1220) but that too is currently closed, so it’s been a delight wandering around photographing and visiting many of the different ancient locations in and around the city center, many of which are pubs (also unfortunately closed). Some of these historic buildings are well presented, gated and documented and some you can just wander into the courtyard off the street and find an amateurish description on a nearby wall, which is what I found this afternoon and wanted to share:
As I was reading down this typically British description “…appears to be of the second half of the 15th Century…” and also navigating some of the architectural terms that one is expected to know (“four carved corbels”, a “Solar Undercroft”), I was taking in the history of the property and having noted that it was acquired in 1630 by Lord Audley and renamed Audley House, I was getting lulled into another couple of paragraphs of changing use and ownership when the sentence: “Following his execution on Tower Hill for high crimes in 1634, the house was acquired as a Workhouse by the City of Salisbury” hit me between the eyes! A quick Wikipedia search later and it seems that Lord Audley was convicted of rape and sodomy along with his page who claimed before his execution that Audley’s wife, Lady Castlehaven, “was the wickedest woman in the world and had more to answer for than any woman that lived”. There’s a rich history behind these notices on old buildings!
As an aside, as I was googling Lord Audley, I skipped over an entry on one of his ancestors, also Lord Audley and also executed. That brief entry reads: “Lord Audley who was James Touchet (or Tuchet) Lord Audley 27/06/1497 Tower Hill Beheading. Led protest against taxation. Beheaded wearing a paper suit of armour”. What???
Fun times. Heading back to Vermont today with a renewed sense of gratitude for life in the US as well as a reminder that the current semantic arguments going on in the Senate would have undoubtedly been resolved by other means in days of yore!
The US State Department updated its travel advisories last week. The good news for the US, which has been undergoing a somewhat humiliating and unexpected role as a pariah state due to the uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19, is that there is now a small dribble of places willing to open their borders to arrivals. The eclectic collection of countries open to visitors from the US includes many Caribbean countries willing to take the risk of exchanging tourism dollars for COVID-19 infections. The countries of the EU are not included, but the Brexit-bound UK is – with reservations – and includes a mandatory two-week self-isolation requirement.
The additional interesting part of each country’s travel warning to its citizens about visiting the other is couched in the paragraphs following the COVID-19 advisories on their respective websites. US citizens visiting Britain are also warned:
Terrorist groups “continue plotting possible attacks” in the UK.
US visitors are warned about going to: tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, hotels, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, parks, sporting and cultural events, educational institutions, airports and other public areas.
There is also a risk of isolated violence by dissident groups in Northern Ireland.
Phew! Once you’ve spent your mandatory two weeks, you might feel inclined to stay in self-isolation.
One has to assume therefore, that the copywriters at GOV.UK, the UK Government’s travel advisory website caught one look at this list, took umbrage and decided that not only was a tit-for-tat called for, but escalation was in the wind. So, in the warning communicated to its own hapless residents considering venturing westwards towards the United States:
First up is a subtle dig at the recently reversed ban on foreign students who will no longer “be forced to leave the USA if their courses moved to fully online”. UK students are however advised to speak to their college administrators to “clarify” their status ahead of the new academic year. Given that US colleges are currently struggling to give any coherent guidance to any of their enrolled students, domestic or international, we wish you best of luck!
I see your terrorist alert and we offer one of our own: “Terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in the USA. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreigners”. Interesting use of the word “foreigners” here and an absence of a lengthy list of specific places to avoid.
But wait; “There have been widespread protests across the USA since 27 May 2020, some of which have turned violent. Curfews have been enforced in many cities as a result. There is potential for further protests and curfews”. It seems we both have terrorists, but you have social unrest. So, while they’re on the subject…
“You should be alert to the dangers of car and street crime”.
What else, muses the GOV.UK writer to herself? Being British, her mind turns to the weather. We should add their big weather to our warnings, she thinks: “The Atlantic hurricane season normally runs from 1 June to 30 November. The Pacific hurricane season runs from 15 May to 30 November”. There it is. No need for elaboration. Hurricanes.
Oh, and: “Forest and brush fires (wildfires) are a danger in many dry areas”.
What about if they are traveling in the winter, she thinks? : “Snow storms during winter can cause delays and cancellations throughout the major airline hubs in the USA”.
That should do it. If the COVID, the student barring, the necessity for visas, the now limited number of airports accepting Brits, the terrorism, the civic unrest, rioting and the street crime doesn’t put you off, the weather should do the trick.
You’ve got to wonder how the US Dept of State is going to respond once they realize that this is turning into a pie throwing contest? I foresee some additional warnings being added to put off the potential for US tourists making the trek to the old country:
“Be aware that Britain suffers from occasional heatwaves (not related to global warming, which is, by the way, a HOAX) and THERE IS NO AIR CONDITIONING ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY”. (Note that the escalation has now taken on a Trumpian capitalization element).
Related: “In case of dehydration or heat exhaustion, DO NOT expect any ice in your drinks – there is apparently an unwritten limit of one cube per customer in the UK”.
“The United Kingdom is currently in the process of withdrawing itself from Europe (yes, that is rather like Ohio deciding to secede from the Union) and, as a result, appears unsure about any rules regarding travel, currency exchange, jobs, transportation, food regulations, units of temperature and measurement and a host of other issues. While this might appear on the surface to favor a stronger relationship between the UK and the US, please bear in mind that 68% of Brits disapprove of our glorious leader, so perhaps not”.
And how will our copywriter at the UK Government respond once she sees further escalation in this war or words and warnings?…
J. Craig Waller 