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| For Karen who emailed me........also, About Living In The UK |
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| I was sitting with my friend, another American, at a pub in Highgate (North London) yesterday, thinking that we may need to leave the place – I mean London – because it is doing our soul damage to pay $6.00 for a cup of coffee, $18.00 for an large cheese pizza, $4.00 for a gallon of gasoline and – this is shocking – about $70.00 for a haircut at the local salon, and that isn’t even particularly good salon.
My friend and I had recently been to America where the dollar is worth so little that I suspect we’ll soon see wheelbarrows of US currency trotted out to buy so much as an English scone. We’d paid $100 for a hotel room that would have cost three times that much over here, eaten dinners that we wouldn’t even begin to afford back home, felt like we ought to be wearing a black mask and carrying a gun when we went shopping. It was…uh…different and we were reeling in the wake of it.
He said, “I felt like an immigrant. I kept looking in the shops thinking ‘so much choice! So cheap!’ "
“I know,” I said. “When I was there it was the same. Dresses so cheap I thought pretty soon they would just pay you to remove them from the shop.”
I used to joke that with the inheritance (death) tax being so high in the UK, I couldn’t afford to die here. However, with the dollar worth as much as yesterday’s doughnuts, I am almost certain I can’t afford to live here either. My sister is going to buy a new car and is going to pay in dollars what I would pay in pounds. My brother lives in an apartment that is so cheap I think I spend more in printer paper per month than he does on rent.
Why do I live here? Well, because I do. It’s so hard to leave England. I’m smitten because of the beautiful countryside, the fact that there are almost no mosquitos at all, and Radio 4. Also, Brian Blessed (especially when dressed as a Viking) and the way people are so very, very kind to dogs. Ask any of the 50,000 europeans who have come to the UK this year. They’ll tell you. We come; we don’t leave. It’s real easy why not: we can’t afford to.
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| Tuesday, September 18, 2007 | 22:19:02 |
