Wait, Am I In A Different Country?

The irony of doing a blog partly dedicated to travel is you have less time to do it when you're on the road. I got to England last week and stayed a couple of days in London before heading up to Oxford. On my first full day I went to Bloomsbury to check out the bookshops and get a pint at the Museum Tavern, my favorite pub in the area.

Wandering down Museum Street I discovered an obituary in the window of the Ulysses Bookshop. Peter Jolliffe, a well-known local bookdealer and proprietor of the shop, had died last December. You can read about his interesting life here. The notice said he had left some money for local book dealers and buyers to have a wake at The Plough, a pub just down the road. I was a few months late for the wake, but in honor of Peter I decided to head on down and have a pint in his memory. I never knew the guy, because his shop specializes in modern first editions and I collect in different areas, but part of having a community is to show respect, and he earned plenty of that.

As I was drinking in the Plough, I thought, "I'd forgotten how nice this pub is, I should come here more often."

Then it struck me--I can't come here more often. It's in a different country! I'd been in England for almost 24 hours and it hadn't really sunk in that I'd actually crossed a border. I come to London so frequently that I've begun to think of it as an extension of Madrid. Weird. That's never happened to me before. Does coming to England count as traveling anymore?

Well, Peter, it's probably not the kind of thought you were expecting at your wake, but I'll certainly remember you for it.