Late to the Party

Sometimes you don't realise you're late until you turn up.

The first time I arrived in New Orleans, at six o'clock on a Friday night, the party was already in full swing and I was perhaps just a little too sober to feel like I was going to have as much fun as everybody else. Despite my best efforts I remained that little bit too sober throughout the weekend and it only slowly dawned on me, weeks later, that arriving a few hours earlier would not have made any difference: I should have got there fifteen years ago.

It seemed to me to be the place a young man could pleasantly do himself some serious liver damage, if he had the time to spare. The problem was that I was no longer that young man and the gaudy revels of Bourbon Street did not appeal to me any more than the ever-present concoction of scents that followed me along its length: a sickly, putrescent perfume of too-sweet alcohol, vomit and bleach. Stately, prim America, the country that, God help it, had once banned alcohol, seemed to need a place where excessive, outrageous behaviour would be tolerated, where folk could act up and get the craziness out of their system before returning to their respectable day-to-day lives. I come from a country with a strong tradition of weekly binge-drinking, but I saw things in the French Quarter that would have shocked me on a Saturday night after a Wales home game in Cardiff: tourists slumped insensible in doorways at nine o'clock in the evening, vomit plastered across the sidewalk, strip bars open for business in the afternoon sunshine as parents and children sauntered by. I'm no prude, but America surely is - and such sights only made it clearer that New Orleans was somehow culturally beyond the reach of the rest of the United States.

And yet, at the same time, this is just one street. Move one block above or below Bourbon and the licentiousness, the neon, the raucous noise that passes for blues music, it all but disappears. By night, the rest of the Vieux Carré is darkness and quiet, secrets and shadow. Amongst the stream of tourists in sports shirts, there is another crowd, another clientele, as different to them as Oberon to Bottom. The men are tall and greying, immaculate and cool in suit and tie despite the languid heat; the women, beautiful and discretely bejewelled. They slip through the darkened streets, into private courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, they drink at the Pelican Club and they leave nothing but their evident sophistication behind them. I admit, I tried to follow but, rather like Bilbo chasing faerie rings in Mirkwood, I stumbled in the darkness as they vanished before me.

It was tantalising. These people, I decided, were a link back into the past, to a long lost zenith because this is, without doubt, a city that was once wonderful. Much like my first view of New Orleans, seemingly floating on the surface of Lake Pontchartrain, it reminded me of Venice - both were once important, wealthy, centres of culture. Now they are largely populated by the people that come to gawp at the remains. Whilst Venice is literally kept afloat by tourism, New Orleans (or at least the French Quarter) seems to be an undead corpse, reanimated by the daily influx of new blood. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that not even fifteen years would have made much difference. I should have come to New Orleans two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the party was at its height. I became worried that I would never be able to enjoy the city, always feeling that I had missed out on either its heyday or my own; forever late to the party.

Needless to say, I went back there just this week and had a completely different experience.

For a start, I took my wife and kids: there wasn't any reason why we should wander the length of Bourbon Street. What's more, the clemency of March is different to the humidity of September - and a cool rainstorm had forced the worst of the drunks and vomit off of the sidewalks the night we arrived. We did different things. We took the street car up towards the zoo, along Charles St and back along Magazine and Camp, through the Garden District and the antebellum houses, which eschew both the colonial stylings of the French Quarter and the dreadful concrete drabness of the modern city. Back in the Vieux Carré, Jackson Square and the cathedral were Disney bright.

We all had a lovely couple of days. We ate good food and enjoyed a drink or two. For my part I think I benefited from lower expectations; but something else happened to me - happens to me - in New Orleans. These two short visits have revealed it to be a place of countless opportunity. There's something about the French Quarter, again it's something that reminds me of Venice: as if historic versions of the same city were piled upon each other through multiple invisible dimensions, intersecting through time, like a boozy French-American Narnia.

It means that it will always be worth coming back, because each time it will be a different experience. The party just rolls along and all we can do is dip in and out.

I feel it keenly throughout this return visit: just as I am seeing the city differently, it is seeing me differently. Multiple versions of me walk these streets beside me, unseen, accompanied by friends and acquaintances, people I've known forever and not yet met. School mates and old girlfriends, colleagues, family, friends, grown-up children, grandchildren of mine, they all link arms and pull me around the unchanging corners of New Orleans. Sometimes we're a crowd, cackling at our own jokes, sometimes just a pair of friends or lovers, hand in hand, threading through the languorous shadows. Whoever you are, whoever we're with, I can see how the city wraps itself about us, mysterious, mischievous, playful, always pregnant with booze.

It could be any time. Satchmo might be playing as we drink; the steamers and showboats might be plying their trade on the river as we wait in line for beignets at Café du Monde; it could be last week, one, two, three hundred years ago, or tomorrow. You and I, we drink, we laugh, we dine. The lights twinkle in the galleries and balconies as we slip amongst the tourists and disappear into secret courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, closing shutters against a mortal storm that threatens, but never arrives - always the justification for another drink and never the end of the party.

All right, if you insist on visiting New Orleans in the present day, and without me, book a table at Sylvain before you get there. And when you do, drink their Dominique's Departure cocktail. And then, or some other time, head on over to Frenchman Street and drop by the Three Muses. Eat whatever you like, it's all good.

But that time you and I went there? We drank The Muse - don't laugh, you chose it and I reluctantly agreed that it was perfect. It looked ridiculous, do you remember? But elated, full of food and shining with gin, we stepped outside afterwards into the night, jazz trumpet all around us. The stars glittered in the death-black sky. I looked at you, something profound on my mind, but you just smiled, an insane grin, and I clean forgot what I was going to say.

It's that sort of a place.

New York, New York, New York...

My life is pretty great. Occasionally, for example, I get taken to New York. My wife has to go there for work often enough that I get to tag along, sneaked on as hand baggage, maybe as often as once a year. A perfect storm of air miles, baby-sitters and opera commitments hit last weekend with the upshot that I found myself in Manhattan with a whole Sunday to waste as I saw fit.

The problem, at least for someone who occasionally blogs about travelling, is that the more often I visit somewhere like New York, the less remarkable it is. I'm past the initial shock, but still many years away from Proustian remembrances. I'll never be cool enough to be blasé about Manhattan, but I am beginning to accept that it is a real place that I can walk around and explore. Given one free day by myself, I'm not swamped with the frenzied pressure of a tourist, desperate to see as much as he can before he leaves. It's a nice position to be in. But I wouldn't have thought to write about it: a sign I might be starting to take it for granted.

I began with breakfast with my wife at Doughnut Plant on W 23rd Street. This place must be amazing because I don't even really like doughnuts that much. It was her recommendation and (not unusually) she was very right. At 8am on a Sunday, the place was beautifully quiet and the Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut was absolutely delicious: the perfect glaze cracked as I took a bite, like paper-thin ice on a half-frozen pond. The dough was light and sweet and, to my relief, I realised it was a 'made with' not a 'made from' situation with regard to the yeast. I'm not the greatest coffee-drinker in the world either, but I was able to gulp down their Valrhona Mocha effortlessly, like it was spring water. Not a bad way to start the day.

And then she had to go to work (oh dear) and I had to while away the day until she would be finished. I had made a rough plan which I quickly threw out of the window. Very slowly I made my way to the USS Intrepid, moored at Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street. It's a WWII aircraft carrier that served at (possibly) the biggest sea battle ever: Leyte Gulf. Today it houses all sorts of military aircraft, as well as a Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise. There's also a Cold War submarine, USS Growler, that was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and told to sit off the coast of the USSR. I viewed stopping here as tidying up - my boys had already seen it all without me on a previous visit so I had the perfect excuse to whiz around for an hour by myself.

Aircraft carriers are impressive things but I think I enjoyed the submarine most of all. America is good for subs: we've seen the USS Pampanito in San Francisco, HA.19 in Fredericksburg, and U-505 in Chicago. This one was very good: full of old school dials and switches, things that have been designed to go demonstrably 'clunk' when they are pressed - quite an important feature when one is messing about with nuclear missiles. The thing I really liked about Growler was that it provided a technological snapshot. Intrepid served for decades and was refitted again and again, masking her original capabilities, whereas Growler, commissioned in '58 and out of service by '64, was made obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Polaris missiles.

Enterprise, the first space shuttle (built for atmospheric test flights only) is still under wraps following Hurricane Sandy, but we've seen her already at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) back in 2010. (Washington now has Discovery, whilst Mission Control Houston only gets a dodgy mock up handed down from the Kennedy Space Center, which has Atlantis. Don't get me started.) And then Concorde. I had never seen one up close before. Certainly never flown on one. (Let's be honest, the closest I've got is this.) It's a beautiful machine, surprisingly small and delicate but with incredible, alien-looking sweeps and flourishes. It still looks futuristic, like something Derrick Meddings would have dreamed up for Gerry Anderson. On another day, with more (or less) time to spare, I'd have poked my nose around inside, but I was keen to move on.

I've been around the Metropolitan Museum of Art before. Or at least, I've spent some hours inside it and seen some of the enormous and amazing collection. But I knew I hadn't even scratched the surface. I seized the opportunity of a long afternoon to try and get some more of it under my belt. I'm not going to give you a gallery-by-gallery account of everything I saw, but I spent the time well. Even better, there are still rooms and rooms of stuff to go back and see in the future.

I surprised myself by enjoying the period furniture, mainly because the Met does such a good job of contextualising it. They recreate whole rooms and salons, brilliantly evoking the whole culture and not just showing a table or a chest of drawers. I don't know why this should be, but the experience is rather more pleasant here than it is plodding around actual stately piles in England. Perhaps because there is none of that stuffy resentment of a home being made available for viewings, the peasantry being allowed to gawp at how their betters live. Recreated inside a New York art museum, these spaces are appropriated for an international public and largely shorn of the divisive nature of class. The paintings are good too and, being alone, I was able to zoom along, only bothering with the ones that compelled me to stop and stare, which is by far the best way to deal with an enormous collection.

But when I do eventually bring the kids here, the first room I will take them to is the armoury. It's not an intimidatingly large exhibit, but there are some very nice pieces and, although they have a bloodthirsty purpose, they do qualify as works of art in their own right. If you don't believe me, check out the hilts on the rapiers next time you're passing through because they are as swish as you like.

And then, like always, Henry VIII turns up. Twice.

Henry VIII is unavoidable. He is the gouty uxoricidal axle around which English history spins. Every thing that happens before leads to and is neatly drawn together by his reign; every thing that comes after starts with him. So I wasn't surprised to bump into him in Manhattan at all. He materialised in the form of two suits of armour, each made for him at a different point in his life. Before we look at them, let's just spend a moment exploring a long held theory of mine: Henry VIII has a lot in common with Elvis.

Both kings, obviously, and also musicians: Henry was accomplished with the lute, a 'talented player of the virginals' (Frankie Howerd face) and composed tunes, but probably not 'Greensleeves'. Elvis built Graceland and hung out with Richard Nixon; Henry built Hampton Court and Nonsuch and wrestled with the king of France. But there's more - two beautiful-looking young men, full of talent and vitality who let it all go to their heads and their waistlines and became all fat and rubbish.

So this is essentially Henry VIII's '68 Comeback Special suit of armour:

 

And this is his rhinestone onesie, dead-on-a-toilet suit of armour. 

Not convinced? Here's the clincher: Henry's last words were (allegedly) "Monks, monks, monks!". If that doesn't make you think of this, then I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, I have become rather sidetracked. I started writing this because I wanted to mention how nice it was just to be in New York. Nice to be somewhere full of people, mostly young, mostly impossibly fashionable and beautiful, all going about their Sunday in the winter sunshine, either citizens of the world idly gawping at the skyline or native New Yorkers heads down, pacing purposefully. Nice to be somewhere cold too, with everyone wearing hats and coats. I had forgotten, living in Houston as I do, that there is a simple pleasure to be had sitting in a bar or coffee shop and watching people as they step through the door, their skin red and rosy, their frozen faces breaking into smiles as they see their friends, their eyes alive with the anticipation of warmth and comfort and, just maybe, a Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut.

The Curse of Jiig-Cal

One day, at the end of what used to be called the Third Form, I was called into the office of the Head of Lower School for what turned out to be an exit interview. In just a few short minutes I would no longer be his concern, but there was just time for one last piece of pastoral oversight. Glancing at that year's report he mildly averred that I wasn't too bad a student and that I would probably get into university if I didn't muck everything up. This was an exciting and important revelation - until that very moment I had no idea that university was even hypothetically on the horizon. I was still getting my head around this news when he asked me what I wanted to do beyond higher education, by which he meant that, having just started to dream about a degree, I should already have chosen a career.

I was fourteen years old. I had not been thinking about career choices. I had been spending most of my time trying to work out who should have been High King of the Noldor following the Ruin of Beleriand and, no, that isn't a euphemism. So I prevaricated.

"Medicine, or law?" I said, but vagueness was something I was not going to be allowed to take with me to Middle School apparently. This was the time to make Decisions.

"Which is it?" he pressed. I flipped a coin in my head. 

"Soliciting," I said firmly. 

The Head of Lower School might have raised an eyebrow at that, but I didn't notice. "Good," he said, gently washing his hands of me. "I'm sure you'll do very well at that."

That was the second and least helpful piece of careers advice I had received. Much more useful had been a conversation I had had with my mother when I was six. She had firmly told me that no, I did not want to become a spy because if the Chinese caught me they would rip out my fingernails. I was immediately persuaded and that's why I am not a spy today.

Then in the Sixth Form the school made a final attempt to help me choose a career. We were made to answer questionnaires that were fed into a computer and then, just many weeks later, we got back a dot-matrix print out with a list of suitable jobs. This was a Jiig-Cal test. It looks like it's a little more sophisticated now than it was back in 1993. At the time it was a little underwhelming. 

The results came back: a list of jobs that could be summarised as 'indoor work, no heavy lifting'. I think the highest matches were librarian, journalist, teacher, but none of it was very revelatory or inspiring. It wasn't until many years later that I realised that I had wanted something very different from this test. It had given me a list of jobs that overlapped with the sort of tasks I did well at school. What it hadn't done, what it would never be able to do, was unlock the dreams and desires I didn't know I had, to show me potential paths that I still had time to take.

Today I have the best job in the world but I do, occasionally, get sudden insights into careers I might have pursued had I but known they existed.

Five Jobs I Would Have Loved, Had I But Known

1. Marine Archaeologist. To be honest, what with the Mary Rose and For Your Eyes Only, this was staring me in the face the whole time and I just didn't see it. All I can do now is gnash my teeth at the missed opportunity. Okay, I can barely swim and I have a potentially crippling fear of deep water, but I am convinced that I could have overcome these if I had but realised such a job existed. I may, even now, have only a sketchy idea of what being a marine archaeologist actually entails, but I imagine it's mainly spending summers splashing about the Mediterranean, hoovering sand away from amphorae, which would be brilliant. My prospects might have suffered when I refused to explore the abyssal wrecks of the Atlantic or the chilly waters of the North Sea but, on the other hand, I might have discovered something like the Antikythera mechanism. And whenever people asked me what I did, I'd get to say "I'm a marine archaeologist," which would be just so cool that the very thought of it makes me all excited.

2. Nail Varnish Shade Describer. It never occurred to me this was a job until just the other day when I went to the shop to pick up some nail varnish for my wife. This made me slightly stressed. Firstly, it is impossible to resist the suspicion that the women in the nail varnish aisle think you are buying it for yourself. Which would, obviously, be fine, but I'm not and there's no way to casually announce that I'm not without turning into a sitcom character (not Ross from Friends, a different one.) Secondly, the labelling is appalling. How am I supposed to find the one particular shade? The rows aren't labelled, the bottles are all mixed up and so the only way to search through them is to pick them all up one at a time and find the name which is helpfully printed on the bottom. Of course, this merely compounds the first problem, because now it looks like I am browsing for a colour I like rather than assiduously hunting down the one out for which I have been sent. 

Anyway, it was as a result of all this that I discovered the joy of nail varnish shade descriptions. I don't know if it's true for all makes, but the particular nail varnish my wife was after is made by OPI and they have some wonderfully silly ones. Some are dull and some are awful, but many are delightful; my favourites: 'I'm Not Really a Waitress', 'Catherine the Grape', 'Bastille My Heart', 'Mrs O'Leary's BBQ' and 'Melon of Troy'. After a while a very clear picture emerges. It is a picture of a room full of clever men and women brainstorming puns, wordplay and terrible jokes with which to describe the colours of nail varnish. This is their job, the lucky so-and-sos, and I would have loved to have done that. 

3. Run My Own Opera House. This is obviously a lie. I couldn't do this at all, and I probably couldn't even imagine half the things one has to do in order to keep such an organisation intact on a daily basis. But I do know a load of people who could work together to run an opera house for me whilst I had very long lunches and, every so often, planned out a season's worth of unworkable and unpopular shows. I may be talking myself out of a job, but I feel I must admit that opera and I are often at cross-purposes with each other. For example if ever there was an opera which deserved a swash-buckling heroic victory at the last minute, it is Tosca. (Oddly, I have the opposite reaction with Rodelinda where I fully expect the drippy royals to get it in the neck and SPOILERS they don't.) Instead, the sudden final tragedy of Tosca leaves me with a strong desire to cut the third act completely. Or, even better, Tosca jumps and then a splash of water appears over the ramparts and she calls out 'Fortuna meglio la prossima volta, perdenti!'. How would that not be brilliant? 

It is with a Calvinesque sigh that I realise that, when it comes to opera, I probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a position of responsibility. Anyway, video games are much better: in Assassin's Creed, your character can sneak into the Castel Sant'Angelo, kill the big baddy, fight all the guards and then leap from the battlements wearing a parachute given to you by your friend Leonardo da flippin' Vinci. Puccini really missed a trick there.  

4. Duke of Norfolk. I went around Arundel Castle in the Summer and good fun it was too. Many British castles are crumbling ruins. They may be atmospheric and beautiful, but nevertheless they are merely ghosts of buildings, rent and wrecked by sieges and long abandoned by whatever ancient lords and ladies were once ensconced there. Arundel is the other kind of castle. It is immaculate, luxurious and not conserved but maintained: those ancient lords are still living there, nine hundred years later, and for roughly half that time it has been the home of the Dukes of Norfolk. Not metaphorically either: even today it is their actual home. 

Now pay attention because the aristocracy are tricksy and confusing. For a start they never live where they should do. The Earls of Pembroke lived in Wiltshire, the Duke of Devonshire's house is in Derbyshire and Arundel is in Sussex, not Norfolk. But the Dukes of Norfolk are also the Earls of Arundel so this, at least, makes some kind of sense. The current one, Edward Fitzalan-Howard, is styled the 18th Duke of Norfolk (although he's actually the 25th man to hold the title) and, as well as being the 36th Earl of Arundel (or the 17th depending on how you count it), he is also the 16th (or 36th) Earl of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, Baron Beaumont, Baron Maltravers, Baron FitzAlan, Baron Clun, Baron Oswaldestre, Baron Howard of Glossop, the Earl Marshall, the Hereditary Marshall of England and, according to some, the Chief Butler of England. 

Walking about Arundel, two things occurred to me. Firstly, there seemed to be an awful lot of overlap here. Given the current rates of unemployment, was it fair for one man to do all these jobs at once? Couldn't some of these titles be shared out amongst the jobless? Don't Surrey and Norfolk suffer from having to share an Earl? And secondly, I realised that I never will be a duke of any kind. The realisation came like a slap across the face, and it depresses me more than you can know. I can't play football, paint or invent things; I could never be a millionaire businessman, or a statesman, or an actor. These things require not only talent but furiously hard work. On the other hand, I know I've got what it takes to be a bloody great duke. I would be brilliant. I'd knock it out of the park. The best ever. Sadly, it won't ever happen. 

5. Pope. I understand there's a vacancy and, let's face it, I'd be a wonderful pope. Even though I'm not a woman, I still think that I could bring the fresh-thinking and unexpected qualities that any moribund two-thousand year old institution desperately needs. And if for some CRAZY reason you consider my atheism a drawback (it's not, it's what would make me a bold and brilliant choice and allow the Church to move in a new, modern direction) then I'm still eminently qualified. Not only do I have grade B GCSE Latin, but I also have a passion for travelling around the world telling people how to live their lives. 

I'd have to negotiate terms quite carefully, though. I'm happy to work all Easter (it's literally just another weekend to me) but I would need Christmas off, obviously. And if Benedict XVI can invoke centuries-old precedents then so can I, which means that my marriage and vow of non-celibacy shouldn't be a problem. The good news is that, even were I to fail to persuade the Conclave of my suitability, I could just call myself Pope anyway like this guy. 

So there we are. Five rather nice jobs that I won't ever get to do, for reasons that still remain unclear to me. At least I still have all my fingernails. 

 

Our Queen

Paul Cunningham/Corbis (via The Guardian)

Goodness me there are some GRUMPY people on Twitter lately. Lots of complaints about bunting and flags; snooty comments to the effect that this is all very unBritish, that London resembles Pyongyang, that only countries without self-confidence have to resort to jingoistic flag-waving.

Some are desperate to get away, to France or America. Others deride the whole business as a sinister distraction from our real problems. And some even go so far as to mention the dreaded 'R' word - Republicanism.

For any of you who have no idea what is going on, all this blather is because this weekend in Britain is the Queen's Diamond Jubilee: the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of her reign. The specialness of such an event may be undermined by last year's Royal Wedding, and by the Golden Jubilee of 2002, but it's still a big deal: Diamond Jubilees don't come along too often. In fact this is only the second in over a thousand years.

So yes, there is bunting and flags. This picture up on the left is of Regent Street in London. When I look at it, I don't see a crushing authoritarian state lacking in self-confidence, I see a party. That's what a jubilee is, it is a party.

There's a very good reason why the flags are not a problem, why celebrating the Jubilee is not a problem, why having a monarchy at all is not a problem: deep down we know that none of this really matters.

If you want to see crazy flag-waving, come to America. The British put up flags for special occasions (coronations, jubilees, weddings, World Cups), but Americans fly the Stars & Stripes permanently. Everywhere. And some of them are so big, an aircraft carrier could use them as a blanket. Each school flies a flag outside and every classroom inside has one as well. Car showrooms fly hundreds off them. Houses have them staked out on the front lawn. I've even seen cars flying flags, and I don't mean the Presidential limousine. When White Vans sport an England Flag for the football, we roll our eyes, but can you imagine someone driving around like that all the time?

It's a mania, a kind of hysteria that has become utterly normal. And it has to be that way because America is an artificial country, a pure idea and not a cultural accretion. Patriotism is essential here because it is the glue that forces all these disparate peoples to combine. That's why school children are made to take the daily Pledge of Allegiance: the idea of America has to be constantly reinforced lest it suddenly vanish.

The irony is that the idea of America is not under threat at all, even though the anxiety seems to have been hard-wired into the national psychology at birth. Whereas in Britain, where the dangers of Scottish independence actually might destroy a four hundred year old union, we don't tend to worry about such things. On some level or other we have no doubt about who we are.

That's not to say that the idea of Britishness is not a turbulent one. It changes, we argue over it, we even, sometimes, fight each other (or someone else) about it. But for a long time things have been settled and even if Scotland did run off, it is likely that it will still have the same Queen as England. The monarchy plays a crucial role in this, the cherry on top of the Cake of State, but please don't confuse this with power or relevance.

I used to be a monarchist, when I was younger, even though I sympathised with republicanism. To square this circle my position became this: that if I were ever to start a country from scratch then certainly it could only be a republic, but that, seeing that we had the Queen and the monarchy and the heritage, it would be silly for Britain to get rid of all that. I know that there are some who find it intolerable that our head of state inherits the job from their parent, and that to persist with it, even ceremonially, is a kind of tyranny. But to obsess about this, to actively pursue a change to our constitution to remove the monarchy, is to utterly waste time and energy that could be devoted to fixing real problems.

That's why I can't call myself a monarchist because that would imply that there was a debate to be had on the subject and there really isn't. There is no arguing with the fact that sovereignty resides with the people. When this was last up for discussion we made the point by arresting Charles I and chopping off his head. That the monarchy was subsequently restored does not change anything at all. From then on, the crown became our possession, to do with as we please and we have not hesitated to make our displeasure known.

In 1688, we kicked out James II and invited William of Orange to be king instead. We picked George I in 1714 and after that we were happy for a while. But in 1936 the unsuitable Edward VIII was forced aside and we made his brother the Duke of York become George VI. If we chose to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of his daughter, Elizabeth II, it might be because we're pleased with our own selection process. There are more dark mutterings about the next one (this is especially worrying) but there is a limit to the damage a bad king can do. If we have to put up with a dotty old loon for a few years, we will. If it begins to look like he's not worth the grief then we'll simply push on and have William instead. They belong to us, not the other way around.

Yes, the monarchy costs us money - but only about 72p each per year. And yes, they are horribly rich and unelected. But the world is full of people who are horribly rich. Compared with most of the people in the world you are horribly rich. And if you want to have a go at unelected power in Britain then let's demolish the global media empires, let's sort out the corporate lobbying system, because these are the institutions that really do own us. Let's get hereditary peers and the Bishops (bishops!) out of the House of Lords. That would be a good day's work.

It'll have to wait until Wednesday of course because of the Jubilee, so in the meantime have a slice of cake and a cup of tea, wave a Union flag (ironically, if you must) and watch the best bloody broadcasting corporation in the world show off our country, our heritage and that nice little old lady whose life we hijacked when she was 10 years old.

She has been one of the good ones and is worth celebrating.

Saint George

St. George by Raphael

I grew up in a little town in a little country. Nothing ever happened in Salisbury whilst I was a child and it never appeared on the local news, let alone the national headlines. It had no minor football team to stage an improbable fairy-tale cup run. It never featured in TV dramas. Neither Antiques Roadshow nor Songs of Praise ever seemed to call. In short I had no way to tell if the rest of the country knew we existed at all. It might even have been that we didn't exist, and just received programming from a real world that carried on happily without us. Finally, when I was twelve or thirteen, a boy in my class won a Blue Peter badge. He went to London, to BBC Television Centre, and we could actually see him on the screen. Here at last was corroboration: I did live in the same dimension as all those other places on the television. Salisbury was real after all.

But even to this day I am completely thrown when I meet people who have heard of Salisbury. And if they say that they've been there it's all I can do not to scoff out loud, as if they're claiming to have somehow inveigled their way through the magic forcefield that shields us from the mortal realm.

All of which is a silly way of raising two ideas: 1) that one's home always looks different from the outside; 2) that we don't give any thought to what it looks like from the outside until we are forced to. Realisation can dawn in an instant or take years to seep in. And it can happen to a species as easily as it can to an individual, as the Apollo 8 mission proved in 1968 (left).

I've been looking at England from the outside now for many years - in fact, rather like a NASA probe, I seem to be moving further away - and an exterior picture has been gradually forming, as if the data were being beamed in from the depths of space, pixel by pixel.

But alongside the slow drip-feed of first Welsh and then American views on England, there have been sudden instances of insight. I've mentioned living in Wales before, but I must reiterate that I barely considered myself English before I moved there: I was British, of course, as was - I thought - everyone else. This was a long time ago - before Devolution - but I was left in no doubt, even by loving friends, that I was English and different, that in the past I had been the oppressor and that even in the present, on match day at least, I was still the enemy.

The English have no cultural memory of being oppressed. In a pinch, we might huff about the Norman Yoke but that is merely to clutch at the flimsiest of straws. And if ever we do wish to empathise with our downtrodden Saxon forebears, there's no way we'd be willing to give up all that we gained from the Conquest. No, we've never been oppressed but we still relish the way that the Plantagenet kings laid about them with sword and fire, crushing Welsh, Scots, Irish, French and even Saracens. It is these kings that we emulate when we send out our footballers wearing the three lions of Richard I; and when we fly the flag of St. George it is because of Edward III, who venerated courtly ideas of chivalry whilst he was cementing an English empire.

In England if we do admit to any of this then we are aren't prepared to see ourselves as the villains of the piece. We see Medieval battles, bashing the Scots or Welsh, as a bit of fun, like beating them at rugby perhaps. 'And look, they still have their own languages, don't they?' we might say, as if this mitigated against the centuries when children would be beaten, or worse, for letting slip a word of their mother tongue. The English were never required to face up to what we had done - there were never any recriminations. As Wales, Ireland and even Scotland were absorbed into this new United Kingdom of Britain, past grievances were swept under the carpet as we set about being beastly to the rest of the world.

It's an important distinction because I think we are much more aware of, upset by, and feel more guilty about what the British Empire did. The implications are still unwinding, all around the world, and we are involved in an ongoing series of complicated calculations, trying to see if our legacy can't be worked to be morally neutral. Yes, slavery, we think: terrible. But on the other hand, you know, Wilberforce and all that! We cling to the idea that we ended slavery thirty years before the USA because it makes us feel superior and less racist. Yes, India, we hmmm. Some bad things happened, but look we left peacefully and India's now a burgeoning superpower, the largest democracy in the world! Okay, we invented concentration camps, but we're not as bad as the Nazis!

The Second World War is seen as a huge make-weight when we're trying to get the scales to balance. Whatever terrible evil things we did, we think, the war against Nazism was a fire that scourged us of our empire and left Britain diminished but redeemed. As an historical narrative it is neat and tidy, but it is something we tell ourselves. I don't think it's how we're viewed in Kenya, or India, or America.

The view from the US is naturally shaped by the War of Independence. Britain, and especially England, is seen as a rump. Quaint, sure, but redundant. And it doesn't help that there's so much confusion about what exactly constitutes the UK, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland or the British Isles. In terms of political power, 'English' and 'England' are used for everything. As a result, 'English' and 'British' are used pretty much synonymously: to be English is to be British, and vice versa.

But culturally, as soon as one identifies oneself as Irish or Scottish, or even Welsh, one is distinct, not English and therefore not British. Tartan, Loch Ness and Braveheart are not British, they are Scottish. Tom Jones and male voice choirs are Welsh. St. Patrick despite being Romano-British and growing up in Wales, is the most Irishy thing ever.

I'm not complaining. Celtic Britain has its own distinct flavour and has excelled at marketing itself and its culture to the outside world. The English, happy to wave the Union Flag, have never felt the need to cultivate their own individual character.

We need to think about how we're seen from the outside. Even more so because of the looming possibility of Scottish independence. If it were to happen, the divorce would be messy and protracted; everything we share would be carved up over many years. But one thing England would certainly retain is the negative association with British imperialism. As far as the rest of the world would be concerned, Scotland would be left floaty-light, new and shiny and free from centuries of subjugation. And England, that old bully, would be merely more shrivelled, more decrepit, with its blood red cross and its fondness for chain mail armour.

This has turned in to a long rant but, as I say, we need to start thinking about how we're seen from the outside. Last week I read this excellent article by Greg Jenner - it passionately puts the case that St. George is a pretty useless rallying figure for a modern England. I think it is the case that our Englishness, because of Britain, because of empire, has long been a internal matter, something that we only thought about in terms of looking inwards. That won't do.

Brilliantly, St. Patrick's Day has been turned into a rolling global party. It may be, for most people, nothing more than an excuse for a beer but it is undeniably a world-wide phenomenon, a massive celebration and a big win for Irishness. In fact, its promotion has been a deliberate policy of the Irish government for twenty years with (thanks Wikipedia) four specific aims:

• To offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
• To create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity
• To provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
• To project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal.

I love that, especially 'those who sometimes wish they were Irish'. As an Englishman I look at those words with envy - who would ever aspire to being English? For a start, we're never going to be able to compete with the Irish when it comes to getting the world drunk with us. But if we possibly could, we should take those aims and try to emulate them. After all, we must have something special, something uniquely English, that the world would be happy to cherish with us? And of course, we do. As Mr Jenner and a great many other people have pointed out through the years, we have Shakespeare.

We needn't do much more than rename St. George's Day, (April 23rd, non-English people) as Shakepeare's Birthday. It's so convenient! (No, there's no evidence that he was actually born on that day but it is very likely and we are a lot less fussy about the 'Englishness' of a Palestinian Christian martyr who we currently share with Georgia, Portugal and host of other places.) But we can keep the flag, sure, why not. George can stay patron saint if you like because that's entirely meaningless anyway. But we should start celebrating Shakespeare on April 23rd. It's distinct. It's marketable. His works are glorious and rich and almost endlessly open to interpretation and exploration. Funny, sad, exciting; English history or universal human drama - it's all there. And best of all, it wouldn't just be happening on village greens and in Norman churches. It could be everywhere; English is spoken by over a billion people, more than any other language. Wheel out the ambassadors and the High Commissioners! Unleash the heralds and their fanfares! Put on a show and celebrate our most significant contribution to world culture.

If nothing else it would be chance to future-proof England. Scotland might go its own way. Anglicanism and monarchy, which we have set such store by for so long, might not last. Symbols lose their usefulness or become sullied. Too often English patriotism is an ugly, intolerant beast, mired in ignorance and the born from the fear that we are no longer the power we once were. To hell with that. Shakespeare offers us an England for all ages, for all the world, and something to look back at fondly, proudly, when we are far from home.

Charles V

Charles I, II, III, IV & V

Another forty seconds on the internet and there's a whole load more Charles V fun to be had. Oh yes, there is. Some of it I am remembering from long ago, some of it is brand new to me. It is all good.

Firstly, and it may be misattributed, but he is supposed to have said:

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse."

File that under 'I'm choosing to believe it, even if it isn't true.'

Secondly, he appears in another opera, Ernani, also by Verdi (never heard of it). It features his election as Holy Roman Emperor. Which is nice.

Thirdly, I mentioned he was Charles I as King of Spain and Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. Well, it gets better even than that. Yes, I know, unbelievable.

He was Charles II in his capacity as the Duke of (amongst other places) Burgundy, Brabant and Luxembourg, and Charles III as the Duke of Guelders and the Count of Flanders, as well as being counted Charles IV as the King of Naples. That's pretty damn impressive and, I think, means he gets to build hotels without needing to buy four green houses first.

Lastly, here, in full, is his titulature:

Charles, by the grace of God, Holy Roman Emperor, forever August, King of Germany, King of Italy, King of all Spains, of Castile, Aragon, León, Navarra, Grenada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Majorca, Sevilla, Cordova, Murcia, Jaén, Algarves, Algeciras, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, King of Two Sicilies, of Sardinia, Corsica, King of Jerusalem, King of the Western and Eastern Indies, Lord of the Islands and Main Ocean Sea, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Lorraine, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Limburg, Luxembourg, Gelderland, Neopatria, Württemberg, Landgrave of Alsace, Prince of Swabia, Asturia and Catalonia, Count of Flanders, Habsburg, Tyrol, Gorizia, Barcelona, Artois, Burgundy Palatine, Hainaut, Holland, Seeland, Ferrette, Kyburg, Namur, Roussillon, Cerdagne, Zutphen, Margrave of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgau, Oristano and Gociano, Lord of Frisia, the Wendish March, Pordenone, Biscay, Molin, Salins, Tripoli and Mechelen.

King of all Spains and Two Sicilies! I hope you all feel suitably humble.

Intersection

I had some fun combining some interests over the last few days. I'm a big admirer of information graphics - I love that a really good diagram can present complex ideas and relationships clearly and instantly - but when this is done in a beautiful or witty way then it's even better.

It's not just a recent trend either. Talking to my son about the Napoleonic Wars this week, I remembered this 'carte figurative' by Charles Joseph Minard. It's a flow chart showing the size of the French army both marching to and retreating from Moscow during the catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1812. The chart was drawn up in 1869. It not only shows the rise and fall of troop numbers and the route of the march (including things like river crossings), it also marks the time taken and, perhaps most significantly, the temperature during the long winter. It's already taken longer for me to type this explanation than it would for you, just by looking at the chart, to understand what happened to the French army. It's a meticulous work of genius.

Click here to view full size.

So, this is history crossed with information design. Brilliant. But the fun I mentioned earlier was had mixing both of these with another interest, opera.

This almost counts as a commission I suppose. My wife (you might know her) works for Houston Grand Opera and their upcoming season includes Don Carlos, by Verdi, and Maria Stuarda, by Donizetti, which both happen to be about real historical figures from sixteenth century Europe. The eponymous pair being, respectively, Charles, oldest son, and heir, of Philip II of Spain and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now, I read History at university, and the sixteenth century was my thing. By which I mean, it is the bit I remember best and therefore am most confident bluffing about. So when L asked if these two people were related, I was more than happy to get out my books and start scouring the genealogies.

The answer is, yes, of course they are: the ruling houses of Europe were very tightly bound together during this period. I had lots of fun finding out exactly how and even more fun drawing it up, especially once I discovered that some of the connecting people had also found their way into operas.

Here's the finished chart. It's simplified, only showing spouses/siblings where they are necessary, and there is one deliberate inaccuracy: Elizabeth de Valois was younger than her brother François II, not older, but showing it the other way around would mean having MQS appearing twice or even the whole thing going around in a scrolling loop! That would work nicely on screen, but on the printed page it just wouldn't do.

There's one other simplification that I had to make. Philip's father Charles is shown as being 'Charles V of Spain' but, of course, he was no such thing. He is really Charles the first of Spain and the fifth as Holy Roman Emperor, but is always known as Charles V. Interestingly, Spain went on and had another three Charleses, so if they had one more, he would be 'Charles V of Spain' and a lot of history books - and this chart - would suddenly make a lot less sense.

Aliens vs Mayans

I'm not one for a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies are seductive and slick, but the truth is surely always actually a messy contradictory affair. So I am happy to debunk a cosy little theory that I knitted together on Twitter this morning.

It started with this Guardian article which relates, with a remarkable lack of cynicism, that the Mexican government is cooperating with a new documentary movie which will reveal how aliens interacted with ancient Mayan people. No, really.

Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was "the good of mankind". He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.

"Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists," he said. "The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we're going to back it up."

(Well, Caballeros is actually the president of Guatemala, which is also involved apparently, but never mind that.) You can't see me, but I am still rolling my eyes in disgust at this, but please, I have to deal with the speck in my own eye before I can take a chainsaw to theirs.

In a nutshell, this article caused me to 'go off on one' on Twitter and I mentioned at one point that this was an indication of the awful state of the Mexican tourism industry: that they were now so desperate to make people visit their country that they were prepared to "literally say anything". And, thinking that I really had to get this off my chest properly, I then sauntered over to Google to find a lovely graph showing how US and European tourists were avoiding Mexico.

Well, guess what. I couldn't find one. No one would deny that there are massive problems. This from the Washington Post, April 2009, reveals the impact of Swine Flu, with resorts running at 20% occupancy rates. And this was after the effects of drug cartel violence had begun to be noticed, as this (from the same month) shows. I'm guessing the global economic hoo-ha doesn't help much either.

But things have been improving, albeit from a catastrophically low base. The LA Times reported that visitor numbers for 2010 were up 17.8% on the previous year, in fact, with the trend set to continue in 2011.

So, despite 35,000 deaths over four years, a US State Department travel warning, slashed prices and a promotional tour to the US during which the president Felipe Calderón has resorted to pimping a PBS travel series, I draw the line at accusing the Mexican government of conspiring to fraudulently claim the country contains sites of contact with extra-terrestrials in order to boost tourism.

Because the whole thing is preposterous.

As the Guardian later makes clear, despite the fervent publicity-garnering quotes from the producers, the highest ranking name attached to the project from the Mexican government is Luis Augusto García Rosado, minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche. A glittering career awaits, presumably? But surely nobody with pretensions to political credibility is going to want to be connected with this.

I haven't seen the film, no-one has yet, and I reserve the right to change my mind once I have. But the likelihood that they will be able to produce the sort of evidence that would persuade me is very very small.

What annoys me most about the 'aliens/early civilisation' theory is that we are so ready to belittle the incredible achievements of these societies. Like us, these people struggled against disease, weather, competitors and yet with rudimentary technology produced some of the most amazing artefacts in human history. Archaeologists and historians devote their lives to understanding what these people believed and thought, and how their societies functioned. But we, knowing better, feel the need to attribute the credit to unknown magic powers. It's as if sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Nazca Lines or Chichen Itza weren't impressive enough by themselves.

But then conspiracy theories are, of course, the preserve of those who are never satisfied with what's staring them in the face.

Diminishing Ripples

I was going to write something sober and reflective, trying to find some long-term perspective for the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September, 2001. Having logged on, I found this piece by Francis Fukuyama in the Guardian. It is brilliant and brief, offering succinct and incisive analysis. Timothy Garton-Ash put forward similar thoughts earlier in the week.

What they don't offer, what no dispassionate or clear-headed perspective can provide, what a lot of Americans still need, is comfort and reassurance. Because, unfortunately, there is none to be had. This has always been a dangerous world where terrible things can happen suddenly and irrevocably, and there is no policy, weapon or faith that can guarantee individual safety.

The unimaginable impact of that day will never diminish for those who were injured, for those whose friends or family were killed, or for those who witnessed the disaster first hand and escaped. But it would be a tragedy for America, let alone the world, if our future history continued to pivot around this black day.

1998 and All That

When writing the history of things, beginnings are nearly always murky, confused and badly documented. But eventually the historian can latch upon a key first date, an anchor that can be relied upon as a sign that things had irrevocably changed.

Today is the anniversary of such a date. On this day, the 14th of October, an historic and fateful encounter took place near Hastings in Sussex. The year was 1998.

No, for once I am not talking about the history of England, but personal history. For whilst my relationship with my then wife-to-be was already a few months old and had already had its fair share of Athelstans and Canutes, it was the day we accidentally spent at the site of the Battle of Hastings that I now look back on as a key moment.

I say accidentally because it was pure coincidence, or serendipity if you will, that took us there on that particular day. At a loose end with spare time together during what was then an uncertain and somewhat loose association with each other, we found ourselves driving around Sussex in an October fog looking for something to do. One of us, I forget who, mentioned Hastings as being nearby and it turned out that neither of us had visited the famous battle site. And then, as one, we both remembered the date of the battle and we turned to each other and said in unison, "but hang on that's today!"

To demonstrate the same knowledge simultaneously to each other was a thrilling moment of connection for a pair of nerdy show-offs such as us and after that we had a wonderful time. Being a drizzly Wednesday, we all but had the battlefield to ourselves which made it beautifully empty and evocative. After stomping around we eventually came to a large stone slab that had been laid to mark the spot where Harold II was supposedly killed. Totally spurious of course, but someone had left a bunch of yellow flowers there, the only bright colour amongst the mist and the October afternoon shadows.

As I get older, memories become increasingly blurry and I am appalled at how often people remind me of things that I have utterly forgotten. But I don't think I will ever forget those flowers, or that day together with the wonderful woman who is now my wife.

Nor will I ever forget that everything we have here - our lives in America, our marriage and, of course, our children - are all as a result of what happened at Battle on the 14th of October.

Highs and Lows of Chicago

Last weekend we all dashed to Chicago; L was working and the boys and I tagged along because we are now Official Travel Boffins of America or something. When L first suggested the trip I didn't want to bother, frankly. It seemed too soon after our epic road trip for one thing.But I am trying to stop saying 'no' to things out of laziness, and off we went.

The actual flight was ridiculously easy, despite having to get up at 5am. For one thing, I keep forgetting how straightforward domestic flights are here in the USA. For another, suddenly sitting still for two and a half hours en famille is easy-peasy after all the crazy cross-country driving we have done. Almost immediately we were descending into a Great Lakes rain storm and a few minutes after that we were in a taxi ploughing through the downpour to Downtown.

The city is beautiful, naturally: an uproar of towers and skyscrapers from the last 100 years, steel and glass and stone and brick, blending and reflecting off of each other and looming over the broad streets and spacious parks. Through all this weaves the 'L', the elevated railway with its silver rolling stock. It completely covers some streets, making the sidewalk feel like an undercity from a 1930s dystopian version of the future - which it probably is to be fair.

Our time was limited so we tried to cram in as much as we could. On Saturday we did the Art Institute and managed to impress Christopher with some paintings - albeit only because he recognised them from Doctor Who. Still, he got a real frisson out of seeing Van Gough's bedroom and his self-portrait, so well done the BBC. Bless him, he does think Van Gough's first name is 'Mister' though.

On Sunday L had to some actual work so we left her behind and caught the bus to the Museum of Science & Industry. More on that, and the Sears Willis Tower in a minute.

Our flight times on Monday allowed us just enough time to have a stab at the Field Museum, Chicago's answer to the Natural History Museum. Again it was astoundingly good - excellent evolution/life on Earth/dinosaurs exhibition, wonderful recreation of an ancient Egyptian tomb and a great set of rooms on pre-European American civilisations. Then it was back in the taxi, back on the plane, 'oh, we've landed' and then back home for dinner. Bang, job done.

Now rewind to Sunday for the highs and lows.

Lows: Ha ha, I'm so clever. The low point, of course, was going up to the top of the Willis née Sears Tower. The ride in the elevator (24 feet per second, fact fans) was enough to make me giddy all by itself. The views from the top were spectacular, but they had to ruin it all by installing some glass flooring in a bay window so that my boys could stand on it, jump up and down and watch me beg (from a safe distance) them to get off.

Highs: Ha ha ha! Did I mention how clever I am? The high point was to be found down in the bowels of the Museum of Science & Industry where they have the U-505: a 250ft long, 750 tonne German submarine that was captured by the US Navy off the coast of Africa in June 1944. The boys may be able to cope with heights, but they clearly didn't take to the claustrophobia-inducing interior. With the doors shut, the lights dimmed, and the recorded noise of the engines echoing through the hull, our short guided-tour was very atmospheric. In hushed tones the guide describes the location and capture of the sub as if it were happening right now, above us. Chilling.

Unusually, the 54 crew members were captured/rescued after the sub was depth-charged by Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3. Even more unusually, the Germans failed to scuttle their ship resulting in a great intelligence coup for the Allies. U-505 was disguised and towed to the Bahamas to be pored over by Naval Intelligence; her crew were sent to a POW camp in Louisiana, just for them, where they played baseball and picked cotton for 25 cents a day. At the end of the war they were all offered American citizenship and six of them took it. Meanwhile, the U-505 was scheduled for use as target practice as German military assets were put beyond use. But the captain of the US task force that had captured the sub intervened - he pulled some strings and got it saved, and he was able to donate it to his local museum in his home town of Chicago.

There it sat, on the front lawn, until a purpose-built underground chamber was constructed for it in 2005. It's amazing, straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me. Most beautifully, one of the six Americanised crew members moved to Chicago, just to be close to his old ship. In fact, he became a volunteer at the museum and himself gave tours of the vessel for many years until he died.

Of the 1200 U-boats that survived World War Two, there are only 5 left in the world. And the U-505 is the only one outside Europe.

As you might be able to tell, I was suitably impressed.