I was back in the United Kingdom for about two weeks, in what is entirely likely to be my last visit in 2022. I won’t be missing it. It’s just been an extraordinarily long time — 86 days this year, with over 33 in London alone — and much of it through the end of Boris Johnson¹ and the utter shambolic mess of Liz Truss’ premiership.² And while politics is better in the United Kingdom than the United States right now,³ they’re still a train wreck and I’ve no desire for a front-row seat.

I’m here because I used up most of the time I could spend in the Schengen Area from April to June⁴ and the UK’s become a very lazy place for me to fill in time. I’m still working on fixing that — my next stop features an interview with Portuguese immigration, the last step in getting residency there⁵ — but until that’s sorted I need to spend time outside Schengen and that frequently means the UK.⁶

It’s not like there isn’t still a lot to see or do, especially outside of London.⁷ This time around I flew into Chester,⁸ which is an incredibly cute city dating back from when the Romans constructed a fort there in 79 CE. It’s had long periods of affluence ever since, and bears remarkably well-preserved architecture from all across them: Roman, Medieval, Stuart, Victorian.⁹

Chester’s well known for the town walls, originally built by the Romans and improved and expanded by just about every era since. You can walk all the way around them — it takes about 40 minutes — and they provide an excellent view of the city center and all its enticements. If you go, expect to spend most of the day walking them; they’re an excellent jumping off point to visit the Roman amphitheater or the Cathedral or any of the pubs for a long lunch. And Chester features something called “The Rows,” an odd medieval architectural feature¹⁰ apparently unique to Chester where there’s a long covered gallery above the ground floor of the shops featuring another row of shops overlooking the streets. I found an amazing bistro up there, Shrub, and had a lovely lunch before I caught my train out.¹¹

Most quaint small towns are good for a day or two; Chester is one of the few where I would have gladly spent a week. There were a lot of inviting pubs and cafés and restaurants to visit — it’s quite touristy, but not obnoxiously so particularly in the off season — and I found myself wishing I had a day to go out on the river or time to explore the Town Hall.

I spent most of the rest of my time in England crashing at a friend’s house before making my way to London, although it didn’t prevent me from visiting a couple castles: Warwick Castle in Warwickshire and Hever Castle in Kent. They’re both pretty touristy, although Warwick is far more touristy,¹² with a birds of prey show and a Halloween dungeon walkthrough and a “Horrible Histories” themed maze.¹³

Hever is best known as Anne Boleyn’s childhood home and is really lovely, even if none of the furnishings are original. The Boleyn’s only owned it for about 80 years; it’s gone through a number of hands over the years until William Waldorf Astor purchased it in 1903 as a near ruin. The Astors restored it — although given the state, and fashions at the turn of the 20^th century, most of the rooms are at best a reasonable supposition of what they might have been.¹⁴ It’s a little jarring to see period wood paneling with contemporary sofas and loveseats, no matter how lovely a drawing room it makes.

But thinking about it, it almost feels more authentic this way. We tend to imagine castles as these austere barren stone ruins, and they were never that way when they were in active use. Much as I enjoy a good tromp through Caernarfon, it’s nicer to see what they might have looked like when Boleyns lived there, or even what they did look like when the Astors did.

I decided on the spur of the moment to see the Tower of London on Saturday¹⁵ and was curious and/or bored enough to pick up a ticket for The Gunpowder Plot Experience, an immersive 90-minute … show, I guess? … where you walk through a series of rooms guided by live actors and get to lightly interact with Jacobean England.

The story is you’ve all been rounded up as suspected Catholics and thrown into the Tower,¹⁶ whereupon you’re picked out en masse as potential spies to infiltrate the Gunpowder conspiracy. Cue an escape from the Tower,¹⁷ a stopover in a safehouse, a pause in a tavern, and a boat ride across the Thames, ending up in the basements of Parliament surrounded by dozens of barrels of gunpowder.

You’re usually in a room with 1-2 actors, supplemented with audio recordings to give the impression of more.¹⁸ And there are a few places you’re asked to put on a VR headset and watch a short scene, typically while sitting on something that moves a little to accentuate the experience. At heart it’s really not much more than a tarted up version of a haunted house,¹⁹ which isn’t to knock it but to set expectations appropriately.

I guess I’d recommend it if you didn’t have anything better to do — it’s quite entertaining — but it’s also very uneven and very expensive.²⁰ The VR is great and evocative but the graphics look 15 years out of date.²¹ The special effects are well done — doors have this great fuse effect running along the frame to indicate when it’s time to move on — but the rooms you move through are frequently spare. And, as usual, there’s no level of interaction greater than being able to banter with the actors from time to time.

I’m off to Portugal for the next few days and my immigration interview. I had expected to spend the time in London before flying out of Heathrow, but I needed documentation²² which was rush delivered by DHL from Washington. And sent to New York. And then to Cincinnati. And then to Leipzig. And finally to the UK, after eight days in transit, exactly one day after I had left my friend’s place to go to London. So I found myself hopping the train out to Birmingham on Sunday and arranging a handoff with my friend on Monday before catching the bus to Heathrow today.

I’ll be back in the UK in February for another larp, and with luck I’ll have recovered from my England fatigue by then. I doubt I will; winter in England can be a nasty business and even if Rishi’s out by the New Year it’s not like there’s any reasonable PM-in-waiting to fix the politics. I do genuinely like England, especially the bits that are just a little off the beaten path, but I’m just not going to be able to really relax someplace where the politics remind me of the current dysfunction in the United States. Time for me to delve into the politics in Portugal.

Next: Lisbon (LIS) to Zagreb (ZAG)
Prev: Oslo (OSL) to Manchester (MAN)

Footnotes

¹ And I’m as shocked as anyone, given the knack the Tories have for making the absolutely worst choice possible — stretching all the way back to Cameron calling for the referendum on Brexit in 2016 — that Johnson decided to withdraw from the current leadership election. I guess it’s going to be Rishi for the time being.

² Although the crash in the pound has certainly been nice for tourists.

³ Which I need to stress is an extremely low bar, cleared mostly by the fact that neither of the two major parties in the United Kingdom is running around claiming the next elections are going to be marred with voter fraud and thereby completely illegitimate.

⁴ After KP I had less than a week left to spend in the majority of Europe.

⁵ Although even with Portuguese residency I’m still restricted to spending 90 out of every 180 days in Schengen, with the exception of Portugal.

The rules aren’t very complicated, but they’re confusing and rarely explained clearly, so it’s taken a while for me to wrap my head around them. The gist of it is usually your time in Schengen as a visa-less tourist is determined by the amount of time you spend in countries that are part of Schengen, irrespective of the agreement which allows you to be there. This is important for me because a number of countries have bilateral agreements with the United States. Those often allow US citizens to spend time there in addition to the Schengen limits. For example, I could visit Germany for three months, then Denmark for three months, because there’s a special deal between Denmark and the United States and Schengen is irrelevant to it.

The weird part is that I couldn’t spend three months in Denmark then three months in Germany; my time in Denmark counts against my time in Schengen. And I couldn’t stay for six months in Denmark, either; I only get three months in Denmark. So with the exception of a few weird corner cases, this rarely comes up.

The magic of getting residency in Portugal, besides actually being able to live in Portugal, is that my time spent there no longer counts as being in Schengen for the purposes of the calculation. I could spend three months in Portugal then spend three months in Germany, and just bounce back and forth like that. I’m not going to — I need to travel around Portugal a bit before deciding where to live, and I’m still not ready to settle down anywhere — but I could.

⁶ And before you ask, this isn’t a Brexit thing. The United Kingdom and Ireland were never a part of Schengen, and so that status never changed for me. What UK citizens lost was the right to live and work in the EU, which was an entirely different thing.

⁷ I mean, there’s still a lot to do in London, as well, but it’s gotten unbelievably expensive. I used to be able to find decent hotel rooms for £100, but now that’s hard to find anything for less than £150. Even the hostels are charging £70 for the comforts of sharing a room with nine strangers.

⁸ Well, Manchester. I caught the train from there.

⁹ Although much of what looks authentically Tudor was reconstructed by the Victorians.

¹⁰ The first mention of them is from 1293

¹¹ The menu doesn’t call attention to the fact that it’s entirely vegan, and it took me a while of studying the menu before I realized it.

¹² It’s owned by the second-largest theme park company in the world. We’re one merger away from mouse ears on the ramparts.

¹³ I’m not judging. I paid to attend, after all.

¹⁴ And at worst a kind of crazed Tudor fantasia. The Astors built an entire fake Tudor village as a separate wing of the castle for staff and guests.

¹⁵ Anne Boleyn is interred in the church there, although the site is unmarked. In fact, of the queens buried there the only one who gets their name commemorating the spot is Jane Grey, and even then it can only vaguely suggest the location. We literally have no idea who’s lying where.

¹⁶ The experience is located right next door, and heavily cross-promoted.

¹⁷ By zipline over the walls, oddly enough.

¹⁸ Although the sound systems are iffy, and they rarely feel visceral enough.

¹⁹ Albeit significantly less gory and with a patina of actual history sprinkled over it

²⁰ If you can find a ticket for £40 it’s probably worth it, but most of them seem to be running £60-£70.

²¹ Although I’m pretty sure there was a scene with King James I which featured Union Jacks flying on the battlements of the Tower of London, almost 200 years before that makes any sense at all.

It’s possible it was the King’s Colours — I didn’t get a good look at it — in which case it would have only been 100 years early.

²² Another round of fingerprints, proving I haven’t committed any crimes the FBI is aware of in the year since the last check. But the check has to be done in the last 90 days, and the US is still taking 8-10 weeks to process them, so they were only dispatched on October 12^th.