I’ve spent about a week in England, and just about nothing has gone right. To start with, after two weeks in Croatia to do a site visit and location scouting, I was hoping to do the same in the United Kingdom with the other larp I’m running this year, And Then There Were None.¹ But with one thing and another my codesigner ultimately couldn’t join me and we punted a couple more months.

But I also had tickets to a Pentatonix show in London.² Tickets went on sale back in March. And sitting in my hotel room getting ready to leave for the concert I discovered it was scheduled for 2023. So I guess I’ll be back in London in 12 months.

Honestly, I’m taking it as a blessing. I was apprehensive about being in a crowd while COVID is still a thing,³ so I was still on the fence about attending a concert in the first place. There was a lovely vindaloo waiting for me at the restaurant around the corner — empty except for me and the staff. That was enough excitement for the night.

I spent a low-key weekend in Salibury with friends. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and mild, so we toured the cathedral⁴ then took an afternoon trip out to Stourhead, the estate owned by the Hoare family until the 1950s. Stourhead is one of the stately homes of England, designed heavily in the Palladian style,⁵ with sprawling gardens surrounded by follies called things like “The Parthenon” and “The Temple of Apollo.”

Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard, set at the turn of the 19^th century in a manor house with a garden very much like Stourhead. That’s right in the middle of the transition from Neoclassical to Gothic Revival and you can see that in the garden, with all those faux temples and knock-off Greek statuary⁶ scattered around a landscape painfully designed just so to look happenstance and bucolic. There’s even a “gothic cottage” on the property, although the lack of central heating or plumbing renders it a little too rural for my tastes.

One of the themes of Arcadia is chaos theory, the idea that our lives are somehow simultaneously governed both by random chance and by inexorable mathematical laws. Which is dominant depends on the story we want to tell. The landscape architects of the time were rejecting the strict formal lines of Italianate gardens in favor of what they intended as an approximation of spontaneous, uncontrolled wildness. But it’s all clearly engineered to within an inch of its life, as spontaneous as the as the shepherds Marie Antoinette might stumble upon during a court masque.

It’s still intensely lovely, despite⁷ all that artifice. But it’s a helpful reminder that humans, whatever their desires, aren’t really capable of being agents of chaos. The best they can manage is a more idiosyncratic idea of order.

But the weekend’s over, and I’m heading to Paris as the first part of a convoluted journey⁸ back to the United States. I just passed the necessary COVID test, so I’m cleared to fly. It’s uncomfortable that the US hasn’t dropped their COVID testing requirement yet,⁹ and doubly so in the wake of the Roe vs. Wade leak. It implies a paranoia about the rest of the world right at the time when the biggest threat to the safety and security of the United States is itself.

But I’ve got tickets to Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser and a friend meeting me in Orlando. I’m on my way.

Next: Paris (ORY) to Miami (MIA)
Prev: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)

Footnotes

¹ I really can’t recommend doing two of these things back-to-back. In my defense, the decision to run And Then There Were None in 2022 was made in 2020, back when there was no way the pandemic was going to last another year, not with all the vaccines finally coming out.

² I’ve been subscribed to a website which tracks artists you’re interested in and provides alerts when they’re playing in your city, and when I left the United States I ended up subscribing to the feed for a bunch of European cities. It’s rarely useful — I travel too much — but sometimes it works out.

³ The United States still requires testing to enter, so testing positive five days after the concert would have seriously screwed up my travel plans to the United States.

⁴ Impressive, as expected. Salisbury Cathedral was built in the 1200s, so it’s Early English Gothic. One of the advantages of my lifestyle if you’re into architecture is that I get to see a lot of cathedrals in a relatively short timespan, so without even really trying I’ve learned the differences between High Gothic and Flamboyant Gothic.

I also really liked the font, installed just over than a decade ago and leveled with laser precision. The water is so placid — despite constantly flowing out the corners — that the surface looks more like highly-polished stone, to the dismay of a handful of patrons who attempted to set handbags or eyeglass cases down on it.

⁵ Apparently a style influenced heavily (and unsurprisingly) by the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio. It features neoclassical forms — balance and symmetry — and experienced a huge vogue in England before and after the English Civil War. If you’ve got a mental image of a classic English Country house and garden, that’s the style you’re thinking of. Those in the United States will recognize it in a lot of colonial architecture; Jefferson was a fan.

⁶ Admittedly, some of it quite good knock-offs.

⁷ Because of?

⁸ London → Paris → Madrid → Miami → Orlando

⁹ I have no idea whether it’s a good policy or a bad policy, only that it seems like an utterly nonsensical one given all the other COVID restrictions which have been tossed out in the United States over the past six months, like always carefully locking the car doors on your open convertible.