Southampton to New York City
Dec 13, 2019
The last few days have been spent in England, mostly in preparation for this transatlantic cruise I’ve booked. I’m ridiculously excited about it, simply because it’s the first real, genuine, bonafide vacation I’ve taken in years. I know that the entirety of my life is in a sense one giant vacation at the moment, but I’m notoriously bad at actually taking time off.
I’m really part of the first generation that could grow up with computers, and I’ve spent virtually all my professional employment as a programmer working on internet systems, so my offline identity is almost entirely wrapped up with my online identity. The first thing I do when I wake up is check my computer for news or email, and I’m usually watching some video online while I’m drifting off to sleep.
Well, for the next week, I’m not going to be doing that. I’ve been surprised at how good internet connectivity is, the world over1 — I thought I’d need to spend a lot of time in local coffee shops while traveling, but it turns out between the WiFi in hotels and my mobile hotspot,2 I’ve got connectivity everywhere.
Except on cruise ships. I’m sure they could provide decent connectivity, but a combination of low demand and the desire to charge as much as possible means it’s ridiculously expensive. So I’m sure I’ll be on here and there, but there’s a real incentive not to be on for very long. So the next week will represent the first time I’ve been disconnected for any significant length of time. We’ll see how that goes.
I’ve spent the time in England with my father, who’s accompanying me on the cruise next week. It’s been kind of a whirlwind — Noises Off and The Book of Mormon3 while we were in London, Winchester Cathedral and the Great Hall4 in Winchester, and a quick trip over to the Isle of Wight to see Osborne House.
Osborne House is particularly amazing, being the vacation home of Queen Victoria. It’s modest, in a way? I mean it’s ridiculously opulent — 300 rooms, apparently — but it was designed and intended as a family home, a place to get away from the opulence of the royal residences in London and relax.
Most of the art scattered around the place where gifts to the royal family, often from each other. There’s a lot of art painted in the 1850s, and much of the sculpture is of the same time period, copies of Greek or Roman originals.5 When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria ordered Osborne House be preserved as of that moment, which makes it a particularly interesting example of the time.
At any rate, somewhere in all this stomping about I managed to screw up my knee — more on that next time — and my mobility has been severely reduced this final day in Southampton. So I got to the hospital, had it looked at, and freshly equipped with crutches limped my way onto the cruise ship. There are worse places to be instructed to lie back, keep weight off your feet, and just watch the world go by.
I managed to be in England during the latest round of elections, where Labour got absolutely destroyed and Brexit seems like a certainty. I’ll leave the wailing to others; my Facebook feed is filled almost entirely with remainers and they’re providing plenty of gnashing of teeth and anguished analysis.
It’s exactly what I went through three years ago, after the 2016 election in the United States. And I wish I had some hopeful information to share, but I just don’t. The truly horrific thing is the realization that a significant portion of your country will gladly vote for liars,6 racists, and authoritarian buffoons.
If there’s good news, it’s that they’re all old and they’re dying off quickly. If there’s bad news it’s that they’re not dying off fast enough. I suppose that’s a silver lining in the inevitable hollowing-out of the NHS — worse health care is just going to knock off septuagenarians at an ever-increasing rate.
But this is the story the world over. Billionaires are propping up right-wing parties using tactics straight out of the fascist playbook, trying to outrace the demographics which will doom them to irrelevancy. If they win the race you end up with Hungary, with opposition parties all but banned. If you don’t, well, maybe you end up with Finland.
It’s not a fight that’s ever going to be really won, though. I think democracy is broken, and the parties on the wrong side of the demographics have a strong incentive to break it further rather than try and fix it.7 The pendulum will swing, eventually. We’ll find ways to fix things. I suppose our job is to try and minimize the harm until it does.
Footnotes
1 There’s a weird side-effect of tech where early adopters often get locked in to outdated technology. The United States invested heavily in broadband over cable as kind of the first generation of high-speed internet for residential customers, and ever since then corporations in the United States have been dragging their feet on investing in new technologies.
Meanwhile, countries that invested late have seen speeds skyrocket while quality improves and prices drop, so they ended up with better infrastructure.
2 I have Project Fi, from Google, which means my phone just works in over 190 countries worldwide, including data, for no additional fees. There were recent reports that Google has started cutting off people who use an “excessive” amount of roaming data — it apparently isn’t intended for the sort of thing I’m doing, despite being perfect for it — so I’m hoping between the time I’m spending in the States this year and a more aggressive approach to jumping on WiFi with the phone I’ll fly under the radar. My new phone has an eSim slot, so I’m trying to prepare for the future.
3 Somehow I remembered my father was flying out on Dec 11th, but forgot that meant he arrived in the UK on Dec 12th. So I saw The Book of Mormon by myself and had an extra ticket go to waste.
I’d say more about The Book of Mormon, but I’m about a decade too late to particularly bother. Some of the jokes are cheap and easy and offensive, but at least it has the guts to actually address some of the issues concerning Western attitudes towards Africa. I don’t think that makes up for it, but if anything the real tragedy is that it ends up being somewhat toothless. The Mormons end up being well meaning, the misunderstandings between them and the locals are eventually resolved on a complexity about the level of Teahouse of the August Moon, and there’s no need to really examine the deep and insidious roots of colonialism.
4 Including the real Round Table!
Granted, it’s not old enough to have been King Arthur’s, but Sir Thomas Mallory didn’t know that, and this is the one he was writing about.
5 Queen Victoria apparently greatly appreciated Greco-Roman art.
6 “88% of Tory ads misleading compared to 0% for Labour”
7 Note the Tory Voter ID plan, a reliable way to drive down the vote of the poor everywhere it’s been piloted.