I have landed

February 7, 2016 • 12:00 pm

It was a long and tiring flight to England. Not only was our plane more than two hours late in leaving Chicago, but we also had to wait for a half an hour once we landed until a gate became open. After that it becomes pure Heathrow Hell: the arrival hall at Heathrow’s international terminal (terminal 5) is a house of horrors, with only a handful of immigration agents servicing a horde of tired and antsy travelers. Hurry up and wait an hour! I still think Heathrow is the worst major airport I’ve ever visited.

On the other hand, I watched several good movies on the plane, including “Suffragette” with Carey Mulligan (well worth watching, Meryl Streep has a cameo), and “Everest“, recounting the 1996 mountain disaster described in Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into Thin Air. (It’s a movie well worth watching if you like mountains and climbing; I loved seeing the Everest region again, my favorite place on Earth, even though the story is horrific and heartbreaking.) Out of curiosity, I also watched “Amy“, a documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse (by the way, she lived in Camden Square next door to my biologist friend Steve Jones, who used to complain bitterly about the paparazzi). Packed with clips from Winehouse’s life and a lot of her live performances, I found it fascinating and sad.  I knew little about Winehouse, but found her a terrific jazz singer. A great pity about the drugs. . .

And then on to Oggsford, where it cost 24 pounds to take the one-hour bus ride from Heathrow. That’s always the first indication that this country is, relative to the U.S., expensive. Average salaries are lower here, but transportation and food are either on par or even higher than U.S. prices. It’s a good thing there’s free medical care and good government services. I haven’t yet had my first pint, but I shudder to think what it costs these days. I’m guessing about four pounds.

Still, the medieval spires of Oxford glowed gold in the special sunlight that follows a morning thunderstorm, and it’s good to be here. I’ve had a proper cup of tea with ginger biscuits (“cookies” to us Yanks), a reminder that England still bests the U.S. in the biscuit department.  Among many, there are cow biscuits, Boasters, McVitie’s chocolate digestive biscuits, ginger biscuits studded with chunks of candied ginger, fig rolls, and my favorite: Garibaldis, also known as “squashed fly biscuits” (see below). For those who turn up their noses at the food here, read Orwell’s “In Defense of English Cooking.”

I know what I’ll be looking for: good pub lunches, fish and chips, Indian food by Euston Station, and a big hunk of Keen’s Farmhouse Cheddar to take home.

garibaldi-biscuits-pile-traditional-english-isolated-white-background-44312409
Garibaldis, or “squashed fly” biscuits, a favorite of British drosophilists

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113 thoughts on “I have landed”

  1. A warm welcome to the UK!

    You will find prices are a lot cheaper outside of London… thankfully. A lot cheaper. The typical cost in our area (the Midlands) for a pint of ale is between £2.80 and £3.30.

    Enjoy!

  2. Wow, I just LOVE those biscuits but never new what they were called, but I did recognize them instantly from that photo. I first had them via an English friend (in Massachusetts) many, many years ago but forgot the name. Thanks!

    1. We have them here, and I like them, but until I saw the picture I never knew that’s what the Poms called Garibaldis.

      We also have a delicious biscuit with similar ingredients that we call “fly cemeteries.”

  4. Welcome to the oulde continent. I agree about Heathrow, I always try to avoid it. It helps to be married to a European, so I can take her passport line.

      1. I remember Heathrow.

        Which is why last time we flew to Europe from NZ, we flew via Paris Charles de Gaulle. Fares were slightly cheaper, too, and the saving paid for our tickets on Eurostar (the train) to London.

        We flew back through Dubai, where my wife, looking for the ‘Ladies’, disappeared through a doorway with the usual woman-in-a-skirt silhouette symbol. I noticed the minaret on the sign – indicating ladies prayer room – too late to stop her. Two minutes later she reappeared, slightly embarrassed, while an amused young Muslim woman pointed her in the right direction.

        cr

  5. I’ve seen Suffragette and Everest, and both made a big impression on me. I’d expected Meryl Streep to have a more important role, given the character she played, but as you say it was only cameo. As for Everest, I recall some reviews on IMDB that suggested the guy who survived the night exposed on the mountain did so because of a miraculous intervention by god.

    Not even god could do anything about Heathrow I’m afraid.

    1. Not even god could do anything about Heathrow I’m afraid.

      Heathrow is quite close to Slough, as discussed recently with respect to despond-ful bombing targets

          1. Apparently, sadly, not as such.

            His current title is Igor Judge, Baron Judge (which sounds a little redundant, but I guess that’s how these title things work). Previously a Recorder, a Queens Counsel, a Justice of the High Court, a Lord Justice of Appeal, and Lord Chief Justice. All varieties of judge, but none of them actually carrying the title ‘Judge’.

            cr

  6. Hi Jerry, you probably know this but a cool pub in Oxford worth a visit is the Eagle and Child, C S Lewis and Tolkein used to meet their and discuss their respective works over a few pints. Me and my mate are coming to your talk on Friday really looking forward to it

    Best

    Mike

  7. Having done the Chicago to London trip many times now, I can confidently make the following suggestion to PCC (pbuh) for his next journey.

    1) Enroll in Global Entry – only matters returning to USA but can pay for itself in one trip w/o Customs and Immigration hassles. Bonus that it includes the TSApre benefits for domestic travel.

    2) Take the Aer Lingus flight out of O’Hare in the late evening via Dublin. If you can sleep on the plane, the overnight trip is the best way to eliminate jetlag. The connection in Dublin is easy, and in the morning you will hardly notice going through EU immigration. They stamp your passport with an Irish stamp and you are now on a domestic flight to Heathrow where you can now skip the hell of UK immigration at the airport.

    I’ll never do it another way if I can help it – added bonus is that this is often the cheapest flight from Chicago to London.

        1. Not Newquay Steam Bitter.

          Newcastle Brown Ale. Known locally (when I was at uni in Durham) as “Newkie Broon” – misunderstood as “Newquay Brown” by students from the south …

          /@

          1. I know them all. Actually, they’re all quite nice.
            A visit to Beamish is on the “to do” list, next time we find ourselves in that end of the country.

      1. If your schedule allows, pay a visit to University College London, on Gower Street, just south of Euston station. It was founded in 1826, at a time when Oxford and Cambridge only admitted Anglicans as students. Anyone who was Catholic, or Jewish, or Nonconformist, or (PCCE forbid!) atheist could not get a university education in England. To address this, a group of freethinkers set up University College, which welcomed anyone as a student. This earned it the nickname “The Godless Institution of Gower Street”.

        Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher known for the principle of utilitarianism, was associated with UCL. In his will, he expressed a wish to be preserved (taxidermy!) and put on display. His auto-icon is in the cloisters of the main building at UCL, in a glass-fronted cabinet.

        1. Charles Darwin also lived on Gower Street (before he and the family moved to Down House), in a building that is now – appropriately – part of UCL’s Biological Sciences department. If you walk down Gower Street from Euston, past the main UCL building, you can see a commemorative blue plaque naming Darwin as a former resident.

      2. If you haven’t seen it, the Museum of London (near St Pauls) is an excellent overview of London history. The galleries are laid out in the form of a timeline, starting with prehistory and progressing through to the present day. (And it earns my stamp of approval because the exhibits, while carefully chosen to illustrate the timeline, are properly labelled and identified).

        Admission is free, too.

        cr

        1. Heartily seconded. I visited it for the first time last November, with my wife. She had been before, many years earlier, and she was astonished at how much it had improved.

          There’s a huge sweep of history from the mammoth skull at the beginning to modern society and culture at the end, all extremely well presented.

          /@

          1. I tried it many years ago, so this might be very out of date! My feet gave out at about the Great Fire, so the rest of its history remains a mystery. I’m thinking about buying a ‘shooting stick’ which might increase my ability to wander through the centuries.

          2. Well, my wife made it, and she hates walking. She also made it round Versailles. I think she forgets her feet if there is enough interesting stuff to look at.

            cr

      3. “Indian food by Euston Station”

        Diwani’s does an all you can eat lunch buffet.
        Whenever we’re around the Euston/King’s Cross area we try to get that. It’s perhaps not haute cuisine but very good value.

        You might even see us there on Saturday as we’re staying in a nearby hotel after your lecture 🙂

    3. We just stocked up on McVitie’s Chocolate-covered Digestives today, one of the few varieties that you can find here in the US.

      (But nothing beats the shortbread my Scottish grandmother used to make.)

  12. I spent a week last year split between Liverpool and Manchester and it was one of the best vacations I ever had. Don’t leave the country without having a few pints of Sharp’s Doom Bar (preferably cask-pulled), Tetley’s, and John Smith’s.

    1. Sadly that title has moved on to either Northern Canada, or western Australia.

  15. I recently learned (by watching the Great British Baking Show on PBS) that British biscuits are meant to be crunchy, or rather to “have crunch” as the judges put it.

    A lot of North American cookies aren’t crunchy at all, though, so “cookie” doesn’t map exactly onto British “biscuit”. For all I know the chewy American cookies that are no doubt already in British shops are called “cookies” there too.

    1. A few years ago there was a dispute with the tax authorities over whether a jaffa cake is a cake or a biscuit (cakes are taxable whereas biscuits are not). Despite it’s name the final judgement was that a jaffa cake is a biscuit: the official definition is a biscuit goes soft when stale whereas a cake goes hard when stale. Ergo a biscuit must be hard when fresh.

    2. I could be wrong abou this but aren’t cookies cooked once whereas biscuits (derived from the Latin for ‘twice cooked’) are cooked twice. perhaps this is where the cruch differential comes in?

  16. I’m surprised that you had such problems at Heathrow immigration. My wife, who is also American, always breezes through immigration at Terminal 5. She has to use the non-UK/EU line, and doesn’t get any special treatment, despite being married to a British citizen.

    My experience of US immigration is uniformly and predictably appalling, so I can sympathise with the frustration and annoyance you must have felt.

    As for the £24 fare to Oxford, it doesn’t surprise me. The Heathrow Express train service is also a rip-off. When I fly out of Heathrow, I use the Underground to get to/from central London. It’s slower, but a fraction of the cost.

    1. The coach from Heathrow to Oxford is an unbelievable ripoff, but it’s the only convenient way of getting there. You can get a return coach from Oxford to Central London for less than half the price.

      1. You could get the Railair bus to Reading and then a train to Oxford, but I just costed it out and it’s fractionally more expensive.

  18. Sad to say I haven’t been to Blighty in over ten years (came close last year). I’ve done the Chicago to London to Leeds run many times, and I could always be sure my bags wouldn’t make the conenction. I’ve always been amazed by the Heathrow labyrinth. It’s clearly been cobbled together over the years with little long-range thought.

    1. The more cynical view is Heathrow has been designed with a lot of careful thought.
      Shame the thought was from someone with a deep hatred of their fellow man.

      1. I thought they designed it that way to keep those damn immigrants out (or at least that’s the Daily Wail interpretation), forgetting of course that the refugees etc. can’t afford the air fares.

    2. Heathrow is definitely showing its age, and the labyrinth is indeed a consequence of the random way it was developed. The exception is Terminal 5, which is a modern and spacious facility, PCCE’s experience with the immigration queues notwithstanding.

  19. You should try a proper curry.

    Start off with the mild dishes (e.g. Dhansak) and work your way upwards.

    You’re a bit too far south to get good beer, but there are some reasonable approximations.

    Also, try a good whisky + Stilton cheese.

    1. That’s fighting talk! There may be a few good Northern pints left – mostly from the micro-breweries – but too much of what used to be good has been ruined by blankets of nitrogen.

      PCC, you’re clearly in for a pub-crawl or two in Oxford. Go to The Bear, donate your necktie, and enjoy a pint of Fuller’s.

    2. One of my former colleagues who lived near Leed’s infamous “Curry Mile” used to know when he was going to get a good curry : you don’t get any cutlery, just (naan) bread.

  20. The best fish and chips near Euston is the Seashell in Lisson Grove; a bit further away but possibly even better is Fish Central in King’s Square EC1
    Indian Food near Euston means Drummond Street – Diwan Bhel Puri, Chutneys or Ravi Shankar

    1. I’d second the Diwana Bhel Puri recommendation – excellent and cheap vegetarian Indian food. Avoid the curries but the snacks and the dosa are genuinely excellent.

      Sadly I don’t find fish and chips in London to be very good as a general rule. Makes me sad.

      1. Diwana you can BYOB.

        And some of the best Indian food is vegetarian, certainly that’s how most Indian people eat. I could pretty much live on their bhel poori and aloo papri chaat and I’m very much a carnivore!

    3. Yes, the Sea Shell is my go-to chippie in London, just a few steps from Marylebone Station. I’ll definitely go there, and, as I recall, there’s a real-ale pub nearby. Since I worked at UCL at Wolfson House, I’ve eaten on Drummond St. many times, and at Diwan.

      1. Ah i see that my recommendation further up is not needed :-).

        Welcome to the UK! Looking forward to the lecture on Friday.
        Will you have the opportunity to sign books and if so, will there be a secret cat word?

  21. For good beer in the Euston area there is none better than the Euston tap right outside. No food there but great every changing range of beer.

    1. Yep Euston Tap worth a stop. Carry on to the Bree Louise for more good beer (straight from keg) + they do food.

  22. For those who turn up their noses at the food here …

    There are loads of great restaurants in London, but many of them seem to serve ethnic food other than English.

    An exhortation one rarely hears on this side of the pond is “Let’s eat English tonight!”

    Also, did Crawford name his/her biscuits after the 19th century Italian general — and, if so, does anyone know why?

    1. Also, did Crawford name his/her biscuits after the 19th century Italian general — and, if so, does anyone know why?

      That’s a good question I’ve never looked for an answer to, despite having asked myself it on occasions.
      Wikipedia affirms that “The Garibaldi biscuit was named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and leader of the struggle to unify Italy. Garibaldi made a popular visit to South Shields in England in 1854. The biscuit was first manufactured by the Bermondsey biscuit company Peek Freans in 1861 following the recruitment of Jonathan Carr, one of the great biscuit makers of Carlisle. “

      1. I thought maybe it’s because it was typical of the provisions fed to Garibaldi’s troops — the way American Civil War soldiers (both Blue & Grey) essentially lived on the same substance (known then as “hardtack”) in the 1860s.

          2. The only persuasive point I’ve ever heard advanced in support of the Ancien Régime. 🙂

    2. There are now loads of fantastic restaurants in London (and beyond) serving modern British food – restaurants in the UK have improved immeasurably in recent years. Places I’ve been too recently like Clove Club, Harwood Arms and Dairy.

      However, the trouble is that it remains harder to get good British food at a reasonable price point. You can go and get a fantastic regional Chinese meal near me for £10 a head but for better British cuisine you are often looking at >£15 for a main course and up (frequently considerably up).

      Also, outside London, the worse the food often is (I live in London, but am from Rochdale so I’m not a snobby metrocentric person). Walk into your average pub for a typical pub lunch and it’s still too often dire. Although conversely, the best British food I’ve had has been outside London – at The Sportsman in Kent and L’Enclume in Cumbria.

      Things are improving all the time in the UK and the old cliches about bad British food are increasingly meaningless. However there’s a way to go at the cheap to lower midrange price point I think.

      2. Thanks. That’s what I thought.I really miss Callard and Bowser, who seem to be no more. I especially liked their barley sugars and the chocolate caramels.

        2. Callard & Bowser’s butterscotch – yummy! I’d forgotten about that till I read your comment, merilee.

  24. Have you tried Twiglets?
    All countries have their delicacies that are well loved by some natives and a few adventurous travellers and hated by most travellers and a few natives. I’m sure Twiglets are the finest of English delicacies.
    There was a time in my early college days when they would be lunch and dinner. I am very interested to know what others think of them.

    1. That is one3 of those Marmite flavoured things – you KNOW half the world will hate & half love!

      Bleurrrggghhh!

  25. The UK has suffered an exceptionally wet wnter with several bouts of flooding in nothern England. One consequence of this has been a nationwide shortage of some of McVitie’s most well-loved biscuit varieties as their factory in Carlisle fell victim to the floods. I hope that this will not inconvenience PCC unduly on his short visit to the UK.

    1. I had no idea – I hardly watch the TV these days. I suppose the biscuits were dunked in the river Eden?! 🙁

    1. Ruddy Nora!!! Where is that???

      £4 is about right depending on the beer & whether you are in a bog-standard pub or central London… cheaper oop north – but then they would say the water is better! 😉

      2. That would be the tourist trap surrounding Grand Central Station in NYC. As long as you get a few blocks away from there, you’ll typically find beers in the $7-$9 range (still higher than £4 according to current exchange rates, but a tad more reasonable). Find the right Happy Hour special, and you can do even better, but that’s pretty hit and miss.

  27. Jerry: Heathrow is colloquially known as “Deathrow” to us Island Apes – and for good reason!

    See you on Wednesday at the Darwin Day lecture!

  28. BTW – beer-wise, there’s a decent little pub right outside Euston called the Euston Tap.

    Nearby on 69 Cobourg Street (NW1 2HH) is the Bree Louise – where you get gravity-poured beer from keg/cask – no gassy pumps. Well worth a visit.

    2. Not been to either of these, but I had the chance to try the same beers pumped and gravity fed side-by-side. The difference really is quite dramatic!

  29. Hi All,

    I have booked tickets for Jerry’s talk in London and the event website said there may be a chance for a book signing afterwards. I was wondering if Jerry has advised of a ‘secret phrase’ this time to get a cat drawn on the book as he often did for his past events! 🙂

    Many thanks.

    Kind rgds,
    A

      2. Ah perfect, once again my comment further up pre-empted.

        So when you say early, does that mean before the lecture?

        If so i might have trouble making it as I’m travelling up from Brighton after work, and still need dinner. Doubt i can be there before seven :-(…

  30. Welcome to the UK, Marks and Sparks do a Ginger Biscuit made with Stem Ginger ,do not get the low Fat Version, no comparison in tase to the Normal one, comes in a green Pack.

  31. Welcome to Britain Jerry. I look forward to your Darwin Day talk. In honour or your arrival and the theme of your presentations here on Fact and Faith I am post a thoroughly British poem on religion here for you.. the poem by one of our outstanding modern British poets James Fenton…

    God, A Poem

    A nasty surprise in a sandwich,
    A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
    The limpest of shakes from a hand which
    You’d thought would be firm as a rock,

    A serious mistake in a nightie,
    A grave disappointment all round
    Is all that you’ll get from th’ Almighty,
    Is all that you’ll get underground.

    Oh he said: ‘If you lay off the crumpet
    I’ll see you alright in the end.
    Just hang on until the last trumpet.
    Have faith in me, chum – I’m your friend.’

    But if you remind him, he’ll tell you:
    ‘I’m sorry, I must have been pissed –
    Though your name rings a sort of a bell. You
    Should have guessed that I do not exist.

    ‘I didn’t exist at Creation,
    I didn’t exist at the Flood,
    And I won’t be around for Salvation
    To sort out the sheep from the cud –

    ‘Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
    In soteriological terms
    I’m a crude existential malpractice
    And you are a diet of worms.

    ‘You’re a nasty surprise in a sandwich.
    You’re a drawing-pin caught in my sock.
    You’re the limpest of shakes from a hand which
    I’d have thought would be firm as a rock,

    ‘You’re a serious mistake in a nightie,
    You’re a grave disappointment all round-
    That’s all you are’, says th’ Almighty,
    ‘And that’s all that you’ll be underground.’

  33. Take advantage of “reverse colonialism” and have “curry”. (Last I checked that actually meant anything from Morocco to Thailand, at least in some of the UK.)

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