+1 for that on several levels. After twenty five years living in Spain , wher we too drive of the right, i.e. correct, side of the road I have real issues with the change, usually driving my hire car straight onto the motorway intersection whie checking over my left shoulder for traffic already in the lane ...Chops wrote: ↑Fri Mar 25, 2022 6:33 am All you blokes drive on the wrong side of the road, dontcha know. My luck I'd take out half of East London before I figured it out. Nah, one thing we got here Stateside are cars. We got cars and more cars. Comparatively speaking, gasoline here sells for a pittance compared to what Europeans are paying, but we are making good progress catching up to our British cousins. No, the train for me. Where it doesn't go I'll walk in the rain and thank every drop.
In general cars are 'pants' - UK English for rubbish or at least it was in the '90s! - and serve only a mobile hazreds for us motorcyclists, for whom roads were invented
So unless it's by bike then by train and Shank's pony you go.But even by train there are boring bits, e.g. the East Coast main libe for much if the way up to Scotland so take a few good reads. Just now I'm into a 'classic', Scottish Journey' by Edwin Muir. Bookworms may spot the resemblance in the title to the famous 'English Journey' by J B Priestley, which was a record of England in the years immediately following the Great Depression, and in fact Muir's book is a companion as it was commissioned along wth Priestley's work by Heinemann & Gollancz. So far very ineresting although I'm only in as far as Edinburgh, the Lowland and into the Borders. My wife, who was born in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary but actually lived in Leith and South Queensferry as a child in the early sixties (he farther was a fireman) said there wasn't so much difference to conditions of the poorer classes in those towns in her childhood than in those bleak years of the nineteen thirties!
Otherwise most of my Scottish reading - you'll have you've guessed that I'm a sassanach!
- is by John Prebble who is far more upbeat, at least 'John Prebble's Scotland' (Secker & Warbugh, 1984, also availabe in Penguin) is. Othweise his more well known titles including Glencoe, Culloden, The Darien Disaster and The Highland Clearances are each more depressing - and distressing! - than the last!Over to you Scottish fellows, is/was the Edwin Muir book as famous in Scotland as J B Priestley's was to the English? It'd be interestig to know.
