Countries and People
Articles about political life
№2
Exit without entry
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1997, I happened to visit London as a tourist. I must admit that from the very first minutes of getting to know this country, it gave the impression of a completely different world - not at all what England seemed like during the fifteen years spent studying its language, literature and culture, first at school and then at two institutes. From the Soviet and post-Soviet distance, it seemed like an illustration of Dickens's works - a country frozen in self-contemplation, constantly rethinking its history, as a result of which English became the main and only generally recognized international language.
However, having taught the whole world to speak their dialect, the English were in no hurry to adopt the laws of life that apply almost everywhere. That is why the first cultural shock for the guest who arrived from Moscow was the fact that the bus carrying a tourist group from Heathrow Airport to London suddenly headed along the left side of the road.
This test was not for the faint-hearted, since in the first kilometers it seemed that the luxury bus, which had gone "against all the rules", would now definitely crash, if not into an oncoming car, then into some kind of barrier. Surprisingly, driving on the left side did not lead to any accidents or troubles, and soon a group of Russian tourists were already curiously looking at the houses and metro stations crawling past the windows.
All this architecture was so different from the usual Moscow buildings that it almost seriously seemed as if it was nothing more than a theatrical set, and soon, when they finally ended, the "real world" would open up around with the usual huge houses and wide streets. However, this expectation was not destined to come true, and soon the tourists, having gone to their hotels, were already filling out arrival cards on the sofas at the reception desks.
The next shock, even more powerful than the left-hand traffic, was the first walk along the central London street. The Airbus arrived in the middle of the day, and therefore the work shift was in full swing, during which white-skinned clerks sat in their offices, buried in computers and documents. That is why there was a persistent feeling that the French airliner had gone off course and instead of London had brought everyone to some Arab or Asian country. All the streets were filled with people of absolutely non-European origin and even not at all dressed in European style.
Several passers-by, wrapped in something like white sheets, proudly carried real turbans on their heads. As befits Hindus, they were silent and looking somewhere ahead, but, apparently, not at the street, but into a meditative eternity known only to them. Groups of noisy short men, reminiscent of Pakistanis or Afghans, were scurrying about nearby. They were discussing something heatedly, and at the same time it cannot be said that their speech resembled English.
Arabs, Hindus, Asians, often dressed in their national costumes and speaking their native languages - these were the people who made up the majority of passers-by in the area of Paddington station at the very beginning of July 1997. At the same time, there were so many of them on the streets that the white-faced passers-by who did appear in the crowd looked more like tourists who had decided to visit this mysterious eastern country in the same way.
The very next day, this observation was reinforced by a young Arab who was handing out some advertising leaflets on the same patch of land. When I tried to take one from him, the guy was incredibly surprised. It turned out that they were written in Arabic script, meaning they were intended only for his own people, whom, presumably, he expected to meet on the street in large numbers. "You read?" he asked me, clearly not an Arab, with an astonished grimace, and showed that the yellow leaflet was covered with wavy-curly letters that were mysterious to a European.
Naturally, I couldn't read them and gave up the idea of taking the flyer. Only in the evening, after the end of the work shift, "whites" appeared on the central streets, as they would be called in America, unexpectedly finding themselves in London as a separate ethnic group, and not yet the most numerous. Dressed in business suits, they hurried with suitcases in their hands to the metro, shops, tomine or somewhere else, - that is, they were clearly distinguished by their vanity and disunity from the Indians, who were in no hurry at all, and the Pakistanis, who walked in large groups and talked loudly.
Even then, there was a feeling that it was the dark-skinned passers-by in exotic clothes from distant southern countries who made up the majority in this country, which for some reason was considered European, although, it must be admitted, it reverently guarded its generally European knightly origins. It turned out that in the spacious Garfunkel restaurant on the corner of Paddington, at the checkout counter near the scales where you had to put your plate with dishes collected together on the buffet, there was an Asian woman working, for some reason I conditionally nicknamed her "Vietnamese", although she could have been Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, or the daughter of any other Asian country. Lively, active, greedy and at the same time cheerful, not missing an opportunity to tease a client, she was in no way like the cold and unsociable Englishwomen.
"You took everything! (You took everything!)", - she exclaimed with feigned surprise and displeasure when, on the second day of my stay in this strange city, I, having already studied the technology of service in her establishment, filled my plate with herring, salads, meat, crab sticks and potatoes. In response to my objection that everything was done according to the rules of this restaurant, the little "Vietnamese" laughed and, remembering my visit the previous day, asked "Large Sprunklist?" - meaning a can of fizzy drink, similar in color and taste to "Fanta". This is what I chose on my previous visit, not finding in the list of drinks offered not one or almost none of the names familiar to a European.
"Vietnamese" served delicious food, but it was a bit pricey, charging eight to ten pounds for lunch, so I didn't go to her restaurant again, but instead looked into a small, cozy establishment nearby, which also offered guests the opportunity to fill their own plate with dishes from the buffet to their taste and then pay for the entire portion at once.
Here, a dark, middle-aged Indian reigned over everything, who, despite his serious and even gloomy appearance, took a little more than two pounds for a full plate of meatballs and some other completely unfamiliar dishes. His food was cheap, tasty, but mercilessly spicy, and only after sitting down at the table did I discover that the meatballs, cutlets, and, it seems, potatoes, and generally everything that I had bought from him in large quantities were generously sprinkled with red pepper.
After sitting in his small dining room for about two hours and eating everything without a trace, in his silent company, clearly felt in the cramped room with the almost complete absence of other visitors, I involuntarily plunged into a state reminiscent of meditation, and now the world outside the windows seemed not a cheerful Vietnamese holiday, but a stream of Indian life focused on something. Having thanked him for a delicious lunch and having gone out "to London", I felt like a yogi for a long time, sitting in the lotus position and looking at one point.
That is why for a long time now this country, in the center of whose capital one could visit first one Asian world and then another over the course of a hundred meters, had little in common with Europe. It is not surprising that in mid-March 2017, almost twenty years after that trip, the upper house of the English parliament allowed the prime minister to begin leaving the European Union.
The bill was approved by an almost threefold majority of votes - 274 to 118. The Lords did not make the amendments rejected by the House of Commons. The government was against the amendments, and the chances of getting them approved were negligible. By and large, Great Britain was not in Europe, since it lived in its own isolated island cultural and historical environment.
The very fact that in a London hotel in the morning they ask what kind of breakfast to serve - British or Continental - says better than all the referendums and official decisions that England never felt like part of the "mainland", that is, Europe as such, and preferred to live in its own way. It is unlikely that there will be fewer dark-skinned immigrants on its streets now - it has colonized the rest of the world for too long and allowed people from it onto its territory for it to believe that one of the reasons for parting with the European Union is fatigue from labor and other migrants. And England is leaving the EU because it is alien to it, and it is alien to it, so that it is difficult for this geographically isolated state with its centuries-old island mentality to conduct a common economy with it, both physically, culturally and mentally.
Trump's Cabinet... 
One hundred... 
Disunited Europe 
Thanks for the background photo of shops on Oxford Street in London to