Part 3 - Elementary, my dear

In the UK, it is tough to cross a road or walk into a store without bumping into a teddy bear. They are everywhere, dressed up as all possible historic & contemporary characters worth their salt. I had a feeling that a tourist attraction in UK really means business the day it brings out its own teddy bear. Name any street in England or Scotland that had some historic relevance, had some particularly bloody past, was visited by a celebrity or just plain, sounds cool & chances are that you will be able to buy a Teddy bear with that message.

Like hundreds of other Sherlock Holmes fans, I have also tried to decipher many a man & woman's past from the way he/she dressed, walked or carried a pen. Probably it was the lack of easy availability of hallucinogens that prevented me from being too successful in those attempts. Holmes is the ultimate intellectual super hero. Here was a guy who does no cardiac exercises or weights or martial arts, has no annoying accents or pointy moustaches, wears his clothes in the right order, does not have an underground lair, but is still able to get the crook by sheer deduction - how cool is that?

So I was really glad to actually pass through 21 B Baker Street. I suppose it is the quirky English humour that has really turned an address into a tourist destination. There was a plaque saying that the legendary detective still gets a lot of cases by mail to that address. Of course, there were the mandatory teddy bears for sale.

One thing that stands out in England is the way they have branded mundane things & how poor tourists like me spend precious forex on them. The Underground is a major brand with everything from boxer shorts to ashtrays on it. The English cop's hat, the telephone booths, the double decker buses, the big clock etc etc. Why cant we make miniature ambys and sell them for dollars?

The original plan was to run around the whole day, visit Harrods, meet a cousin of ours & then catch a train to scotland. After successfully completing task 1 only the whole day, we decided to take a morning train & thus get some well deserved sleep. We planned to meet up with one of Ps cousins for dinner. So he takes us to this pseud Chinese joint called "Memories of (some chinese guy)". And we sit down and I freeze. There are these nice little chopsticks on the table & nothing else.

So I look desperately at my better half for some support, some solace & she mumbles something to the effect of "Just Try.." Luckily I am not one of those who find every minute a challenge & takes it head on. So I asked for forks. Surprise surprise so did her cousin & from that moment we really bonded. Till date I havent really met a horizontally challenged chinese guy & I believe their way of eating might have something to do with this. I mean how much can you eat with two little sticks? I am sure a lot of chinese folk are just eating very little out of sheer frustration on not being able to eat more. We Indians on the other hand know that we can eat as much as our hand will allow.

(Here, let me point out that the above is not an extraordinary observation. I am sure that there are countless obscure authors who have written the same about Chinese before. So if you think this is your idea, please claim it. But do it before I get a two book deal & a movie offer from Dream works. Dont come back running then)

Part 2 - A 'moving' performance at Garrick

I doubt that I will ever become a 'theatre personality'. But I do enjoy a play or so once in three years. But what I know for sure is that I am most likely to have been banned for life from the Garrick theatre at the Westend in London.

Having taken the connecting flight from Paris & having had my first encounter with the French language - I blanked out in front of the security officer when she let loose a barrage of sounds at me & later I pretended to move my lips to make the sound 'bonjhuuuur' the 'r' kind of fading into oblivion with a flourish - all I wanted to was what any sane man would wish on arriving in a foreign country - sleep. But unfortunately, my contribution to this trip started & ended at carrying the heavy stuff & so all my talking tough amounted to nothing. I suspect that men ceased to be the dominant sex the day women started to wear pants - in the house & everywhere else.

So I shrugged off my sleep & off we went - on the London Underground. Here I first got a sign of what compensation litigation can do to the social fabric of a country. At every other station there was an announcement - "Mind the Gap between the train & the platform" - no doubt put in place after a drunk guy lost his shoe between the train & the platform & went on to sue the underground for a million quid ! (All slang used in this article are country specific). The closest Indian railway annoucement that I could think of was "Women passengers should avoid sitting near open windows with easy access to chain snatchers" or "Avoid taking biscuits from strangers, they may be drugged".

After walking through Regent street, Trafalagar Square etc we finally reached the west end. On the way we asked 6 different folks for directions & got answers in six different languages all amounting to 'got no clue, mate'. It was here that I realised I had walked straight into a carefully laid trap, what with my partner having booked very expensive tickets for a Westend performance - 'One flew over the cuckoos nest'. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the bird folk would come back to haunt me after I had told their side of the story a few weeks back. It was starring Christian Slater, so it cant be that bad I thought. And then the performance began.

The first thing I noticed was that Christian Slater is actually quite short. The next thing I remember is waking up just in time to prevent headbutting the English gentleman sitting next to me. For the next half an hour I swayed from side to side, from front to back, almost fell off the chair & was rudely woken up a couple of times by laughter. The harder I tried to keep my eyes open, the deeper I sank. It would later turn out to be one of my most expensive moments of slumber. And just as I noticed that Christian Slater was actually quite short, the lights went out & I stood up to clap. My wife pulled me down just in time as apparently it was only halfway done.

I felt that the story was well told to its conclusion. Either way to prevent further embarassment, she agreed to leave. So like all the English folk, we got up as if to get a glass of wine & promptly slipped out of the theatre.

Till date, I have failed in giving a satisfactory explanation to my conduct.