Synedoche, UK

 The subhed (gratuitous J-school shibboleth) currently says "London ≠ the UK." I mention this, because I anticipate switching it up from time to time -- the next one will probably say something like: In nothing but thermal underwear since March 2020.

But the reason for the present subhed is something I discovered when I first began talking about moving to Bristol: Americans, even those who really should know better, like US diplomats, regard "London" as synonymous with the UK.

I'm not sure whether their mental map is some kind of distorted Mercator that makes the island the size of Singapore, or they figure that non-London areas are pretty much basically suburbs, but I've been blown away by their insistence.

"I'm moving to the UK," I told the young lawyer who was adopting my foster cat, by way of explanation why I couldn't foster fail with this wonderful ginger I was obviously skeptical of leaving in his care. We chatted a while longer (make sure you don't let him out), and then he parted with a breezy "Enjoy London!"

"I'm moving to Bristol," I told my cosmopolitan colleagues, repeatedly. "It's in the Southwest." (Sometimes I would just say, "I'm moving to rural southwest England.") "When are you moving to London, again?" they would ask. ("Do they know something about Bristol I don't?" I worried to TH.)

For the large virtual retirement seminar I took at the end of the summer, I explained ahead of time to the instructors that I was in Bristol but wasn't a morning person anyway and could do their DC timezone just fine. In the chitchat before they introduced the next speaker, I would always hear them tell that person that participants were based all over the US and they even had someone in London. I spent ages combing through the participant bios trying to find that person -- I wanted to ask them whether they'd hired a Customs broker to import their stuff -- until I realized they meant me. "I am on the opposite side of the country," I PM'd  the course coordinator furiously. "I can walk five minutes and be looking at sheep. There are woods. There are farms. I AM NOT IN LONDON." I mean, I'm sure she wondered why I was so het up about it. But, y'know? It builds.

It's standard Ugly American stuff: I trivialize major distinctions in your country while expecting you to know mine, because my country is important and yours couldn't possibly be. And I do despair about it, a little, because if foreign policy experts show such callous disregard for geography, can the average American point to the UK on a map? I mean: I know they can't. But it's one thing to know that intellectually and another to be forced to confront the circumstantial evidence. 

I've lived in London twice in my life, at different life stages, and, to be honest, I didn't give non-London areas much thought at the time. There was Brighton, and its fabulous Terre a Terre restaurant (though to be honest, Brighton kind of is a suburb of London), and the time I had to deliver a foreign policy talk to high school students in Birmingham and one asked me whether Dubya knew that "the whole world was taking the mickey out of him?" (Sadly, my response is lost to the ages.) The point is, I didn't think much about the inner life of the outer areas, and, to the extent I did, I'm pretty sure I just thought, "oh, it's much the same."

Readers: it isn't.

Let's turn it on its head: Englishness is not in London. London belongs to the internationals. I thought I'd experienced the gamut of accents there, never realizing those were just the London ones. The city is like a mild cheese. "Englishness is such a barely-there culture," one thinks. And then one comes to the West Country.

Much as with many a strong cheese (well, the sheep-y ones, anyway), I didn't like it at first. It's so damn parochial, I said. (And it is.) It's so 'Little England'! I raged. (And it is.) And, of course, there's been the pandemic since literally Day 3, which has prevented me from sampling and enjoying the things the West Country has to offer (such as, for instance, cheese). 

But, in this artificially elongated acclimation process, I find myself increasingly glad for the resistant firmness and odd textures and flavors of this corner of the land. Utterly guilty of what has irked me in others, I myself have only recently stopped judging the Rural Southwest for its distance -- metaphoric and actual -- from London and begun to shift from seeing the local color as an annoying mold on the London rind to a different substance whose culture is worthy of study in its own right. 

And that, really (probably. Because: who knows?) is the subject matter of this blog. I shall, of course, proceed Caerphilly.