The Road to Little Dribbling (32 page)

A selection of tablets with Linear B script are displayed at the Ashmolean, along with an excellent account of how they were deciphered, plus a great deal more from Knossos. I lost nearly another hour at a single display case in the Minoan section, and realized I was not going to live long enough at this rate to reach the top floor, so I picked up my pace. But it still took another three hours to see the museum even briskly. It is just the most wonderful place.

Afterward, I had an urge for fresh air and decided to stroll out to a place called Wytham Woods, on a hilly site a little beyond the western edges of the city. Wytham Woods is almost certainly now the most studied woodland in the world. It was donated to the university in 1942 and has been used ever since for botanical, environmental, and zoological studies of every possible type. Its study of bird populations, begun in 1947, is the longest-running biological survey anywhere on Earth, and other parts of the woods have been used for the study of bats, deer, insects, trees, mosses, rodents, and almost everything else that lives and breeds in a temperate climate.

Wytham Woods (it’s pronounced
wite-hum,
by the way) is just three or four miles from central Oxford, but it takes a little getting to on foot because you have to cross the Thames and get past the very busy A34 western bypass, neither of which is exactly replete with crossing places. The most congenial walk appeared to be across Port Meadow, a vast open flood plain beside the river, but I had a strangely difficult time finding it. I walked some of the time on residential streets near Port Meadow, some of the time on residential streets not near Port Meadow, some of the time in what seemed to be a nature reserve not too far but definitely separate from Port Meadow, and some of the time through a kind of swamp that could have been anywhere, before I could confidently pronounce myself actually on Port Meadow, and even here I seemed to be in its most remote and least visited corner. The route took me across a large stretch of open ground generously strewn with horses, some of them frisky in a way that wasn’t necessarily friendly. Thoughts of animal tramplings running through my head, I walked briskly, but happily they paid me no heed.

I emerged to find myself in Wolvercote, considerably adrift of where I hoped to be by now, and followed the road toward the village of Wytham, at the base of Wytham Woods. It was an agreeable walk that took me past the Trout Inn, a famous riverside pub which appeared in about a thousand
Inspector Morse
episodes on television, and the remains of Godstow Abbey. Consulting my map, I found I was still quite a distance short of Wytham village. This was turning out to be much more of an undertaking than I had expected.

Wytham is a sweet little village, with a pub, a village shop, and a church, and not much else. The one thing it didn’t have was any indication of how to get to Wytham Woods. Down whichever lane I ventured, I came across stern signs telling me to go away: “Private Residence. No Trespassing,” “Private Road. No Thoroughfare,” “Private—Authorized Vehicles Only.” My Ordnance Survey map showed the woods as being laced with tracks, but there was no indication of how to get up to them. I couldn’t find a single footpath sign anywhere, nor anyone to ask.

A sign on a side lane pointed to a field station, which sounded promising, and I walked a half mile down the lane but found neither station nor footpaths, and the woods, visible on the neighboring hillside, were growing more distant rather than less. I had already walked quite a distance and still had to get back to Oxford, so the idea of walking another mile or two up a big hill into woods was less enthralling than it had been two or three hours before. This is the problem with walking—that you can consume so much time and energy getting to your destination that you don’t always have a great deal in reserve when you reach it.

I found my way back to the village. The shop was closed for the afternoon and there was no one around to ask for guidance. According to an information board nearby, the village was mostly owned by Oxford University and the villagers were mostly tenants, so all this seemed a little unnecessarily unfriendly, I have to say. Later I learned from an acquaintance who lives in Oxford that Wytham Woods isn’t really open to the public. They might not Taser you, as they might in California, but they don’t exactly welcome you with open arms onto the land. Then it occurred to me that if they are doing careful studies in the woods, if they have nesting boxes and traps and the like scattered about, they can’t really have people up there with their dogs and mountain bikes disturbing things, so I forgave them in the name of science.

Besides, it was half-past five, nearly cocktail hour, so I strolled back to Wolvercote, and had a drink at the Trout Inn, the pub where the fictional Inspector Morse and his trusty sidekick Lewis often went for alcoholic refreshment and inspiration while solving one of Oxford’s many murders. I once met Colin Dexter, the donnish creator of the
Morse
series, and asked him how many murders he was personally responsible for.

“Sixty-eight!” he answered proudly. He also told me that the number of murders that he had contrived for a dozen mystery novels was several times greater than the number of actual murders in Oxford in the same period. The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be. I looked into this once and found that statistically a Briton is more likely to die by almost any other means—including accidentally walking into a wall—than to be murdered.

And if that’s not a happy thought, I don’t know what is.

Chapter 17

The Midlands

I

I
RECENTLY BOUGHT A
new laptop. It came loaded with some software—I think it is called Microsoft Gestapo—that lets them enter the computer at any time of the day or night, line everyone up against the wall, and install some new software. I don’t know what this new software does or why they didn’t think to put it in in the factory, but it sure is important to them to get it in there now. About every second time I fire up the computer, I get a message that says: “Updates are ready for your computer. Would you like to install now (now is recommended) or be reminded every fifteen seconds for the rest of eternity?”

At first I submitted, but the updates took forever to load and they didn’t make any detectable difference to the quality of my life, so eventually I tried to subvert the process by switching my computer off and then on again. Take it from me right now, you should never do that. The next message I got said:

“Resuming installation process. Do not ever try anything like that again. Remember: we know that you spent a whole afternoon on March 10 watching Paris Hilton home videos. We’ll tell your wife. We’re Microsoft. Don’t fuck with us. Download will be complete in 14 hours.”

So when I got an update notification now, as I sat on a train from London to Birmingham, I just stoically accepted and gave up the hope of doing any work for a while. Instead I had a look at the three strangers sitting with me at a snug little table. They were all dressed for work, but none of them were working either, as far as I could tell. The man beside me was watching a movie, and it wasn’t even a good movie. I could tell because it had lots of explosions and starred Liam Neeson. The two people opposite held smartphones like little prayer books, transfixed by what they found on their screens. Nearly everyone else within sight was holding a phone and doing rapid things with their thumbs. Two young men who had not evidently mastered the use of their thumbs were asleep with earphones in. Only one man with a laptop and a document seemed to be engaged in paid labor.

All this was of interest to me because this was the very train line that the government wanted to replace with a new high-speed operation known as HS2, in an effort to make the nation more economically vibrant. (HS stands for “high speed”; there’s already an HS1, for trains to the Channel Tunnel from London.) The idea was that by getting people to Birmingham twenty minutes quicker, they could get more work done and all those extra twenty minutes would collectively translate into gazillions of extra pounds for the economy. I am a little dubious about this myself because I think that if you give anyone anywhere an extra twenty minutes, they will just have a cup of coffee. It’s what you and I would do. It’s what anyone does with twenty minutes.

The people who are opposed to HS2 argue that there is no need to get people to Birmingham quicker anyway because they can work on the train—that thanks to laptops and tablets and cell phones people can be as productive now while traveling as in the office. In principle perhaps, but as my carriage mates were demonstrating, people don’t actually work on trains. In fact, I am not sure they work at all anymore.

Not long before this, my wife and I ordered a sofa from a shop on the Fulham Road in London, and on a Saturday in May, just before the May Day bank holiday, we traveled all the way into London from Hampshire to complete the paperwork. When we got to the shop, we found three other couples standing outside. The door was locked and the interior in darkness. This was at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, thirty minutes after the posted opening time. We all took turns peering through the glass door, as if one of us might spot something that the others had missed. There was no sign in the window to indicate why the shop was shut. People with smartphones activated their thumbs and reported that the shop’s website gave no clues. One man dialed the shop number, and we could hear the ringing inside, but obviously there was no one there to answer it. After about twenty minutes, we all gave up and wandered off. Three days later, curious as to what had happened, I called the shop for an explanation.

“Oh, yah,” said a young woman with a posh voice, “we shut for the bank holiday.”

“But Saturday wasn’t a bank holiday. The bank holiday was Monday.”

“Yah, we shut for the weekend.”

“But you didn’t put a sign in the window or a notice on your website. You just left a bunch of people standing there like idiots.”

“Oom, yah,” she said as if that were an interesting but pointless observation, and I realized that she was almost certainly doing her nails or reading e-mails.

“Well, you know what, you are a spoiled, brainless fuckhead,” I said. Actually I didn’t say that at all. I just thought it. Instead I muttered some pathetic lamentation, in the British style, and hung up. In the end, you just give up or move to another country.

I truly don’t understand how Britain does it. Great Britain has the world’s sixth largest economy, but as far as I can see it doesn’t make much of anything anymore. So few industrial companies are left that the
Financial Times,
the British equivalent of
The Wall Street Journal,
had to take the word “industrial” out of the Financial Times Industrial Average, its principal measure of corporate well-being. Only five of Britain’s largest companies manufacture any products at all in the UK now. When I was a child, Britain made a quarter of all that was produced in the world (though, to be fair, my being a child had very little to do with it); now the figure is 2.9 percent and falling. These days, Britain makes Rolls-Royce jet engines and all the little pots of marmalade in the world, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell.

Nearly everything that’s left seems to be owned by foreigners. French companies own Hamley’s toy store, Glenmorangie whisky, Orange mobile phones, Fisons pharmaceuticals, and EDF, one of the country’s main utilities. Two other leading utilities are German-owned; another is owned by a Spanish company. Jaguar, Blue Circle Cement, British Steel, Harrods, Bass breweries, most of the main airports, a number of the top soccer teams, and much else besides are all foreign-owned. Fewer than half of Britain’s largest companies even have a British-born chairman.

HP and Daddies sauces are made in Holland. Smarties are made in Germany. Raleigh bicycles are made in Denmark. In 2010, RBS, a failed Scottish bank owned by the British government, lent the money to the American food conglomerate Kraft to buy Cadbury’s, Britain’s most venerable chocolate maker. As part of the deal Kraft promised to keep open a Cadbury factory near Bristol, but it was just fooling. As soon as the deal was complete, Kraft closed the factory and shipped its machinery to Poland.

I think these things matter. People used to be proud of what Britain gave the world, but now they can’t even be sure of what it gives itself. If you sell out to outsiders, you must accept that it will be people from other lands who decide what snacks you eat and where your sauces are concocted.

And yet the country thrives. It’s a miracle. How does it do it? I have no idea. All I can say is that it isn’t by working hard on trains.

—

I am fascinated by HS2. The whole idea is so mad that you have to, as it were, step back and walk all the way around it to take it in. To begin with, there is the projected cost. It began at about £17 billion, I believe, and the last I saw was up to £42 billion, but I am sure it is much higher now, because the costs of these big projects always inflate faster than anyone can type the numbers. The only certainty with large infrastructure projects is that no one can ever predict anything about them with certainty. The Channel Tunnel cost twice as much to build as expected and attracted half as many people as predicted. HS1, older sibling to HS2, was confidently forecast to carry 25 million passengers by 2006. In fact, it has never reached half that number.