On August 21, we heard Big Ben chime for the last time. It is due for some revamping work and won't be heard again for four years. My 13-year-old daughter was my excuse for taking a stroll round the main historical landmarks. Trafalgar Square with Nelson still perched on his column. Will she remember that he was the one who defeated Napoleon at the battle of Trafalgar? I doubt it. She paid more attention to the buskers and other street artists who try to attract an audience. Piccadilly Circus where she took pictures of the Eros statue; the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace; unassuming Downing street the significance of which she failed to gather and, last but not least, afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason, a very English tradition although it didn't seem to me that there were many English people about in the quaint and luxurious establishment. I refused to be defeated by the recent terrorist attacks there, so we took a walk across Tower Bridge. The views from the glass-floored footbridge high above the Thames are spectacular. To walk on the glass floor while watching the water and the cars hundreds of meters below without feeling dizzy was enough of a challenge for me when I realized that if I lifted my head I could see myself and what was a hundred of meters below me. One can't fail to see from there the dense entanglement of glass buildings of all shapes and heights, from the Shard to the Gherkin, tightly packed and overpowering the Tower of London.
Luckily, not even market-liberal, pro-brexit Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, dared to sell a single acre of the many parks and woodlands dotting London. I had many an invigorating early-morning walks in some of them, especially Hampstead Heath, my favorite, and a less well-known one, Edgewarebury Park, where I stopped walking occasionally to gorge myself with plump ripe blackberries jutting from the undergrowth. It still amazes me how England still feels like a garden in many parts, even in overcrowded London. And this, despite some very unwelcome changes in other areas.
One of my English friends' elder son, 19, has dropped out of his first year at university after only six months. He had already accumulated a £15,000 debt and couldn't stand the pressure of the debt piling up while not being absolutely sure of his job prospects as an architect, especially now that the Tory government has changed the system. Student loans are no longer run by the state but by banks and they are no longer interest-free. I knew this would happen. I said it repeatedly to my French students. England's higher education is for sale! To the highest bidder. Universities are more interested in attracting rich foreigners than in investing in the youth of the country. The aim is short term and consists in making as much money as possible despite the media doing their best to write stories about deserving sons and daughters of immigrants who have managed to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge. My friend's younger son, 16, was waiting for his GCSEs results but he has already decided he would not go to university. Difficult to imagine that only 13 years ago, higher education in England was more or less free. All my English friends took advantage of four years of carefree higher education. This is what post-thatcher governments have achieved (Margaret Thatcher herself, as far as I know, had never suggested privatizing higher education; she who, as a grocer's daughter, had benefited from free first-class higher education at Oxford university); both Tony Blair and David Cameron will be the names attached to making higher education an impossible goal to reach for many working class and lower middle-class kids. And it will change the face of English society for the worse, no doubt about it.
On a lighter note, I had been looking forward to attending a performance of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Apollo Theatre. Like many people of my generation, I still remember the unforgettable acting of Elizabeth Taylor and of Paul Newman, as Maggie and Brick, in the movie of the play. How to parallel this level of acting? This must be the impossible challenge that any director of the play is bound to be confronted with. Perhaps, as the untamed passion of both Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman could not possibly be matched, the director chose to
show the heat of the emotions expressed through props such as, for example, a shower running over the flimsy white clothes of Brick (played by Jack O'Connell), revealing his perfect naked body underneath the clinging shirt and pants. And in the last scene, I was more than a little surprised to see the two main characters appear, out of the dark stage, stark naked. If this was meant to raise the temperature and exacerbate raw emotions, I felt the end result was rather the opposite. Still, the great lines of the play remain and the spirit of Tennessee Williams prevailed.
