You almost never get to hear things like rain falling hard on the roof in London. It rains all the time, but it rarely comes down in a pour like it’s doing right now. I had walked here twenty minutes ago in the sunshine, and I had been sweating.

This is a curious little island we’ve taken as our home.

It was like this in Brighton a few days ago, too. Brighton is to England what Austin is to Texas, which is to say, it’s my favorite place in the whole country. It’s sunny and on the water and, yeah, it rains a lot there too because it’s still this some quixotic island, but it never looms the way London does.

I thought for a long time I wanted to live in a city that loomed, that hung its buildings tall and stretched them on for miles. After Chicago and London, I’ve realized I like them smaller, the sort you can walk across. It took me a lot of learning by doing, but I’ve had the time to figure it out.

I went to Brighton with Tony, who was in the country to play some Real Live Tigers shows, which everyone here called gigs. The last one was in Brighton, a radio show recorded in the cocktail bar of a small hotel on the beach. I stayed up late that night, meeting new people and pretending I knew enough about England to talk about politics and the differences between small cities and London, which occupies a place in England that no American city occupies in that country- things like that, and maybe I do know enough. I’m a quick study, after all, and we’ll see if Ken Livingstone beats Boris Johnson today in the Mayoral election against the odds and proves my instincts sharp.

Thunder! Just now, thunder- this is a strange day in the British isles. You can go many months without hearing thunder, even if it’s rained every day for three weeks.

And now it’s sunny. What are we going to do with you, England? Get off on the novelty, I suppose. Why not? This is an odd place, but I’m happy to be here, finally.

I finished deception by Phillip Roth a couple of days ago. This makes six of his books for me, and that may well be where it stops. I loved the plot against america and american pastoral, which are the two I started with, and I thought there were some neat things about the human stain. But I hated everyman and exit ghost so much that I don’t even really know why I picked up deception.

It’s mostly not a very good book, but there is one thing about it that I found really significant. It’s about an American writer living in London and having an affair with a woman he talks down to and treats like a child, which is what many of Roth’s books are about, at least in part. She’s English, he’s American, and he talks at length about the English, and he hasn’t always got the kindest things to say about them.

Most of what Roth says (the character’s name is “Phillip Roth”) is stuff that has been on my mind since coming over here. But it’s stuff I felt like I needed to keep to myself, except when I would feel especially aggravated and then harsh Kat’s mellow by complaining about them. But reading them in Roth’s book felt like a validation of these things, which makes dealing with them much easier. It’s much easier to accept something once you know you’re not alone, or crazy, for noticing it.

It’s something that was helped by having Tony stay in town for a few days, too. Things that needed to be validated- like everything being so fucking expensive, or the awkward shuffle of strangers on the sidewalk who have no qualms about standing in the middle of the pavement, lined up four wide like the goddamn defensive line of the 1985 Chicago Bears- become minor concerns when there’s someone to affirm that they’re actually happening, and that it’s all right to be bothered.

England is a strange place for an American. The politeness thing works in ways that are counter-intuitive to me. Because the English are unfailingly polite, and rarely confrontational. It’s why we look like such pricks to them- Americans are not reserved in the same way at all. But it’s not the same thing as being considerate, and that’s an important distinction.

Here’s a scenario that happens a hundred and fifty times a day- coming out of a train station, say, on a cramped, narrow platform, someone might decide for any of several reasons to stop. Perhaps they need to look at a map, or perhaps they’re having a conversation with someone who is going to be going a different direction and they want to say goodbye, or perhaps the rest of their party is behind them and they want to catch up. So someone will stop in the middle of a crowded platform, which means that everyone else will have to either wait for them to start moving again or try to navigate around the body standing like a stuffed animal in the middle of this small space.

English politeness dictates that everyone disregard this obstruction and continue as though nothing had happened. It would be rude, after all, to tap a stranger on the shoulder and say why don’t you move out of the way before you stop. So it never happens- or, if it does, it’s because an American did it and everyone around was offended. Consideration might dictate that a person instead look around, realize that he’d be inconveniencing a gaggle of people, and get out of the way, but that’s a different thing from politeness.

And every country’s got these quirks- pull that shit coming out of the subway in New York and you’ll find a cheerful group of people happy to let you know exactly what kind of asshole you are. In China you’d probably just have a crush of people shove you out of the way. It’s not wrong, but it’s been nice, the past week or so, not having to downplay my own discomfort with these things- to be able to get a bit indignant on the train with Tony, or to read Phillip Roth’s take on these things.

So there’s that. The other book I finished recently was also largely set in London, but it was written by an Englishman, so it didn’t address these things. I picked up the spy who came in from the cold by John LeCarre and read it pretty quickly, it being something of a page-turner. I liked it, I guess, but I was hoping for that sort of genre fiction book that really transcends its genre, while it was mostly just a spy story. It was fun until the end, when, in lieu of a satisfying conclusion, we just get eight pages of LeCarre’s thoughts on socialism. It’s not the first novel written in the first half of the 20th century that I’ve read that opted to conclude with the protagonist abandoning the narrative of the book to instead talk about the evils/inherent righteousness of communism (even martin eden by Jack London, one of my favorite books, goes out like that), but here it was even less satisfying than most places, because I was having a good time with the big escapes and adventure set-up.

But so much for that. We still haven’t got steady Internet access at the flat, so I’m a bit more sporadic online than I want to be, but we’ve abandoned the notion of paying for Internet access, given the huge fees charged by British Telecom to install a line. There’s an unsecured wireless network that comes in and out, and that’ll do, along with the library.