Rich Mintz  

When I was in London, I stopped into Gosh!, the bright comic and graphic novel shop at the foot of Berwick Street in Soho (right down from Foxcroft & Ginger). I picked up a couple of gifts, and my eye was caught by the title and cover art of Gemma Bovery, so I threw that in too.

Simmonds (whom I never heard of before) is a British children’s book author and a cartoonist for the Guardian. Gemma Bovery is one of a short list of adult (by which I mean “for grownups,” get your head out of the gutter) books she’s written, and I think it was first serialized in the Guardian.

It’s a reimagining of Madame Bovary in a different context, populated (largely) by contemporary middle-class English people. The Bovaryness is a little heavy-handed, but this isn’t a book you read for the plot (although there’s more plot here than in some graphic novels) — I love the style, which combines first-person storytelling, omniscient-narrator editorializing,  flashbacks, illustrated tableaux, and diary entries. You never know from page to page what you’re going to see, or in what combination. And she is excellent at precisely mocking the absurdity of social-climbing English people (one nouvelle riche is drawn with a perfect horsey mouth, and her appalling French is precisely rendered).

I’ve already ordered Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe, which is apparently based on Hardy. For some reason that one’s easier to get in the US, and cheaper, so maybe you start there.

It occurred to me today after my first long bike ride in NYC since returning from London that in 5 days of very frequent cycling in London’s most congested neighborhoods, not only was I not honked at once, I never saw another cyclist honked at.

NYC is actually pretty good about not honking at cyclists (if you think otherwise, try biking in, oh, any other city in America that isn’t Portland or San Francisco), but honking in general is a part of the culture here, and sometimes cyclists are on the receiving end.

What brought this to my attention was, of course, watching a perfectly nice woman, biking perfectly legally and safely up the left side of Church Street in TriBeCa, get blasted by an SUV (with Illinois plates) for daring to take the lane rather than plow into the back of a garbage truck. It didn’t bother her (these things happen, even in NYC, especially when you ride in the B&T zone), but it sure pissed me off. She was behaving like a car, and this guy was angry that she didn’t just stick to her place, i.e., the gutter.

in retrospect, part of what’s different in London is that cyclists almost universally behave like cars, in that they almost never fail to stop at red lights in traffic (something like 10% of the time, as opposed to 60% here), never ride the wrong way in traffic, and are deferential whenever pedestrians are in the vicinity. Some do weave in stopped traffic, which I note is not illegal and not particularly unsafe; but many of them just stop in the bus lane when the bus stops, knowing that the driver will make the best time he can and there’s not much to be gained by playing leapfrog with him all the way to Hackney.

And I never, ever, ever in London saw something I see every day here, which is some crazy jerk cyclist racing past stopped traffic into a crosswalk full of pedestrians. It just doesn’t happen.

The “in traffic” matters; on empty streets, London cyclists ride the wrong way with impunity, but if there’s nobody around, the consequences of “impunity” are pretty slim. And you don’t find (for example) cyclists riding the wrong way down Tottenham Court Road, whereas I have to dodge a salmon or two on 6th Avenue every day.

I updated my London cycle hire map, and the final count of cycles hire in 5 days is 36, not counting the trial cycle I took out and rode around the block when I first arrived. Not bad.

Also over the 5 days:

- Total taxi rides: 4

- Total train rides: 4

- Total Tube and bus rides: 0 (!)

Obviously I wasn’t going to bike all around London for 5 days without stopping into Velorution in Fitzrovia, probably the best bike shop in England for the kind of cycling I like (utliitarian, inclusive, design-y, fun). They recently moved into larger quarters on Great Portland Street (only a few blocks away from their old location, which is a good thing because that’s where I initially went looking for them), and in the new place they have room for a couple dozen demo bikes, a wall of bags and panniers, a children’s section, and a ton of cycling accessories, eclectica, and ephemera.

I didn’t buy much (a T-shirt, and one of those nylon grocery sacks that stuffs into a little 2-inch packet you can carry in your pocket), but I sure thought about it. Because London is in Europe, Velorution carries bikes you rarely see in the US — an adorable white Jopo from Finland (one of which I saw on the street earlier in the day), Bromptons and Pashleys, the gorgeous Scottish Paper Bicycle, and a range of Dutch bikes (along with those wooden bike trailers you throw your kids in with the groceries). Along with every product ever made by Brooks or Carradice. Afew shops in NYC like Adeline Adeline carry some of this stuff, but the stock is quite a bit deeper at Velorution, and the prices are a bit lower.

One thing they had was a bright red Strida, and they let me take it out for a spin up Great Portland Street to the end of the block and back. If you think I wanted one before, imagine how I feel now. It’s a little wobbly at first, and the geometry is unique so the riding position is a bit more recumbent than I’m used to, but when you do get used to it, wow, is it fun! The belt drive makes it smooth and clean, and the brakes are great. And it’s small enough to pack easily for an airplane (in checked baggage) and rolls much more easily than the Dahon when folded.

I rode the regular-size Strida (which is a little small for me), but I was excited to discover that NYC eWheels has the slightly larger Strida SX in stock. At $950 it’s a little steep, but there’s always Christmas…

And while on the subject, Barclays Cycle Hire deserves an explicit mention, although it’s easy to take for granted because it works so well. (Thanks to the people behind it for adapting the card readers to process US credit cards, which didn’t work when I tried it a year ago.) It works more or less exactly the same as the very similar cycle hire systems in Washington and Montreal and other places, and uses the same Bixi bikes. The difference is that the stations are placed much more densely in London, making the experience vastly better for people who spend all their time making short hops around the central core.

I paid £5 for a seven-day membership, and in 36 hours (half of which I spent asleep or in the office) I’ve already been on 12 bikes without spending any more money. There’s something of the bike-imbalance problem that I experienced in DC, driven by commuting patterns, but with such a dense web of stations you never have to walk more than a few minutes to find another option. (In theory. At 6pm in the City I had to try four stations before I found one with an available bike that didn’t have its “repair me” light on. Obviously the system is on Spotcycle, but the availability data isn’t as current as in DC, where you can depend on it — perhaps because the London system is more heavily used and turnover is faster.) And they have rebalancing vans just like DC does — on Sunday morning I watched one drop off a dozen bikes at an empty station near Embankment tube. And some of the stations are huge (the Whitechapel station where I picked up a bike tonight had, what, 60 docks?)!

There are places I’m planning to go that are a little ways outside the system — Brixton, for instance. But for the most part, I’ll spend my entire week here completely within the zone, and won’t have to spend another penny on transport until it’s time to leave for the airport.

…or at least it’s in the European Union, at least for now; which means that, bikewise, you see a lot more Dutch bikes (and the occasional Spanish bike, and once in a while a Bulgarian or Latvian bike, etc.). You see much more Dutch and Danish and Swedish bike accessorizing — racks, panniers, trailers, baby carriages, and the like. And you see many more people in ordinary clothes riding around (although this is starting to change in New York too).

You can tell you’re in a city that’s trying to take cycles seriously as a mode of transportation when you see cycle superhighways like the one at left, with dozens of cycles passing at rush hour (not my photo; I was busy riding when I found myself at the start of the CS2 route near Aldgate).

And bike shops like Velorution, which I’m hoping to stop into tomorrow, are doing their best to bring style to the everyday cyclist. We have shops like this in New York, too, but they’re either way too precious (although to be honest I like these Bookman lights so maybe I should stop in when I get home) or they have a serious case of Way More Authentic Than Thou. Velorution seems to strike a good balance between taking cycling seriously and having fun with it. (Note: there are teenage jerks in bike shops in London too — one sold me a helmet on Sunday morning — but to be fair, it was just after 11am when they opened, which means that a short four or five hours earlier he was probably vomiting his guts up on the night bus, and despite that he did manage to make it in to open the shop on time. So five points for him.)

So after 36 hours in London, I can say quite emphatically that there are a lot of folding bikes here. I thought there were a lot in New York, but there’s really no comparison — maybe twice as many proportionally here, maybe three times, maybe more.

Almost all the folding bikes you see in NYC (80%? more?) are Dahons — they’re not too expensive, and lots of shops stock them. They are, after all, the global market leader by a wide margin. (They’re also made in Taiwan, and NYC’s Chinese-speaking population is about 12 times that of London, so everything Chinese is more common in New York.) You see the occasional Brompton in NYC, but they’re expensive enough (two or three or five times the price of the Dahons) that they’re relatively rare.

In contrast, here there are Bromptons all over the place — I was standing on a streetcorner near Smithfield Market during the afternoon rush today, waiting for the light, and Brompton after Brompton after Brompton came tearing west across the top of the St. Bartholomew’s circle.

My hotel even has a pair of Bromptons in hotel livery available to lend, which I’m mildly curious about. I don’t expect the ride will be much different than my Dahon — the geometry and the wheel size are very similar — but I like the way they fold. (Folding a Dahon is like stuffing a poodle into a sack; folding a Brompton is more like having a cat curl up neatly in your lap.) And lots of the local Bromptonites have custom front-rack bags like this one, which just makes them cooler.

Is it that the national market is incrementally smaller and tighter? Or that the population is incrementally smarter? Or a bit less cowed by corporatism? Or just a bit more demanding, in environmental and quality-of-life terms? Is it the cultural affection for London’s grand food halls? I don’t know what it is driving it exactly (although I have some thoughts below), but it’s clear that the quality of groceries is higher in London than in the United States.

I’m not necessarily talking about the quality of provisions at the high end. Certainly the produce and meat at Fairway, or Whole Foods — or, for that matter, a large, well-stocked Publix or Ralphs — rivals anything commonly available in London.  What I’m talking about is the quality available to the great middle market across the country, from the four or five national mass-market purveyors.  It seems that the average Briton has access to far better (fresher, more wholesome, better-tasting) food, and especially prepared food, than the average American.

In the United States, once in three months I might come across a store-brand prepared (i.e., perishable) dish from Kroger or Safeway or A&P that I found worth mention, and maybe once a month a boxed or canned (dry-goods) product that’s interesting.  And specialty grocers like Trader Joe’s score better.  But everything I ate this month from Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, and even Tesco was excellent: good-tasting, well-labeled, made from wholesome ingredients, free of artificial preservatives, sustainably sourced and proud of it. The prepared Indian food and fresh pasta sauce I bought from Sainsbury’s (and from a limited-stock city centre store, mind you) were both restaurant-quality, and Waitrose’s baked goods were on a par with their artisanal equivalents costing three times as much.  (And don’t get me started about Waitrose, the only mass-market supermarket I’ve ever seen to rival Harris Teeter for quality and visual experience.)

This isn’t the Harrods food hall, or even Marks & Spencer’s, that I’m discussing; it’s the ordinary supermarket chains that feed the overwhelming majority of the British public day in and day out.

What makes the difference?  Here are some thoughts:

• Because there’s a single national market — and everywhere on the island of Britain is within delivery distance — it becomes cost-effective to offer the full range of products to every community in the country.  It’s also less necessary to use preservatives, which means (on the downside) that fresh prepared food in the UK lasts only three or four days rather than the week or more that’s common in the US.
• It’s clear that the culture is more accepting of sustainability and authenticity as a value worth paying for — although to be honest, the prices of the sorts of food I tend to buy (i.e., excluding the heavily processed grain-based items such as sugar breakfast cereals that are subsidized in the US) did not seem significantly different here.
• This may be my urban bias talking, but most people here, even in the cities, seem to be culturally closer to the land than the average American is; certainly there is a larger share of the population in the UK than in the US that is a generation or less removed from rural or village life, and even in the cities, the health of the countryside seems to be treated as a community value to be respected.

Whatever it is, I’m sorry to be going back home. I eat very well indeed in New York, but I do have to shop carefully (I almost never set foot in any of New York’s four largest grocery chains) and it costs me.

Maybe this is sort of an obvious question to someone who’s spent a lot of time here — but do the English think of Australians in London (and, by extension, of New Zealanders, although yes, I do know they’re not exactly the same thing) in more or less the same way that New Yorkers think of Californians? You know, as not quite serious enough to be taken seriously, kind of like big rangy teenagers with open mouths and wide eyes (and, of course, with those perfect buff-teenager-forever bodies we all wish we had), all wide-eyed and nature-loving, clannish and content, frustrating because they won’t acknowledge or apparently even notice our contempt, the objects of our pity-envy in massive proportions?

I can get away with asking questions like this, you know, because I’m a California-born New Yorker.  So I’ve lived on both sides of the stereotype.

The ways of Australians are sort of a mystery to me, in London and everywhere else — I’ve had relatively little sustained contact with them, and all I’ve managed to learn about them so far in London is that they have their places — for some reason they’re all around Earl’s Court (this has been explained to me, and I’ve seen evidence that it’s true, but I don’t understand why), plus of course they’re in the Crumpler shop in the West End and various other locations.

What prompts this post is seeing an apparent New Zealander today in a cafe (pulling espressos, natch) wearing a T-shirt reading “PAKEHAS KNOW HOW TO PARTY” (a word which, obviously, I ran and Googled) — and seeing him get a compliment on it by a woman who was perfectly nice but had an accent and hairstyle that virtually shouted out “I’m not from around here.”

Blue State Digital is here in force at Internet World UK, the largest digital marketing trade show in the United Kingdom.  You get a sense of the size of it before you even enter the gargantuan Earls Court Two exhibit hall, and once you’re inside, the show seems to go on forever:

I’m here myself in person, along with Rhiannan Sullivan and Dominic Roter of our London office. Our booth is in the back row, right next to the keynote speakers’ hall, so if you’re attending any of the keynotes, please stop by and see us.  Thomas Gensemer, our managing partner, is speaking tomorrow at 12:30 on the topic of “What Brands Can Learn from NGOs and Politics.”  Admission is free.