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DKR Political Musings from Nineteen and a Bit Years Ago
Letter from England —#4 — 13 February, 2003
When I first moved to the UK, I planned to write an e-mail “Letter from England” every month, as a way of keeping track of my journey from Anglophile American to lonely and homesick ex-pat. Like so many of my similar intentions, this one was never carried out. I think I managed to write three in two years, and there have been no more for the past two years. In September of this year, it will be five years since I threw the giveaway / bon voyage party at Walker Church and put 66 boxes of stuff, overwhelmingly books, into a warehouse in Hopkins and took a non-binding six month leave of absence from a pretty good job at the U, and got on a plane with a ticket to Birmingham International Airport, with a return portion I hoped never to use, and bluffed my way through customs as an American tourist. (With an inexplicable desire to find out if Hinckley, Leicestershire, England could possibly be more interesting than Hinckley, Minnesota, USA? What’s really inexplicable is that I still live in Hinckley!)
I find myself moved to write another letter from England. I don’t know why. I think it’s the war, the war that will surely come. As a Billy Bragg song says -
