People and Puffins are Awesome

but people can also suck

I’m back from vacation and have to sort through 1,878 photos. I promise not to share all of them. Except maybe the puffins! I loved the puffins. And the people.

I saw a lot of beautiful places, saw a lot of new birds, met a lot of friends, drove over 1800 miles on the wrong side of the road—including through a parade of celebrating football hooligans—and was attacked not by them, but by a cow.¹

In the coming weeks, I’ll share stories and photographs from our visit to England and Scotland. In England, we visited the Roman Baths and Solsbury Hill, Chatsworth estate in the Peak District, Coniston in the Lake District, then up to Ben Nevis in the Highlands, visited the grave of naturalist Gavin Maxwell in Sandaig, took the last turntable ferry boat to Skye and spent several days exploring that beautiful isle, before driving to Glasgow to meet new and old friends, then driving down to Jane Austen’s House and spent nearly a week in London, from the Regency Cafe to Primrose Hill.

Two weeks in the U.K. and I’ll say this: Scots are friendly people, Glaswegians doubly so. We rented a BYD hybrid that managed over 600 miles per tankful. Driving in London is mad, but the road markings made it all right. Single lane roads in rural Scotland are less hazardous than English country lanes where posh drivers assume the other car has to make way. But nearly everyone was friendly, even the drunk kids celebrating their firm’s victory in the streets. The man working at Spitfire Coffee, who chatted me up; the young woman at the hotel counter who told me about her upcoming trip to Berlin; the woman at Monorail Records, who talked to me about Jonathan Richman, and how he played on a riverboat sailing down the Clyde.

I saw puffins for the first time, and it’s still the people who stand out. That’s something, isn’t it?

In both the UK and US, some of the old people are… not all right. One pro-Brexit pensioner tried to convince us that the media hid all the rapes and murders going on, so “we wouldn’t rise up.” And today in the airport lounge, when I asked a bunch of loud old white Americans playing videos on their phones if they knew they were in the quiet room, they sulked until I went to refill my coffee, then stared down my wife and slammed magazines down at her like toddlers. I mean, if you’re going to be entitled, don’t be a coward as well. Also, Douglas, no one gives a shit how you make a martini. You are an old boor.

Most of the people I met were nice. The drivers, the pedestrians, the people on the tube. I had a lot of nice talks with strangers in record stores, whiskey shops, pubs, bookshops, cafes. Heathrow runs like a Swiss watch. Newark Airport wasn’t as bad as expected, at least for international flights; we got through customs quickly, just not as quickly as Heathrow. And in both airports, Americans had to bellow loudly at minor inconveniences like having to shuffle items in overweight luggage.

Maybe people were so friendly to me because I made the slightest effort to not be a raging asshole? Not sure.

1. Both we and the cow are fine. The car, not so much.