When a desi gets lost in McBritain's
Britain, our destination.
Similar gaffes have occurred in the past. In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus landed in what he thought was India, but it was America. This case of mistaken identity caused the Italian navigator to call the local inhabitants 'Indios', Indians, an appellation that would be used for centuries to refer to indigenous Americans.
What I was wondering on the long ride from the airport to the city was where the dickens I'd landed. Because London seemed transformed by some wave of a Hogwarts wand into an ersatz America.
The sedate rows of semi-detached homes, like queues waiting in patient orderliness at bus stops for red double-deckers, had given way to a Manhattan manque, a grotesquerie of steel-and-glass and concrete.
If the western purlieu of Hammersmith had been rendered unrecognisable, the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush, once res very much des, has morphed into a mangled masquerade of a mid-town Chicago on the Thames. It was like a city gent toffed up in a black coat, with pinstripe trousers tucked into spur-jangling cowboy boots, his bowler hat replaced by a 10-gallon Stetson.
I went to my favourite pub in Camden Town, which I remembered as a bastion of Britishness, like the Changing of the Guard. A blonde hostess greeted me, 'Hiya, watch can I getcha?', Cockney suppressed by Kansas twang. Slow-cooked barbecue spare ribs. Corn bread. Ranch dressing? What happened to fish and chips, and don't spare the vinegar? Where did steak & kidney pud go?
I asked for a pint of bitter,
