I love London and a trip from (Central) Europe across the Channel always feels a bit like I have changed contintents. Suddenly cars hit your zebra crossing from the other side. I love when I hear the sound of Big Ben, making every hour clear that the world continues to move forward. But going to London also feels like going back in time, the time of aristocracy. An English friend who had never been in Eton or Oxford, told me that he found his countries‘ ongoing distinct class society disgusting, but at the same time, he also admiered it a bit.

Being in London is like the old British Empire is just around corner. I spent days at Charing Cross Road and its rows of specialist (travel!) or second-hand bookshops like Foyles, browsing books on former British colonies like Hong Kong, Kenya or Ceylon I could not find somewhere else. I ate kilos of strawberries at Wimbledon and loved to watch British ladies with extravagant hats punting the river Cam in Cambridge. Even when I realise that the days of the Empire are long gone and that my British friends (with whom we share more drinking habits than with any other country) decamped into their insular snail shell, there is still the British Museum. I remember my first visit 1989 in the course of a school excursion. The entire place looked like a colonial relic but since the installation of the glass-roofed Great Court, it became a different place. In 2009 I saw the „Shah Abbas: The Remaking of iran“ exhibition and suddenly the museum had become into a sort of enlightened cultural exchange explainer which made me proud that I had the opportunity to once live in this great country of civilisation that was too often just associated with Islamic fervor and terror. The great thing the British Museum does is allow is to look at the world as if through other eyes.

I should set my eyes more on Britain beyond swinging London. Britain is great, from the mysterious jagged peaks on the Isle of Skye in the north to the pounded waves ofon the rugged cliffs of the Cornwall coastal walk. At least, after finishing school three school mates and me embarked on my first real a road trip ever, from Germany to Scotland. We took the ferry from Zeebrugge to Kingston-upon-Hull, became melancholy at Simon Garfunkel‘s Scarborough Fair, watched Pretty Woman in Newcastle-upon-Thyne and finally entered a houseboat on the Caledonian Canal to search for elusive Nessie in Loch Ness.

Let‘s finally talk about (English) food. It did not start well: To strentghen my knowledge of English my employer had sent me in 1992 for a couple of weeks to Cambridge. I had the pleasure of staying with an English family in their typical redbrick rowhouse. The family was wonderful and I learned a lot about the rivalry of English football clubs. However, dinner unfortunately confirmed all stereotypes: Fish and Chips would have been fine, but it was all potatoes potatoes or potatoes, sometimes crowned by a stodgy English pudding. Luckily I met a Swiss co-student at my language school who happened to share a similar destiny at ther family’s house. So after dinner I sneaked out of my family’s house and went, thanks to my Swiss friend‘s affluent dad, by a typical black London cab to London. Indian or Chinese foof were a wonderful compensation.

In the meantime, cooks from every part of the former British empire have made it to Britain and turned the former culinary desert into paradise. Chicken Tikka Masala became a kind of third national dish in Britain, and London became one of my favorite destinations to eat well.

 On Sundays in the early wild nineties, I followed the masses to church – not to any church, but to the Church. The Church was a defunct factory on an abandoned industrial site behind Kings Cross railway station in London. At 10am the party was at full swing. Sweet Caroline and Heavy Metal, drinking was heavy, too. The t-shirt on sale set the mood: Go to Church and drink until I am cute.