Carol and I can’t believe it has been 20 years since we last went to England. Twenty years!
(Editor: One sentence into the blog of this trip, and I already sense gauzy memories coming on. Writer: Well, that’s actually two sentences, but darn tooting!)
TLDR: Glen had a great time his junior year, especially in the spring, working in Parliament and seeing as much of England, Scotland, Ireland, and other parts of Europe as he could. Because of those happy memories, he's always fond of those countries.
England was where all the foreign travel started for the both of us. Oh, yeah, when I was 18 and then again when I was 19 I had ridden my motorcycle up to different places in Canada, but Canada barely counts as a foreign country, and certainly isn’t overseas travel.
(Editor: Some Canadians might take exception to that! Writer: What are they going to do, win hockey’s Stanley Cup for the first time since 1993 just to get back at me? Editor (meekly): Maybe, although probably not.)
In 1983, Carol went with three other young ladies to England, Scotland, and then to Paris for her first-ever trip abroad, and loved it.
In 1983-84, I was honored to be part of a wonderful academic/real life experience program that was absolutely wonderful. I loved it while I was doing it, and I still have fond memories, of it today.
American University and Leeds University worked together to create a magical short-lived program that would take some Brits, bring them to Washington, D.C. for the fall semester. We would all take one class a week together with the esteemed Professor, Dr. Walter Oleszek, one of the leading congressional scholars in the country. More importantly, we would intern for 4.5 days for Members of Congress. That was an excellent experience.
Even better, at least from my vantage point, was the spring semester in London, where we took a class once a week from a British professor of politics, and also interned 4.5 days a week for a Member of Parliament.
My Member of Parliament was a young fellow named Geoff Lawler, who won a four-way race in 1983 against all odds. His constituency was Bradford North, which was very much a Labour stronghold. It would be like a Republican winning a congressional seat in Detroit, Michigan.
I’ve argued with myself about whether to include the details of his win, and lost the argument. So here goes: The sitting Labour Party member was deselected and a member (Pat Wall) of the Militant Tendency which thought the average commies in the British Labour Party of the early 1980s weren’t radical enough (think of the Militant Tendency as an even kookier Antifa). Wall was like the Lauren Boebert/MTG, but on the extreme left instead of the extreme right. The deselected Labourite (deselected is like a congressional incumbent being unseated by a local party committee whilst drunk with the idea they are showing the LINOs – Labour In Name Only – what’s what. I think the committee’s anger swirled around the fact that the incumbent only voted 99.9% with the Labour Party.
There was also a candidate from the short-lived Social Democratic Party (SDP). The SDP’s slogan was “take the politics out of politics, vote SDP” which made them the less crazy uncle version of Ross Perot and his supporters.
When the votes were counting, Geoff had pulled off the biggest upset of the election. Which immediately put him number one on the all the target lists. Both the Charlie Cook and the Stu Rothenberg ranked his seat as Solid Labour.
So Geoff had the crazy idea that a 21 year old American who had worked a couple of internships in Congress, and had volunteered in a few campaigns from Mayor of Sparta (for my dad) to the U.S. Congress, might be able to help him run a more American-style congressional office – responsive to constituents, suck up to the press, help answer letters, and look for opportunities to convince the Labour voters that he was different. I felt a little overwhelmed by the request, but little by little I took to the job.
Geoff only had one paid staffer, a secretary named Roz who didn’t like me at first, because, oddly, she saw me as a threat. So not only was I trying to win over voters, I worked to win over Roz, who well before the end of the internship in May, took a liking to me despite me being, well, me.
So, with all that background (Can we get back to England, please!), Geoff was a great boss, taking me to various pubs, making fun of me as an American, having me draft speeches and questions for minsterial question times, writing press releases. He took me up to Bradford North for a magical weekend of meetings and meals (not that Bradford is magical, but doing what we did was). Since then, Geoff and I have stayed in intermittent touch, as he’s visited us a few times, we stay connected via email, Zoom, and What’sApp. I send him these blog emails, which I think actually occasionally reads (hi Geoff!). He’s as sickened by Boris Johnson as I am by Donald Trump.
Being over in London also instilled my love of traveling. I had a great time with our flatmates (three of the Brits, five of the Americans), but I also took trains around England, hitch-hiked to and from Scotland for my spring break, and even motorcycled one weekend to Wales for great hiking. As the semester was nearing its conclusion, my dad came over and we went to Ireland together for a memorable father-son travel (Geoff was great and showed my father all around Parliament before we went to Eire).
After that, I trained around Europe, going to Paris, Nice, Monaco, Pisa, Rome, Florence, Venice, Lucerne, Bruges, back to London, and up to Yorkshire (thumb out again) to visit Stephen Byfield, one of the Brits, at his family home where his parents took great care of me.
Funny enough, the program only lasted a few more years, as many other universities copied from AU-Leeds. There were so many American interns running around Parliament that the MPs voted to no longer allow American interns. It was an amazing matter of timing that the Brits and the Americans in the first iteration of the program got to do what we did. I’ve been quite lucky in my life, and that’s just one example.
Fast-forwarding through the next 40 years, Carol and I went to England and Scotland for our honeymoon in 1987, took our young daughters to England and Ireland in 2003 as the Gulf War was about to unfold, and here we are.
So when we had the chance for a free three-night stay in early June at a posh London hotel, the Langham, we grabbed it. Given that we’ve already traveled for seven and a half weeks this year, we kept our trip to seven nights, adding four nights in the picturesque, and scary as hell, Cotswold region west of London.
(Editor: Well, that was nicer to read than expected. It’s a bit syrupy, but you clearly have genuinely fond memories of your semester there. Writer: Speechless at a compliment from you!)
nd memories of your semester there. Writer: Speechless.)
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