25 Things that I Love About the United Kingdom

In the interest of providing you all with "fair and balanced" coverage about my misadventures here, I suppose that since I shared my list of twenty-five things I miss about the States, I should share with you my list of twenty-five things that I absolutely love about the United Kingdom. It's simply fair, isn't it? After all, notwithstanding the protestations of nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists or twenty-first century Christian fundamentalists to the contrary, America isn't the best of all possible worlds. It's not the Promised Land--that's in Palestine, not central Missouri. So, without any further fanfare, here's my list of twenty-fifth items in, or things about, the United Kingdom that I absolutely love. In no particular order, they are:

1. Good beer, particularly Newcastle Brown Ale and Bombardier;
2. Bangers and mash smothered in brown onion gravy;
3. The view of London from one of the bridges spanning the Thames on a clear, early autumn night;
4. St. Paul's Cathedral;
5. The speed and convenience of the London Underground;
6. The continued array of different accents and dialects that have persisted to the present;
7. The monarchy;
8. The view of Bath and the surrounding hills from the Royal Crescent;
9. The vast and diverse collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum;
10. A culture is far more literate and more attuned to the clash of ideas on a daily basis;
11. The ruins of the Roman Baths in--of all places--Bath;
12. An English roast chicken dinner with Yorkshire puddings, gravy, potatoes, cooked carrots, and peas;
13. The fact that they still measure distances in miles, even as they reckon speed in kilometers;
14. A stroll through the City of London on a quiet Saturday afternoon when all the banks, exchanges, and trading houses are closed;
15. Open, rolling hills dotted with sheep, cows, and enormous round bales of hay;
16. Public green spaces like Regent's Park and St. James's Park in London, Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, or the Royal Crescent in Bath;
17. A political system that allows for a more robust, even rough-and-tumble exchange of ideas as well as insults;
18. In that vein, Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park;
19. The Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich;
20. A pleasant evening spent in spirited conversation with friends in the corner booth of some pub, drink in hand;
21. Young children speaking with British accents;
22. Chocolate chip cookies from Gregg's Bakery on Goodge Street in Bloosmbury;
23. The fact that the legal drinking age is eighteen, not twenty-one;
24. A "constitution" that is not given in the form of a single document, but in a series of medieval charters, legislative statutes, international treaties, and unwritten conventions; and
25. The people from Dickinson College with whom I get to share all of the preceding.

My apologies for the sentimentality of Item #25. But as the Bard of Stratford put it in his masterpiece Much Ado about Nothing, "[b]y my troth, I [must] speak my thought." (Act I, Scene 1). In any event, a little more narration--and a little less sentimentality--later on.