On Friendship; or, What Nottingham can tell us about New Orleans

As the song says, it was John Wesley Harding who was a friend to the poor. But certainly Robin Hood would stand stand a good chance of sharing that title. After all, he robbed the rich to feed the poor; so the "medieval legends and tall tales" inform us. Well, Old Ken happened recently to be in Nottingham and had some adventures there—events whose meaning I haven't quite been able to fathom. But, given the heart-wrenching disaster in New Orleans of late, my own humble observations in Nottingham have begun to take a kind of comprehensible shape. So, I apologize if I seem to be mixing comedy with tragedy too freely here, but as Old Ken has found the two are inxtricable from this thing we call the human condition. So, sit back and let me try to tease out this tale.



Now, as you can probably imagine, modern-day Nottingham looks little like that of Robin Hood's day. The mysterious haunts of the enchanted Sherwood Forest have been replaced by sterile high rises, shopping malls and franchised pubs.





But, lest we forget about the adventures of Little John, Friar Tuck and the Merry Men, one can visit the "Tales of Robin Hood" theme park. Perhaps the bastard spawn of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, a Chuck E. Cheese's pizza shop, and a taxidermy studio (as is suggested by the disturbing and frankly inexplicable stuffed dogs whose animatronic barking greets the horrified visitor upon entrance), "Tales" must serve as the necessary training ground for the Goth community of Nottingham. I mean where else are you going to be paid to wear velvet pants, long flowing capes, and extensive amounts of costume jewelry in the name of appearing "medieval"?



In any case, once escorted by a "wench" back in time, one boards a ski liift-like seat, which is attached to a motorized track hanging from the ceiling. It is here that the real confusion begins. For, as the chair begins to buck forward and swivel to guide us through the various dioramas depicting life in Nottingham and Robin Hood's exploits therein, audio speakers located both within the chair and the papier-mache environment begin barking out atmospheric sounds and fragments of dialogue. Add to this cacophony the ambient noises emanating from the other moveable seats surrounding one's own—sounds which are just enough out of sync to produce a very strange echo effect—and a crushing nauseous headache begins to build.



While I won't go through a full catalogue of the curious characters one can meet in the diverse environments ...



I will mention that they look as if they could use a good cleaning.




Look, for example, at that puddle of slime oozing from the over-turned pitcher on the wooden table above. Ummm, slimey.



But, lest we get carried away entirely, let me note that I shared this adventure with my friend Tim, who has recently moved to Nottingham. I had planned my trip up to visit him and to witness the legal component of his marriage to the lovely Bev at the Nottingham register office. It was touching for Old Ken to be invited to such a ceremony and to have made such great friends in Tim and Bev. But in our preparations for post-wedding picnic, I happened across an experience which has resonated with me as I have watched the images coming from New Orleans through tears of rage.




So here was the situation: Tim and I were in a grocery store, gathering materials for the picnic and waiting to meet Bev who was at work. We had been shopping for some time and thought we had covered most of the basics. We had fruit, vegetables, cheese, beer, cookies, crackers, "crisps," hummus, luncheon meats, and so on.





Feeling slightly bewildered by all the shopping, Tim and I gathered our thoughts in the produce aisle. Had we thought of everything we would need? What else would people want? Feeling like we had lost the ability to see the forest for the trees, I turned to a woman who was picking out some pears and began to ask her a question. I wanted to get her thoughts on what we might need for this event, so I turned and asked her "do you go on picnics?"

I had planned to immediately follow her response with an explanation that Tim and I were running out of ideas and we wanted to make sure our bases were covered. I was stopped, however, by the absolute look of horror on her face. She was looking at me in pure disgust, as if I had a second head—and the head of an alligator at that—sprouting out of my neck. "No!" she responded in disdain, turning on her heel and walking away.



Well, needless to say, I was pretty confused by such treatment. Later, it was explained to me (by an English woman) that, from the perspective of an English person, I had asked this woman a really personal question. Or, better said, I had asked her for personal information that no English person would feel confortable divulging to a stranger. This sounded a little paranoid to me, but her generalization of the principle was much more chilling. People in England, she claimed, "simply don't talk to people they don't know in public places."

Now, as I think I have shared in my story of having been "born on a blue boat," English people seem willing to believe anything Old Ken tells them—granted that I have been introduced to them by a friend of theirs. That is, I can tell them some of the most ridiculous tall tales and I can tell those stories BADLY. Nonetheless, if and when I choose to alert them to the fact that I am pulling their legs, they are always shocked at the audacity. The assumption, as I have begun to see it, is that someone to whom they are introduced by a friend—a friend of a friend, or someone who is an accepted part of the group—simply has to be a good person, a straight dealer, and someone who would never intentionally take them for a ride. By contrast, as was most dramatically demonstrated by the failed picnic inquiry (although I could, sadly, provide many other similar incidents), someone who is a stranger, an outsider, or, God forbid, a foreigner is to be treated with the most extreme suspicion, as their intentions can only be malicious.



Many people will no doubt have far more intelligent things to say about the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans than Old Ken. But, as I have watched the aerial images of my brothers and sisters dying in their thousands, this ridiculous encounter in Nottingham keeps running through my mind, as if we are witness to its multiplication on a massive (and therefore much more cruel) scale. For, where else has the clannish (a word chosen advisedly) mentality—to trust and provide for those you perceive to be like yourself and to refuse fellowship and actively repel those who are other—recently manifested in such clear and devastating terms? Sadly, as I'm sure astute readers will remind me, we are not short of comparable examples. But, the fact that such privation, such denial of friendship, is being practiced on our own people by a government that—whether we voted for it or not—represents us, fills me with profound shame, sadness and bitter rage. We will not be forgiven for this.