I go out there.
I write about what I find.

As of this very warm afternoon, Grace and I have been in Britain for three weeks. Three weeks in most anywhere is certainly enough time to see the major sites — but preoccupied with other duties, and finding that the train into the city from our current accommodation is both one hour away and US$10 (one way!), we have often hesitated…

Until today. Because this evening, we have mustered the cash, risen from the London Underground, and emptied our schedules. Well, at least I have: my wife’s schedule, to her great pleasure (for reasons you may soon understand), has not: a friend from New Zealand lives in London — as does seemingly half the population of that very remote country — and they are to spend a few hours catching up.

As we go our separate ways now, I leave the familiar and enter into the unknown: if you had asked me this morning, “Have you been to London?”, I would’ve said, “yes.” But confronted with a reality of raw concrete that I cannot twist any which way, I am forced to acknowledge that I have never truly been to London.

Because on a bus, or in a train, or bound by a tight schedule, you are secluded: often physically, other times by excuses, but nevertheless, you are partitioned. And in being so, you inevitably lose the greatest lost art I have just uncovered: walking.

I tell you, Americans and New Zealanders both have it wrong: cars, buses, or trains certainly can travel more distance than a British man on foot, but they can only take you so far; and once the future is faced by a man on only