The days go slowly, but the years go faster. It is ten years ago this week that we made our first and only trip to the States. It was a package tour with Great Rail Journeys, a kind of retirement prize after I had just done eighteen months [post-retirement] locum work at Holy Trinity, Brussels. We had talked about going to the States forty years earlier, in the summer of 1976, in the days of Freddy Laker and Skytrain. But it didn’t happen. And that year we went from Paris to Scotland instead, and stayed with friends in Glenbucket, and took the little, original ferry across to Skye, from Glenelg to Kylerhea [the last manually operated turntable ferry in the world]. And in the heatwave of 1976 we swam and sun-bathed at Elgol. It was a good summer.
A first taste of the States
In May 2016 we flew from Heathrow with Virgin Atlantic. Of the outward flight I remember nothing except that the entertainment console broke down. The trip started in New York, in a hotel on Upper West Side with breakfast in a cafe above a supermarket across the street.
Our friends David and Cindy Kreh came up from West Grove, Pennsylvania. With them we did a boat tour around the State of Liberty. And looked at Times Square and the Twin Towers Memorial. On Sunday morning we went to Trinity Church Upper West Side and heard Tim Keller who was preaching. Very well, about being reconciled with your enemies. The music was restrained, a grand piano accompaniment and a clarinet. The congregation seemed to be predominantly young, yuppy, Asian-American.
American trains were generally comfortable and spacious. The first lap was to Washington. A city tour, on day one, the White House, the Jefferson Monument, the Martin Luther King Monument; followed by a day to explore. I went to the Arlington National Cemetery; Susie to Georgetown. And we met up in one of the magnificent [and free] Smithsonian Museums.
From Washington we had our first overnight on the train, arriving in Chicago after breakfast. The beds were comfortable enough. The attendant told us with amusement of a woman the previous trip who had tried to get into the bunkside string container. And was then unable to get out again without his help. AMTRAK policy was to mix people up in the restaurant car, so we had breakfast with a very young Amish couple who were travelling out to California for their honeymoon. Chicago itself was a bit of a blur. A bus trip took us past [a] Trump Tower and to the edge of Lake Michigan. Which was very grey and a bit misty. And we rode the A-Train, the elevated metro system. Trying unsuccessfully to remember the jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn that was the signature tune for the Duke Ellington orchestra
Go West Young Man
The phrase is attributed to the American journalist Horace Greeley. Colorado was in various ways the high point of our tour. By the end of the first week we were in Denver, the mile high city. I skipped out of a bus trip up into the Rocky Mountains, to Pikes Peak and the Estes National Park, [too scared of heights] and took in a Sunday morning service at Denver First Presbyterian Church. In a building that might have seated two thousand, there were roughly a dozen of us. Seated in the vestibule. Accompanied by three guitarists, one in snakeskin boots and a cowboy hat. we sang Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and Give me oil in my lamp. The lady minister discovered that I was from Scotland, and asked if I knew Scott Rennie, a gay Church of Scotland minister from Aberdeen [now at St Giles Cathedral here in Edinburgh.] But I didn’t. [And I still don’t.] After church I visited the Denver Museum. And fell heavily twice on the simulated ski jump. We spent an hour or two browsing in Tattered Page, an excellent bookshop and cafe in a converted church on Colfax Avenue. But I began to doubt my sanity when I nearly bought a biography of John Wayne !
After Denver we had a night in Grand Junction, and from there we took a bus up to Silverton, a historic, former mining town, 9,000 feet up in the San Juan Mountains. The population of the town dwindled as the last mines closed, and Silverton is now best known as the terminus of the historic, tourist railway, the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The railway was built in the 1880s to transport gold and silver ore from the mines, but it now runs purely as a tourist attraction. Using historic steam locomotives. The track runs along a narrow shelf high above the Animas Canyon. Happily I was distracted from looking out of the window by an invitation to the bar. From Bob Cottam, the former Hampshire and England cricketer, one of our group.
At Durango I had a copious breakfast in a diner adjacent to the hotel. Then, still on a bus, we made our way to Monument Valley, the valley of the rocks. On the border of Arizona and Utah. It is famous for its iconic sandstone buttes, which rise steeply out of the desert floor. The valley is best known [at least to me] as the setting for a clutch of John Ford Westerns. The film critic Kevin Phipps declared that the valley epitomises what cinema-goers think of when they think of the American West. Monument Valley is held as sacred by the Navajo Indians, and we had a very good lunch in a Navajo restaurant.
We were back on the train at Flagstaff, for a trip to the Grand Canyon. Extraordinary. A bit alarming for an acrophobic [me]. And impossible to photograph. And then back on the train for another overnight to Los Angeles. Of which I remember very little, other than the footprints of Hollywood celebrities. How can John Wayne have had such small feet ? The same size as Shirley Temple. Here we stayed on the Queen Mary at Long Beach. Compared with the enormous rooms of our usual hotels, the cabin was modest in size and the walls very thin. The Queen Mary was also hosting delegates to a big gay convention, and the noises from the adjacent cabin were disturbing.
The final destination was San Francisco. Our arrival there was delayed several hours by a body on the line. A bus took us from Oakland across the bay to our hotel. An initial city tour took us across the Golden Gate bridge, and up to the viewpoint of Bernal Heights, and through Haight-Ashbury, On our own we walked steeply uphill to the house where Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, and then on to the City Lights bookshop to buy a copy of the book. Which I hadn’t read for some 50 years. And we ate clam chowder on Fisherman’s Wharf, courtesy of a gift voucher from Rebecca.
Susie said that she could happily live in San Francisco. But after three days we flew home to Heathrow. Initially to child-sit at High Wycombe, and the following week to embark on a locum spell at St Alban’s, Strasbourg. It was a great introduction to the States. Good trains, good hotels. Great scenery. But an enduring memory is watching [parochial] news programmes on American tv. Which always featured an XXL-sized sheriff standing in front of the flashing lights of an enormous police car talking about a break-in at a local liquor store. And, even worse, we saw something of the debates between Trump and Clinton prior to the 2016 American election. When Hilary was speaking, Trump would leave his lectern and start prowling around her in a sinister, spooky way. Like a sex offender sizing up a potential victim on Wimbledon Common.
Envoi
I’m delighted that we made that trip to the States. Once. But while the country is under the present management we wouldn’t dream of going back. Incidentally I thought King Charles did as well as one could have hoped on his recent state visit. It sounded like a well-crafted speech to the two houses. And he did well not to react to Trump’s oleaginous remarks about his [“amazing, wonderful, much-loved, much missed” etc.] mother having a crush on the young prince. Whether it will influence this week’s elections I very much doubt. The whole Mandelson furore is a self-inflicted injury for the Labour Party. We’ve all known for years that Peter Mandelson is as bent as a corkscrew. And long committed to personal gain and self enrichment. Sometimes I think he’d fit well into the Reform party. Along with the other dubious millionaires and tax evaders
May 2026
Through a glass darkly 