Bokelskere.no

She caught a tube to Shepherd’s Bush, where there were no shepherds and no bushes: only a foreigner can thoroughly appreciate how much of its heritage a country has lost. No saints or woods in St. John’s Wood, no knights or bridges in Knightsbridge, no black friars in Blackfriars. England’s Englishness was tourist brochure stiff, history book stuff, like the fairytale palaces of Kraków surrendering to acid rain and Kodak flashes, like Queen Anna Jagiellonka, buried even deeper by wars and ideology. The English Queen was only good for putting on tea towels and coffee mugs for Americans to take home, and all those castles were just crumbling to rubble, waiting to be used as backdrops in Hollywood movies about Robin Hood.