Elbow Room

As I have observed to you before, The United Kingdom is incredibly old. It is also (as many of you may already know) an island nation. It is either the fact that they have nowhere to spread out to, or the fact that the villages have always been fairly close knit. I am not sure which is true, but as was observed to me by a coworker that was here before I came, everything seems smaller here. The houses have doors that I would knock myself out on constantly; I have hit my head going into stores on more than one occasion here.

The streets are narrow and much more often than you see in the states, they are often one lane (but still carry traffic going in two directions). As you would expect, this also carries over to cars. The car I rented over here was small by American standards but…


…c’mon! I have boots that are bigger than this!

I assume that the vehicles I wrote about in the entry on the Brighton Pier (the little two-seater BMW vehicles) are driven more for sport and fun than for practicality. But this is a primary transportation vehicle. I would hate to have to make a trip to the Home Depot in this but I’ll bet it gets great gas mileage! It’s probably really easy to fit into the parking spaces that they have here which, on average, are about the size of the twin beds that we had in our bedroom as kids.

“Free shoehorn with every test drive” would be my guess as to what the marketing campaign must be. All I can say is it certainly makes no less sense than the Hummers you see clogging our roads with a tiny little five-foot-six woman at the wheel. (No slight meant to women or people who are of average-to-small stature – I’m trying to slam Hummers and their drivers in general!)

Have a great day!

Don Bergquist – Thames Ditton, United Kingdom – 16, December, 2004