A Week in London

By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

MEVASSERET ZION, Israel — The Israeli government issued a travel warning for all Israelis going abroad. The animosity towards Israel, the massive pro-Palestinian (and hence anti-Israel) demonstrations all over the world threatened the welfare of Hebrew-speakers everywhere. But we had booked long ago to spend a week in London in November and meet friends, preferring to avoid the summer because our visit last year had been spoiled by the searing heat wave of July. And since we speak English we decided to go anyway.

The first thing we noticed when travelling on the tube (underground) was that London is full of foreigners speaking every language under the sun, ranging from Gujarati to Serbo-Croat and all stations in between, and that this didn’t seem to bother anybody. I doubt that the average Londoner would be able to identify Hebrew if he or she heard it and would display animosity to whoever was speaking it. On the contrary, whenever Yigal and I got into a crowded tube carriage younger people immediately vacated their seats to enable us to sit down (presumably our grey hair has that effect).

We were very fortunate in being able to meet old friends, some of them from my school days, others from my time at university, and most of them seemed to have grown old gracefully and in reasonably good health.

London has changed in some respects and remained the same in others. Travellers on the tube are now subjected to constant exhortations to take note of anything untoward, upon which they are required to: “See it. Say it. Sorted.” I don’t think my English teacher at school would have approved of that mangled version of the language. “Mind the Gap,” which used to be the catchphrase of choice, seems to have gone out of favour (but there don’t seem to be as many gaps between the train and the platform as before).

Culture in London is still a constant attraction, with plenty of exhibitions, concerts and plays. Since we were limited in time and availability, we ended up attending only one play, ‘Dear England,’ about the difficulties of being the manager of the English soccer team. It was produced and performed in a lively and original fashion, with plenty of fit young men in shorts jumping and running around on the stage, as well as declaiming their parts in a variety of regional accents, which did not always help us to understand what was being said. But it was a spectacle that was presented with a great deal of lively originality, and the ice-cream we had in the interval was as good as ever.