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I woke up on board a 747. Once I’d remembered why, I looked at my watch, and estimated we were an hour or two from landing. I took a drink of water. Soon the BA flight attendants started bringing in breakfast, and I gently prodded the spouse awake. Against all probability, I had managed to get 2 or 3 hours of pretty decent sleep onboard an airplane. Soon we landed at Heathrow Terminal 4.

As we disembarked from the plane, I started to hear raised voices. It turned out that some genius in the UK’s Department for Transport had set new airline luggage policies.

Flying in to the UK, you can carry one piece of hand luggage, and one personal item such as a laptop. However, flying out of the UK, you can only carry the one piece of hand luggage. The piece de resistance: the restrictions apply even if you’re only changing planes at Heathrow.

Hence numerous business travelers had flown in with a travel bag containing valuable or fragile items, and a laptop bag containing their laptop. They were now arguing with airport security because they couldn’t fit the laptop bag inside their other bag, and didn’t want to trust the laptop or their carry-on to the tender mercies of the baggage throwers. And I can quite understand–I often travel with a carry-on bag containing SLR and lenses.

Still, it wasn’t our problem, so we strolled past the angry people and headed to immigration. Thanks to my European passport, I could waltz into the fast line. The woman who checked my passport was wearing a Muslim jilbāb, and the situation struck me as slightly ironic.

True to the promise, our luggage got priority, and hit the carousel first. We found our way through customs, and my parents were waiting to meet us. Mother was clearly very excited. Hugs were exchanged, and we got into the Range Rover for the trip to Bournemouth.

England was much as I remembered it. The countryside is not unlike the Texas Hill Country, though of course it lacks the cactus and vultures, and the trees are different species. The buildings are the main difference–old, often dirty, and made of brick.

Bournemouth isn’t home, and I don’t think it ever will be. However, pretty much my whole family decided to up and move there after I had left for the USA, and they love it. It’s like they’ve lived their all their lives. So the place gives me a strange feeling, as though Buckinghamshire is just an implanted false memory.

It’s certainly a nice enough town. But in spite of recent changes, it’s still a bit of a sleepy seaside resort, and not the kind of place I’d want to live. And since it’s the most expensive place in the UK for property, we couldn’t afford to live there anyway.

The sea is cold. After a week or so, when the weather warmed up, there were people swimming in it; but I wasn’t going to be one of them. However, we did walk along the sand, and splash around in the surf a bit.

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

In case anyone in the UK is feeling complacent following this week’s US torture legalization, it’s worth noting that the US agreed to return nearly all the UK residents currently being tortured in Guantanamo—and the UK government said it didn’t want them back. Four of them are still being actively torturedinterrogated.

We like to think that we are immune to propaganda. Yes, other feeble-minded individuals may allow their attitudes to be shaped by the media and their surroundings, but we’re sure that we are far too smart for that.

In 1975, John Cleese savagely satirized British attitudes to Germany, in the classic Fawlty Towers episode The Germans. After a blow to the head, hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty loses his ability to self-censor. While taking a dinner order from some German guests, he proceeds to blurt out the names of Nazis; eventually he descends into xenophobic ranting.

The sad thing is that after 30 more years, nothing much has changed.

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When Britain started deploying surveillance cameras everywhere, civil libertarians got worried. No need to panic, they were reassured—the cameras were just to watch criminals, they weren’t going to be spying on law-abiding citizens.

Well, starting next year the government will be using the networked cameras to feed computers running license plate recognition software. They will record the time, date and location of every car they see, and store the information in a big database. The database will be kept for two years.

That’s just the start, too. They hope to link thousands of more cameras in to the system, and extend the database capacity to five years. So soon, any time you travel by car in the UK, the government will have a complete record of your journey.

• The trouble with being a goth is, you can’t be a goth at a seaside resort like Bournemouth. It just looks silly. Trust me on this.

• I notice stupidity is being imported from America. I saw a letter in The Guardian where the author, apparently serious, refered to himself as an “African-Briton”.

• Speaking of which, when did The Guardian start carrying ads for phone sex lines and hot bi action?!

England seemed much more bearable this time. I think there were several reasons for this. Firstly, now that my family have all up and moved to Bournemouth, there are actually things to do when I’m visiting. About the only thing worth doing in Hyde Heath was getting a lift to Amersham station and a train to London.

The second thing is that it was summer, which means the rain was slightly less frequent and it was pleasantly warm. There’s definitely something to be said for visiting at times other than Christmas.

Another bonus is that I love the sea. I could probably just sit on the beach and listen to it for an hour.

The final factor is that I hadn’t been back to England in three years. My mother didn’t even begin to annoy me for the first week. Edd seems to have taken over the responsibility of arguing with dad, so I had no choice but to get on with everyone.

Bournemouth is still very much the traditional English seaside resort, complete with beach huts, pier, and chip shops. The town center has streets of shops radiating away from a central park, with a balloon ride for sightseers. West of the town center, where my parents live, the hills almost become cliffs and there are all kinds of excitingly rugged chines suitable for geocaching.

To the east is the New Forest, so called because it was planted on the orders of Henry VIII, who felt that England needed a ready supply of timber for wartime use. Obviously for me, one of the high points of the visit was the weaselarium. It’s officially called the Otter, Owl and Wildlife Park, but there’s a clear emphasis on mustelids. Oh, yes, there are plenty of owls I suppose, and some deer… but they have weasels galore. American river otters, European river otters, Asian small-clawed otters, mink, pine martens, stoats, ferrets, polecats, and even a couple of badgers. I think I can safely say you won’t see more varieties of weasel in one place. The animals all seemed to have plenty of space, too. Inside there was a definite musky weasel smell, which we began to recognize from time to time while out walking in places like Hengistbury Head.

Being away for July 4th, we still managed to see fireworks, but without the attendant nauseating warmongering and overpatriotic fervour. The evenings were warm enough to wander the beach, mostly. All told, a pleasant vacation.

England is about to lurch further to the right. David Blunkett is said to be planning further “reforms” which will partially abolish the right to trial by jury, and end the “double jeopardy” rule by which you cannot be tried twice for a single crime. Police will also now be allowed to electronically tag suspects who have not been accused of any crime.

The right to silence was ended some years ago now, and armor-plated cameras routinely watch the‘citizens’ of Britain, piping their video feeds directly to central police monitoring stations.

It’s hard to be precise about these things, but I think most impartial observers would conclude that after these new ‘reforms’, the UK will actually be substantially further towards the authoritarian, fascist right wing than the USA. It’s the continuation of the trend I saw around 1995, when it became clear that the Labour party had been destroyed, and that the Liberals would continue to be kept out of power by the corrupt and undemocratic electoral system. The scary thing is that the UK government basically has no opposition; the Conservative party is rabidly in favor of increasing police powers and cracking down on pesky civil liberties as well. Don’t expect much public outcry; as far as I can tell the people of England are as complacent as ever.

I’m really glad I escaped when I did. I can’t imagine going back.