The Full English

By Bull Garlington

 

The Full English is the hilarious story of a father's failed attempt to take his family on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the United Kingdom, a disastrous trip ruined by his stratospheric expectations, his inner American, ennui fat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Writer PRO
• Release date: Apr 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578680644

Bull Garlington

Bull Garlington is an author and syndicated humor columnist whose work appears in parenting magazines including Chicago Parenting, New York Parenting, Michiana Parent, Tulsa Parent, Birmingham Parent, and Carolina Parent. He is co-author of the popular foodie compendium, The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats. Garlington’s features have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation since 1989; he won the Parenting Media Association’s Silver Award for best humor article in 2012. His book, Death by Children was a 2013 book of the year finalist for the Midwest Publishers Association, and was named 2013 Humor Book of the Year by the prestigious industry standard, ForeWard Reviews.

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Preface

The story I’m about to tell you may lead you to believe the crazy trip I took to the United Kingdom with my family was horrible and, by inference, so was the United Kingdom. This was not the case. My terrible experiences were entirely the result of being an overweight, out of shape, arrogant, cynical American out of his element (a Lay-Z-Boy) and unprepared for leisure travel with people older and wiser and, surprisingly, in much better shape than himself.

The United Kingdom is as charming and adorable as its people1 and so visually rewarding, it’s like driving through a series of expensive picture postcards (although Wales is still the best part2).

I am mostly a grumpy man, prone to complaint, and usually unwilling to move out of my comfortable recliner except to get coffee or let the dogs out. At the time of our trip, I was far more out of shape than I knew and woefully unprepared for the arduous walks across such treacherous terrain as level parking lots and well-groomed open fields that was required by the luxurious travel accommodations provided by A COACH TOUR COMPANY WHICH SHALL NOT BE NAMED.

It may seem that I spent those fifteen days bored, suffused with ennui, and pining for a beer. This is an accurate observation, but incomplete. There were certainly more instances when I was having a good time and truly excited about whatever ancient fucking castle we were about to climb way, WAY too many steps to get into. It’s just those moments don’t make for good travel writing and are banal to the point of skull fracture and I’m a goddam award-winning humorist with a professional obligation not to bore you with such luminous anecdotes as We saw this castle. It was exactly as advertised. We had a wonderful time, because you could very easily toss this slim volume into the trash and because there are 19-million other travel books already doing that and they’re all murderously boring.

Failure is the only thing that is ever interesting in a story. We are all suckers for schadenfreude; we revel in there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I tales from abroad.

There are various categories of failure and they’re all good. There’s carelessness, heedlessness, inadvertency, and laxity, all of which are fantastic. Then there’s default, delinquency, dereliction, misprision, neglect, negligence, nonfeasance, and oversight, each thrilling to behold in its inevitable conclusion in a jail cell, a train wreck, or a ball of fire.

My failure was typically American: I set stratospheric expectations of excessive adorability and was deeply disappointed when the United Kingdom turned out to be full of ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary places. It is the prevailing American mindset, and don’t tell me you don’t have it,3 that the rest of the world is our theme park. England is an English-themed attraction where we’ll get scones and tea and toad-in-the-hole and bitch about the French. In Scotland, we’ll eat haggis and listen to bagpipes and when a lone piper plays on the castle wall, we’ll get a tear in our eye and a brogue in our tongue and try to figure out how we can afford to buy a kilt. It tends to ruin this bubble of expectation when we take a bus from Dunboyne to Dublin that takes us through endless suburbs of cookie cutter homes which could be anywhere in America--especially when that bus picks up a bevy of disaffected Irish teens who plug in their headphones to listen to Foster the People4 and Adele.5 We could get that singular experience in Wisconsin any day of the week. There is a related failure in the subliminal disappointment of modern attractions like the Doctor Who Experience or a Dublin T-Shirt shop, both just well-organized roadside attractions and tourist traps, which would be perfectly at home in Kissimmee Florida as they are in the UK. Or the London Eye, which is a fine achievement in ride architecture but is still just a fucking Ferris wheel. Chicago invented Ferris wheels!

A POPULAR COACH TOUR COMPANY WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED knows this weirdness about Americans, and caters to it perfectly. Our perfectly curated itinerary took us from gift shop to gift shop with just enough musty old castles and rustic pubs in between to keep our Facebook feed properly and authentically British.6 I’d like to be cynical and call it pandering, but A POPULAR COACH TOUR COMPANY WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED was only responding to their target market. An American retiree visiting the mother country doesn’t want to get up in the morning and have a bagel and a cup of coffee. They want authenticity. Hence the Full English, a breakfast of pure, pan-fried insanity, as authentic to England as biscuits and gravy are to Alabama. Except biscuits and gravy are delicious and The Full English is beans.

[MY ATTORNEY] is third generation Irish. She’s so Irish she still knows all the Irish songs,7 she has a distinctly Irish name, and she grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood on the Northside of Chicago. Her father was a second generation Irish democratic politician with dual citizenship. She has cousins in County Cork. Our son is named Connor and believes he is Irish. Going to the Emerald Isles was a big deal.

I, on the other hand, am 9th generation Welsh. Also known as a frikkin’ American.8 My American-Welsh heritage goes back to the 17th century when Christopher Garlington sold his home in Jolly Olde for a peninsula in Virginia. A few generations later, the whole gang picked up and moved to Alabama where the government was giving away land. They eventually became coal miners and pipe-fitters. I’m about as Welsh as a Kardashian. But tell that to my family, who still hang a Garlington coat of arms on the wall like a shield and think they’re related to the Queen.

Garlington is a fairly unique surname. There aren’t many of us out there. Our family history involves a castle and a mansion and everyone named Garlington claims to have descended from the Garlingtons who married into the Conway family whom apparently owned Conway Castle in Wales so we all think we’re English royalty. I think every family reaches back to look for some proof of better days. We use ancestry.com to build a map of our name to hopefully lay our finger on some indicia of nobility then lord it over our double-wide neighbors to prove we aren’t actually mongrels.9

I was well aware of this the first time I visited England. I was 18, in a student exchange program for Lions Club International. I was supposed to travel with another kid from my hometown, Danny Jones,10 but last minute problems meant the club had to send him to stay with a family in Lancashire, while sending me to stay with a Podiatrist in Loughton who was entirely unprepared to have an 18-year-old American living in his home. My hosts, Ted and Corrine,11 were diligent and helpful but couldn’t do much about having to go to work every day, leaving me alone in a beautiful row house in a country where I didn’t speak the language but could legally buy beer. They gave me a key to the front door, showed me how to catch the Tube, and wished me luck. I spent hours and hours traveling all over London completely alone, delightfully bewildered, and utterly hammered. It made a deep impression on me, which, when married to my family’s insistence that we are goddam Welsh royalty, galvanized some kind of deep connection between my 18-year-old soul and lush Britannia.

When [MY ATTORNEY] changed my original travel plans to include England, this connection was energized and lit up and I was suddenly overjoyed. Returning in my late 40s with wife and children and mom in tow loosened a collection of emotions and reflection I don’t normally entertain. I expected my kids to have the same deeply reflective and slightly spiritual experience I’d had as a teen.

They did not.

Riding a bus for ten days straight also brought up some emotions I had spent years stuffing into a hole wherefrom they should not ever escape. I am a child of divorce so I moved around a lot as a kid and spent a lot of time alone on a school bus staring out a window through the rain, brooding. When I rode the bus through the UK, I reverted back to this depressive, hideous whiny pose and spent a lot of time alone staring out a window into the rain, brooding.12 In both cases, it would be helpful if I could travel back in time and whack both iterations of myself with a seven iron.

Sigh.

Great Britain is beautiful. It is an endless rolling documentary on adorability. I wish I had gotten into shape before I left. I wish I had drunk more coffee and less beer. I wish I had stayed awake. Instead, through my own pathetic fault, I spent upwards of $20K to sleep through the United Kingdom.

I present to you my memoir of the most expensive nap in the world: I give you The Full English.



Hail Britannia

In August, 2011, my wife and I took our family on the trip of a lifetime. We spent an embarrassing wad of money. We got on a plane with my two teens and my mom and flew to London for a trip through the U.K.: 1100 miles of picturesque countryside, thatched roof cottages, and tweed. It was a weird mash-up of the Beatles, Doctor Who, and Downton Abbey fused with a British Literature class and carbon monoxide.

And I slept through it all.

Maybe it was the sheep. There are a lot of sheep along the roadsides in England and when you’re on a bus six hours at a time after a nine-pound breakfast and a beer, the coach gently rocking you in your form-fitting seat with the sun shining on you through the blurry Plexiglas window that will become the lens through which you will experience the bulk of Britannia, you will count those goddam sheep until you pass out.

I don’t really know how we ended up on a coach tour.13 My original plan was to rent a house on the Ring of Kerry. It came with a car. It was stumbling distance from a town crammed end to end with pubs. There were 140 acres in the back leading down to the ocean. My idea was to arrive, open a beer, and stare. I got all the info together and gave it to my wife who rolled her eyes, trashed my dreams, and put us on a bus.

I’m in my early 50s and I don’t consider myself a senior yet.14 I don’t have to, there’s a legal definition I can wave in anybody’s face if they even offer me a discount. In my mind I’m still 17, but my body disagrees; my body thinks I’m 85 with bad hips. Maybe it’s because I’m fat as a house, or perhaps it’s because I haven’t exercised regularly since 1989. The thing is, I don’t think of myself as an old man so when my wife told me she’d booked us on a coach tour of the U.K. my inner teen smartass was having none of it.

Seriously? A coach tour? You know that’s the Grandma goes to Vegas package, right?

Don’t be an idiot. It’s a wonderful tour.

Will they have room for our scooter-chairs?

Id. Dee. Ut.

I dare you to ask.

She’s a lawyer so, challenge accepted. She dials the company running the tour. She asks a couple of questions then shuts the door to the kitchen. I can hear muffled questions. Long silences. She comes back.

They can accommodate motorized wheelchairs for up to 30 people.

"What’s that dear? I can’t find my hearing aids—OH, MY SACROILIAC’S GONE OUT!15"

I had spent a year working on this trip. A year. Or, like, maybe six months. Or, ok. Maybe like, a week. But still. I’d put some effort into it. I was proud of my work and [MY ATTORNEY] just rolled her eyes and tossed it.

This isn’t the first time she’s ruined a vacation.

Sometime around 2002, we went to New Orleans for ten days because she was there on business so she bracketed her meeting with vacation days, we dropped the kids off with my mom, and headed south.

[MY ATTORNEY] handed me a three-page itinerary, single spaced with bullets and maps.

I don’t do agendas.

Shut up. We’ll have a great time.

Can’t we just wing it?

No, we can’t just wing it.

I like to arrive in a new city unprepared. I like to explore, to discover–

Everybody already knows New Orleans; you’re not discovering anything.

I want to get lost in the city.

I’m just gonna let that one hang there for a minute.

People who take agendas on vacation are still at work.

Fine, Columbus, you have the two days I’m in the conference to do whatever you want.

No plans?

I plan to listen to your admission that not having a plan is a stupid way to vacate.

That is not going to happen because I’m going to have an awesome time.

I had a horrible time. I woke up late, I got lost in the city but not in a good way. I finally decided to head over to Poche’s Charcuterie for some cracklings. I’d read about Poche’s in a foodie article and I thought it was just outside New Orleans which is true if you measure things in Texases but not true if you measure things in miles and minutes because Poche’s is in Beaux Bridge which is 126 miles west of New Orleans and it was Sunday.

How do I get to Poche’s? I asked the front desk.

What on earth is a Poche? They replied.

A charcuterie just outside the city?

Well of it’s just outside the city, then it shouldn’t take very long.

One of the bellmen leaned over. Aw man, Poches is the bomb. Just head out 10 and you’ll be there in no time flat.

I headed west on 10 and finally, after hours of driving, I got to Poche’s, parked my car, and got out.

A few things about me.

Because I’ve been slowly going deaf for most of my life and because I enjoy the occasional binge on heavy metal, I can read lips. A little. I mean I can read lips if somebody talks slow, and since I was in the south, that’s pretty much everybody.

Secondly, I had a do-rag period I am not entirely proud of. On this day I was wearing a do-rag I’d made myself from some scrap cloth I got at Walmart with a flame motif that would’ve made Guy Fiery feel gauche, a motif that matched my shirt perfectly well as it was a bowling shirt covered in little Tabasco sauce bottle print, open over a heavy metal t-shirt featuring a delightfully Satanic rendition of a cross bedecked in human skulls, over rather poorly fitting shorts and sandals.

I was listening to the kind of heavy metal that can only be attributed to musicians who were bored and disaffected by their lives as drug trafficking bikers while axe murdering tourists in Mexico. Loudly.

Also, I’m a big guy. And I don’t mean I work out big. I mean I eat a lot of fucking steak and potatoes and Italian beef and beer big. I mean Alabama/Chicago big. I mean fat. And short.

I got out of the car and stood up, looked over the roof into the faces of the good people of St. Martin Parish, dressed in starched white and khaki, with polished shoes and pearls and light coats and