Today I slept late and woke up to an email from back home reminding me that I hadn’t written-up a set of committee minutes that had been due out before we left the UK, three weeks ago! Doing the write up took another hour, but at least I got them done before we left.
There was the inevitability of packing to be done, plus the family were due over for a farewell roast dinner before we left for the airport. The dinner was very tasty and was followed by banana pudding and a baseball match on TV. Then we loaded up the van (OMG how much luggage do two people need??) and Ali drove us to the airport.
The temperature here is heading back towards the seasonal norm of the mid- to high-thirties Celsius and even with the air-conditioning running, I was still sweating all the way to DFW!
We got checked-in without incident, after initial horror at seeing a whole platoon of US Army troops queuing for the desks. It turned out they weren’t flying on United, so we just had to get through them and our own desks were clear.
So as I sit here waiting for our flight to be called, I’m ruminating a bit on Dallas and the State of Texas. Talking to Brett’s mum yesterday in the car, about the state of Downtown Dallas, we came to the conclusion that the city was really a big ‘small town’: It is so spread out and disparate in both its layout and its thinking that no-one seems to be able to inject any enthusiasm for a city-centre project, everyone seems to be very concerned for their districts and neighbourhoods, but they don’t look beyond that.
The city is spending a lot of money on building its own Spaghetti Junction though. There are lots of road works going on on the main arterial routes and they are building bridges like there’s no tomorrow with carriageways being carried high and interweaving with half a dozen others. I’m sure it will look very beautiful when it’s complete and be absolute hell to navigate. And I don’t know why they need it all anyway. There’s not really anywhere to go that’s so different from anywhere else in the city. In the ‘Things To Do’ section of the local paper, the restaurant listings filled about 80% of the column space, with barely a couple of pages filled by the Arts and other community activites. There is also a disturbing propensity to dress children in t-shirts which proclaim them members of ‘God’s Army’ or the ‘Jesuit Rangers’. Religion seems to be a big focus of many people’s lives here.
All that said, the people I did meet were warm and open and very friendly. London could learn a lot from the social culture here, although I fear it never will because the pace of life here is so much slower than in somewhere like London or New York. People have time to interact here. The sprawl of Dallas means that everyone has their own space and then some. It is not a crowded city. I’ve had a lovely relaxing break here, without any of the pressure or stress I often get when I travel abroad. Meeting Brett’s family has been great and I hope we can entertain them in London some time soon. I feel I’m ready to go home now though. Time to get back to work.