The inquisitive one traveled to London. It was going to be an exciting adventure!

While in a crowded street market, the inquisitive one saw some postcards. “I could send these to my nephew and niece!” thought the inquisitive one, as a bunch of people jostled into the back, shoulders, and butt. When the inquisitive one went to pay for the postcards, there was a terrible realization: the credit cards, cash, phone, and passport were all missing!

Instinctively, and in a panic, the inquisitive one ran to that timelessly universal haven for inquisitive types, the public library. Frantically, the inquisitive one Googled what to do when lose passport England USA help! and scanned through some websites. Next, the inquisitive one logged into the email account and composed a message.

Here it must be noted that, due to shock and anxiety, the inquisitive one had been stricken with a psychological disorder! The inquisitive one could no longer distinguish fact from fiction, information from misinformation! Furthermore, the inquisitive one could no longer recall a single rule of spelling, grammar, or word usage! Consequently, the email read as follows:

Not knowing whom to put on the To: line, the inquisitive one sent it to every contact in the address book. Then the inquisitive one waited for a reply.

But no one replied! The inquisitive one kept checking the email for hours, but then, night fell. The library closed. The inquisitive one was forced to scrounge through trash bags for food and sleep in an alley.

The next day, the inquisitive one fell in with a band of drug dealers. But the inquisitive one, having no talent for sales, was not able to make any money. As the days passed, the inquisitive one started to despair of ever again eating something that didn’t come from a garbage bag. But then a fellow drug dealer invited the inquisitive one to, along with him, ditch the drug dealers and join a band of political agitators: which the inquisitive one gladly did.

This was a better situation because the political agitators took tea and crumpet breaks 15 or 20 times daily, which filled the belly nicely. These political agitators were pro-Brexit, or anti-Brexit, or anyway they had a very specific stance regarding Brexit. However, due to their use of incomprehensible words such as queue, quid, lift, and mummy dear, the inquisitive one was not able to determine what precisely that stance was.

Anyway, a few days after that, Fortune smiled even more happily on the inquisitive one: someone replied to the email! The inquisitive one collected $10,000 using the bank information sent by a (wonderfully kindhearted!) acquaintance, whom the inquisitive one vaguely remembered having met a couple of decades previously. Oddly, though, at the U.S. Embassy, the inquisitive one learned that, contrary to what the Internet very clearly stated, such a large sum of money was not required.

While the U.S. Embassy was working on issuing a new passport, the inquisitive one (with wonderfully kindhearted generosity!) gave the remainder of the cash, as well as the bank information, to the good drug-dealer-turned-political-agitator friend.

This friend, the inquisitive one had been astonished to learn, was Hamlet, Prince of Denmark! Well, or maybe he was Charles, Prince of Wales. In all honesty, the accents in this city were so thick that the inquisitive one could hardly understand a word anyone said. Or was he a Nigerian prince? In any case, he was a prince, but he had fallen on hard times and lost his throne. He promised to return all the money, and significantly more, to the (wonderfully kindhearted!) decades-old acquaintance of the inquisitive one, and to give the (wonderfully kindhearted!) inquisitive one a sizable pile of precious stones and jewels, once his throne was properly restored. And it surely would be restored within the next few days, due to the temporary loan of the money in the account!

The inquisitive one, strangely and sadly, lost contact with the prince at that point. But the very next day, the U.S. Embassy issued the inquisitive one a new passport! While the inquisitive one was not able to recover the lost credit cards, cash, or phone, the issuance of the new passport was a truly wondrous occurrence: and the inquisitive one’s anxiety faded away. Knowledge of spelling, grammar, and word usage returned. Also recovered was psychological sanity, including the ability to understand what was real; what was possible but unlikely; and what was rabid delusion.

MORAL: Health is better than wealth; and it’s easier, as they say in the wisest countries, to pass a needle through a camel’s eye, Amen.

Mind the gap! This I will do. Yes, sir; yes, ma’am!

It would be a shame to drop a personal item between the platform and the train—or, God forbid, a body part. I am finding that the gaps here in London are more irregular than in Washington, D.C., and truly do require some minding. Sometimes the train is flush with the platform. Sometimes there is a sizeable step up or down. Sometimes there is a sizeable gap. And sometimes one must be particularly mindful because there is a step and a gap.

Security Slogans

As with the subway, so with the language. Sometimes the language is perfectly intelligible to people on both sides of the Atlantic; sometimes there is a gap. For example, take the security slogan adopted by the British government and police and rail industry in 2016 and now ubiquitous in rail stations:

Upon first seeing and hearing this slogan, I knew what it was trying to convey, as the slogan is very similar to the one we have used in the U.S. since approximately 2007, and which originated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks:

In both cases, the message is simple and easy to follow. All you have to do is nothing—unless you happen to notice something unusual (like a bag left unattended), in which case you need to tell someone in uniform, because it might contain something dangerous (like a bomb).

The British Slogan in an American Mind

But the word “sorted” in the British slogan had me alternating back and forth between confusion and (carefully stifled) rolling-on-the-ground belly-laughter. To my American mind, the word sorted is mainly applicable to underwear drawers. So there I was, innocently trying to navigate a large, crowded station and figure out which platform my train would shortly arrive at, while imagining ripped security officers behaving as follows:

The British Slogan in a British Mind

I explained my confusion to a fellow attendee of the London Silent Book Club and asked what she thought of the slogan. Contrary to my interpretation, she thought it made the officers sound tough—even gangsterlike. To her British mind, the word sorted is mainly applicable to roughing people up. She put on her toughest, thickest accent and said to me,

“We’ll sort him out.”

Wow—a terrifying experience to hear her say that! I sure wouldn’t want to be (or see anyone I loved) “sorted out” by any British security officer, thank you very much!

(I would like to note here that I do not watch British television shows—or American television shows for that matter—so my ignorance of this word usage may be a mere personal problem, not any kind of commentary on international relations.)

Mind the Gap

But that’s not the actual intention of the slogan, either. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sorted is British slang for “arranged or dealt with satisfactorily.” In other words, the slogan means exactly what I originally thought it meant. If you see something suspicious, say something about it to security officials, and they will take care of the problem in the most appropriate way.

Perhaps the most appropriate way is to put the underwear and socks in neat little piles (ha!—doubtful). Perhaps the most appropriate way is to rough someone up and teach ’em a lesson they won’t forget anytime soon (ha!—perhaps).

More likely, though, the most appropriate way is to determine whether there’s a credible threat and, if so, evacuate the area. And then, all of the British and any American travelers can exit the train station, sit around together amidst their luggage, wait for news on when the trains might resume service, and bitch to one another about how shitty life is.

Because the gap is never really very large. Sometimes there’s no gap at all. Sometimes you need to take a little step, up or down, in formality. Sometimes you need to make a mini mental leap. Sometimes you even need to step and leap at once. But you never need to be a world-class long jumper or pole vaulter.

All you need to do is mind the gap!

Where did I hear of Penelope Fitzgerald? I can’t remember, but I believe I read about her recently.

It’s a subtle feeling, one I can’t substantiate. I could, I suppose, spend hours paging through my precarious stacks of magazines. There’s also the finger-snapping quickness of the Internet—which informs me that some 30 New Yorker articles in the past couple decades have made mention of her. None of these, however, jog my memory.

Perhaps this is fitting, as Penelope Fitzgerald is a writer of subtlety, who has herself, as an author, tended to fly under the radar. But she’s far from an unknown: even, apparently, to me. So when I was recently browsing through a little bookshop, and noticed a little book called The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald—I snatched it up.

The Bookshop is about an unassuming woman who opens up a bookshop in a remote corner of England. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and rightly so. The following passage, which ends a chapter, is a good example of the subtlety of Fitzgerald’s writing:

“She herself was going to take the ferry across the Laze, as it was early-closing day, to deliver thirty Complete Wild Flower Recognition Handbooks to the Women’s Institute. Remembering this, she took the top book off the crisp pile and looked through the illustrations for the green marsh plant which Raven had shown to her. It was not mentioned.”

Ah! So delicate, this passage. But why was the green marsh plant—the one plant, of all the plants on earth, most meaningful to the protagonist, as it was shown to her by a true friend, of which she had very few—not mentioned in the “complete” guide?

Perhaps the green marsh plant was not scientifically classified as a wildflower. Or perhaps the plant’s omission from the book was an error. But this is beside the point. The point is more filamentary. It has to do with the overlooked, the missing, the forgotten phenomena of the world.

What, after all, is the value of minute remembrance? What is the value of the overlooked, all those who are ignored by the public at large? What, indeed, is the value of books and magazines, when they never seem to contain what you’re really looking for?