Despite all the business, I have found some time for reading. One of these indulgences has been Letters from England by Karel Čapek, first published in Prague in 1924. Against my expectations it is a delight and pretty nearly a laugh a page — which is likely what was intended. All interspersed with Čapek’s curious little drawings.

Čapek is best known for writing, with his brother Josef, two almost iconic plays: R.U.R. (1920) and The Insect Play (1921). I know the latter as the short scenes were a staple of my school’s “house plays” and we even did a complete staging in my final year at school as that year’s school play. Ants running amok in the auditorium! Dark and malevolent; but great fun.

But Letters from England is Čapek’s reportage on a visit he paid to Britain. First he sojourns in London:

[S]ince I have already been on this Babylonian island ten days, I have lost the beginning. With what should I begin now? With grilled bacon or the exhibition at Wembley? With Mr Shaw or London policemen? I see that I am beginning very confusedly; but as for those policemen, I must say that they are recruited according to their beauty and size: they are like gods, a head above mortal men, and their power is unlimited. When one of those two-metre Bobbies at Piccadilly raises his arm, all vehicles come to a halt, Saturn becomes fixed and Uranus stands still on his heavenly orbit, waiting until Bobby lowers his arm again. I have never seen anything so superhuman.
…
[A]t night the cats make love as wildly as on the roofs of Palermo, despite all tales of English puritanism. Only the people are quieter here than elsewhere.
…
But not as long as I live will I become reconciled to what is known here as ‘traffic’, that is, to the volume of traffic in the streets. I remember with horror the day when they first brought me to London. First, they took me by train, then they ran through some huge, glass halls and pushed me into a barred cage which looked like a scales for weighing cattle. This was ‘a lift’ and it descended through an armour-plated well, whereupon they hauled me out and slid away through serpentine, underground corridors. It was like a horrible dream. Then there was a sort of tunnel or sewer with rails, and a buzzing train flew in. They threw me into it and the train flew on and it was very musty and oppressive in there, obviously because of the proximity to hell. Whereupon they took me out again and ran through new catacombs to an escalator which rattles like a mill and hurtles to the top with people on it. I tell you, it is like a fever. Then there were several more corridors and stairways and despite my resistance they led me out into the street, where my heart sank. A fourfold line of vehicles shunts along without end or interruption; buses, chugging mastodons tearing along in herds with bevies of little people on their backs, delivery vans, lorries, a flying pack of cars, steam engines, people running, tractors, ambulances, people climbing up onto the roofs of buses like squirrels, a new herd of motorised elephants; there, and now everything stands still, a muttering and rattling stream, and it can’t go any further …

Amongst Capek’s perambulations of the country he visits the Lake District and makes this note on the sheep:

Pilgrimage to the Sheep. It is true that there are sheep everywhere in England but lake sheep are particularly curly, graze on silken lawns and remind one of the souls of the blessed in heaven. No-one tends them and they spend their time in feeding, dreaming and pious contemplation.

He also makes numerous observations on the English themselves, including thes delights:

I wouldn’t like to make overly bold hypotheses, but it seems to me that the black and white stripes on English policemen’s sleeves have their direct origin in this striped style of old English houses.
…
Most beautiful in England though are the trees, the herds and the people; and then the ships. Old England also means those pink old gentlemen who with the advent of spring wear grey top hats and in summer chase small balls over golf courses and look so hearty and amiable that if I were eight years old I would want to play with them and old ladies who always have knitting in their hands and are pink, beautiful and kind, drink hot water and never tell you about their illnesses.
…
Every Englishman has a raincoat or an umbrella, a flat cap and a newspaper in his hand. If it is an Englishwoman, she has a raincoat or a tennis racket. Nature has a predilection here for unusual shagginess, overgrowth, bushiness, woolliness, bristliness and all types of hair. So, for example, English horses have whole tufts and tassels of hair on their legs, and English dogs are nothing but ridiculous bundles of locks. Only the English lawn and the English gentleman are shaved every day.

It’s real reportage of the hastily concocted letter home variety. A sort of semi-structured stream of consciousness. And none the worse for that. As I say it is pretty much an amusement a page. A couple of evening’s bedtime reading or something to while away a train journey.