The woman at the Wales Tourist Center in London could rent me a car for three days but not for two days, doubted it was allowable to pay for three days but return the car after two, and anyway didn't have the right kind of vouchers, could I please come back tomorrow. To any longtime American Anglophile, everything about this episode -- the saleswoman's sweet, bovine unreason, the infinite lack of rush, the commercial hopelessness of a Wales Tourist Center seemingly intent on keeping you out of Wales -- dripped with nostalgia for a lost civilization: pre-Thatcher Britain. Life isn't much...
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