Every city has its Italian restaurants, its St. Patrick’s Day parade and its Chinatown, but the English—the tea-stained-toothed tribe with the supercilious accent that unaccountably makes Americans go weak at the knees—are all but invisible. And unexploited.
We should rebuild England in Vegas. Only Englishier.
Tourists visiting Baker Street—home of the immortal Sherlock Holmes—frequently bemoan the lack of the traditional filthy yellow “pea souper” fogs that used to kill more Londoners every year than Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, the Luftwaffe and Henry VIII combined. Alas, the last of these killer mists appeared in the 1950s, exacerbated (says my dad) by the burning in domestic fireplaces of the tar-saturated wooden blocks left on the sidewalks in their thousands when officials dug up the tramlines. But that’s not to say they couldn’t be re-created and improved upon for the Vegas London experience.
Close your eyes now and breathe in the scent of spilled beer, bad plumbing and—mmm—freshly vinegared fish ’n’ chips. Now imagine the touristic appeal of authentic oak-beamed pubs and kebab (never “kebob”) shops ram-packed with savagely inebriated, bowler-hatted, berserker English scum mere minutes away from a good old-fashioned fist, bottle and knife fight with the psychotic but cheerfully smiling bobbies.
And lots of coughing. Coughing is what Brits do. Way more even than sipping tea with their pinkies cocked, kowtowing to royalty and singing traditional football songs like, “My old man said be a Chelsea fan. I said, F--k off, bollocks, you’re a c--t.” It defines them.
My wife and I recently spent five days in England. Everybody had a cough or cold and cheerfully used us as their man-sized Kleenexes. We were drenched in a fine drizzle of warm expectorate. Disgusting at first, yes, but once one’s ears become attuned to the perpetual barking, it becomes a comforting aural background—like the chirping of crickets or the ribbeting of tree frogs in the tropics.
At Heathrow, on our way home, we watched an airport security guard carefully open a passenger’s box of chocolates, gingerly remove the outer band, raise the lid, remove a piece of protective corrugated paper ... and cough. This is the sort of authenticity that must be worked into the Vegas London experience.
Englandland (“Englishier than England”) will consist entirely of filth and horse-dung-caked streets where, at a quarter past every hour, shrieking whores will toss up their voluminous petticoats and skitter wildly on the greasy cobbles, chased by savagely coughing, top-hatted and scalpel-wielding Mr. Hydes, Henry VIIIs, Sweeney Todds and Jack the Rippers. Tourists will swoon.
Cheeky, dirty-faced, prepubescent pickpockets will gladly dance for you and—if you toss them an extra thruppence—express undying and heartfelt gratitude for saving their would-be-speaking-German-if-it-wasn’t-for-us cheerful cockney urchin asses in not one but two World Wars.
Unlike those stuck-up, ungrateful bastards in Frenchland next door.