The Decline and Fall of Empires
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Edinburgh—it’s the perfect place to read ghost stories and slurp down bowls of steaming hot soup and engage in general autumnal-ness. I will not, however, be sucked in by the ubiquitous PSL. Et tu, Scotland?
The Decline and Fall of Empires
When Lee and I arrive in a city that is known to have a thriving culinary scene, I have a system for figuring out where to eat. I check a handful of sources that I’ve come to trust (like Eater and Time Out), then I hop on Instagram. I try to find the local foodies and interesting restaurants, and branch out from there. It’s a quick and visual way to get ideas for where we want to eat (#willtravelforfood).
The day we arrived in Edinburgh, when I started digging into the tasty part of Insta, I was a little surprised by the overall mediocrity of what the local foodies were posting. It mostly looked like oversized portions of chain restaurant-style ordinariness. Blah.
But then I saw something that stopped me mid-scroll: one blogger had posted a worried explanation of why he was suspending his restaurant posts for the next few months. He said that between fuel prices and food prices, he was worried about getting through the winter, so he was giving up eating out for the time being.
That was the day we arrived. The next day was the Queen’s funeral, which was a national holiday. Edinburgh was mostly silent. It was a Monday, so rubbish hadn’t been picked up in a few days, and the streets were kind of a mess. I walked all over everywhere (searching for contact lens solution; I finally found one open pharmacy, deep in the grimy bowels of the train station) and saw very few people. It was a weird and slightly eerie welcome to a city that has, in past visits, felt comfortable and familiar.
And then—this week happened. I woke up Monday morning and saw that the exchange rate had tanked overnight. Now, if you’re not in the habit of making all of your daily purchases in a foreign currency, you probably don’t keep an exchange app on the home screen of your phone, but I do. I am still rooted enough in the concept of national currencies that I can’t really think about value without grounding myself in dollars.
But I definitely understand that the exchange rate matters to me. I saw that the pound was worth $1.07 (it had been holding steady at $1.15) and I texted Lee and told him to go crazy and have two breakfast pastries if he wanted.
For context, when my family first moved to the UK in 1970, the exchange rate was well over two dollars to the pound. In other words, we had to spend two dollars to buy one pound. Today, I can get a pound for $1.07.
On the surface, this would seem to be to our advantage, as it’s basically lowering prices for us. And I’m certainly not going to volunteer to pay more. But I still find it worrisome. I’m definitely no economist, but the whiff of decay is strong around here these days—it blends right in with the whiff of garbage and homelessness that hangs over the streets around our Airbnb.
I’ve been an Anglophile hovering at the edges of this country since I was three years old—I love the UK, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever stop loving it. But being able to step back and see the sweep of those decades, as a smitten outsider, is sobering. It feels like I’m watching a country slip down the ranks of nations in real time.
I suppose it’s the normal cycle of power and economies—nations rise, nations fall. No country can be number one forever. But it does beg the question: how does a country maintain its dignity on the downward slide? Do its citizens even realize they’re on that slide, or are they too busy going to Starbucks and fretting about the lighting in their Instagram posts?
Take care,
Lisa
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