Fry in America

Seems to be something of an American media theme this last few days, no doubt prompted by the presidential circus, but as it means we get the national treasure that is Stephen Fry with a new show, "Stephen Fry in America", as he crosses the United States in a London taxi cab (not his own one which he so famously drives around here in Blighty though). I had no idea he was almost born in the US when his father was offered a job at Princeton but he turned it down. Hard to think of Fry as American, he seems to quintessentially British - I mean Twinnings got him to advertise their tea, he cooks on an Aga and gives a wedding present to Prince Charles. All of which might have made him annoying except he seems such a lovely bloke, fiercely intelligent and very funny and self depreacting with it. America's loss was our gain.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain.

Twain/Sam Clemens has been a favourite author since I was a boy. In the bus to work a few days ago I looked up from my book when it was picking up passengers and saw someone had written this quote on the window of their flat facing out into the street two stories up where only the occasional person in a double decker bus would be high and close enough to read it. How lovely. Of course, I tend to include reading as 'travel' because it is travel for the mind...