It's a wanderful life, so it is

We had two reasons for going to Washington. One was to watch an NFL american football game. The other was because Washington has its own powerful gravitional pull and being only two hours away, it was simply impossible to resist.

American football consists of a series of set piece plays, which feels strange to anyone who is used to free-flowing sport, like proper football for instance. This stop-start nature has its own rhythm where each and every play offers the promise of the most exciting moment of skill and human endeavour anyone has ever seen. That never happens of course but at least some moments of tension are guaranteed when one side must deliver or lose control of the ball. To the uninitiated, it all looks like dozens of grown men wearing sofa cushions re-enacting the battle of the Somme until the crowd goes wild because someone has actually managed to catch a ball. Fortunately Niall has educated us in the nuances of the sport so we were very well prepared.

Americans love an overblown spectacle so as well as the obligatory marching band they had a flyover by an enormous military aircraft and the unveiling of a pitch-sized flag – ten times the size of the largest flag in Britain – that even Trump might consider as too ‘bigly’.

Niall absolutely adores American football, especially his beloved and all-conquering Kansas City Chiefs. Our match was at the opposite end of the success scale, watching two of the worst teams from last season: the Carolina Panthers taking on the Washington Commanders. That’s why we thought our ticket prices were so reasonable. We’d carried out our due diligence when choosing our seats, of course, but either we’d been less than thorough or the internet may be unreliable. Both could be true, I suppose.

Whatever the reason, we had an almighty column blocking our view of one third of the pitch (they call it a football “field” but even a city boy knows that’s a place to put agriculture-type things, like sheeps and wheats). Amazingly, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as our concrete bunker helped to create a fantastic atmosphere. The fact that the Commanders dominated the game helped, as did all the alcohol, and inhibitions dissolved as people moved from seat to seat to avoid the huge column and there was much a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ and stomping of feet. It was great fun.

The National Mall is the highlight of Washington and runs from the Capitol building at one end to the Lincoln Memorial at the other with the Wasington Monument in between. It’s about the same length as the Houses to Parliament to the Tower of London and the lanscapes couldn’t be any more different. London is teeming with all sorts of buildings but the sense of space in the Mall is almost overwhelming. It’s as if America is saying to Europe, “Get a load of our spacious skies!”. Like american football, it is also full of set pieces, museums, government buildings, memorials and even a white house. Each one is spectatcular in its own right.

There is so much to see that we’ve walked even more than in Richmond. 26 miles in two days. Our next trip probably should be to a shoe shop but we have a couple of days in North Carolina, at the Outer Banks.

Note: I wrote this post before the U.S. election in which American voters backed a demagogue and his weird cabal, who have all the inhumanity of fascists but lack the competence to make the trains run on time. I don’t think any of us are insured for that but, in the cities at least, we have seen plenty of support for common sense that there is clearly hope for America and for the rest of us.