That England wasn't just London, you had already understood at sixteen when, on a splendid yet bitter study holiday with most of our high school classmates, we played cricket in Manchester, got lost among the spiers of Oxford and felt the cold of the water reaching our bones when trying to bathe in the North Sea at the end of June. Likewise, many years later, crossing Cornwall for a conference where we presented work on how to improve the management of water networks using the mathematics of social networks, what captured us were not the brilliant minds we met, but the tides that had swallowed and regurgitated the landscape every day for centuries, the ruins of Arthur's castle on the steep cliffs of Tintagel and the largest biosphere in the world which hosts the Eden Project.
This time traveling from Bath to Cambridge, crossing the counties of Somerset, Wiltshire and Essex, trying to condense your thoughts as much as possible as if tracing a flow chart, you are left with other strong images behind the dazzling lights of the City. The endless meadows of a green that only the incessant and nebulized rain can color so intensely, the sunless charm of the navigable canals that systems of locks connect continuously from West to East, the terraced houses all the same like soldiers ready to defend themselves from the next invasion (which, here they are sure, will arrive), the order of things each damned in its place, the architecture without pomp, the fast roads that cut through hills dotted with a white fauna cruelly friendly to the his executioner.
But it's not the places that mark you; and just as gazes are formed in experience, in the daily exercise of relationships, pain, passions, so in memories the forms of the humans who populate these lands are more strongly impressed than the often uncontaminated nature or the buildings with colors respectful of the rural landscapes or even the fascinating Roman baths where, perhaps for the first time, you have the vivid sensation that there were other Pompeii beyond the Alps.
Rather, character is the protagonist of this immense island; the pride of the indomitable women of Jane Austen's stories - a female force that has governed men for centuries like nowhere else, the elegance of prejudices, the invasive kindness, the austerity in study, the fierce competition in sport and the timeless pride that in Cambridge you perceive on the streets that immortal poets, scientists and artists crossed.
The same pride that Joanne Rowling gave to Herry Potter's eyes when she twirls her magical holly wand in the air. As if everything were possible: stopping the Vikings, occupying half the world with colonies, repelling the Nazis and then destroying them by organizing the largest landing in history, even crossing walls at stations and flying on wooden brooms or under colored umbrellas. A lucid pride that doesn't seem to warm the heart, surrounded by the gray that envelops everything.
In the gaze of today's first lady, beyond political considerations, there are the same eyes, somehow the same pride, as Austen, the last Shah, the Queen Mother, Churchill and Potter. A single woman challenges an entire continent and here, everyone you ask now doesn't agree, perhaps they no longer agree as in 2017.
At dinner, my colleague with the long bangs, the pink skin dotted with freckles, the English dress and the Bristol accent, says to me almost in a whisper: "Brexit... a stupid thing!". Then he explains that we will see, that the United Kingdom is strong, it is independent. Then I look at her better and in her posture, in her gaze, she seems like the prime minister. The feeling is that even in the confusion that reigns, democracy is solid, the spirit is the same as when the enemy arrived from the sea, even this time it comes from the heart of the Kingdom and May has no other spells yet to cast.