CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The last American tourist.

I was driving along a curvy English road outside a village in Gloucestershire a few weeks ago when a sign loomed on our left. It said:

CATS

EYES

REMOVED

My first thought was: What a horrible way to make a living in this day and age, even out here in the countryside. So much for All Things Bright and Beautiful… Maybe those people who said that Brexit would turn the English into depraved monsters were right.

I was jumping to conclusions. It hadn’t been put up by an entrepreneur or veterinarian but by the highway authority. Cat’s eyes are what the English call those super-reflective bumps embedded in the stripes on minor highways to keep drivers from drifting across lanes. The sign was a warning that this curvy road had recently become much more dangerous. But how, in this heavily touristed part of England, was a non-English driver to know that?

It was a theoretical question. No place today is “heavily touristed.” The past two years have seen an extraordinary lull in international travel, due at first to Covid but later to the stubborn persistence of the measures taken to contain it, and all the exertion, expense, inconvenience and indignity they have entailed: The overzealous nurses who think “nasal swab” is Italian for “cerebral probe.” The angry flight attendants shaking you awake in the middle of the night to tell you your mask has slipped off your nose…

All this has changed the culture of yesterday’s hotspots. Americans — bossy, querulous, ubiquitous — have for the last two years been almost entirely absent. Foreign countries suddenly feel more foreign. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, the era in which we exuberantly measured our civilization’s advance by tallying new McDonald’s had come to an end. London’s fastest-growing franchise chain seems to the be the Indian teahouse Chaiiwala, which started in Leicester in 2015 (and is really superb). The one in Brompton Road has a prayer room downstairs.

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