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map it wasn’t intended as a momentous gesture. In the end the trigonometrical survey was found to be largely inaccurate anyway, so Lambton and Everest died having achieved very little.

    George Everest, incidentally, didn’t pronounce his name Ev-er-rest, as everyone says it today, but as Eve -rest—just two syllables—so that the mountain is not only misnamed but mispronounced. Everest died aged seventy-six in Hyde Park Gardens, London, but was carted off to Hove for burial. No one knows why. He had no known connection to the town or to any part of Sussex. I was greatly taken with the idea of the most famous mountain in the world being named for a man who had no connection to it and whose name we don’t even pronounce correctly. I think that’s rather splendid.
    St. Andrews is a striking church, large and gray, with a dark, square tower. By the gate stood a large sign saying The Church of St. Andrew Welcomes You, but the spaces for the vicar’s name, the times of services, and the phone number for the churchwarden were blank. Three groups of vagrants occupied the churchyard, drinking and enjoying the sunshine. Two guys in the nearest group were arguing heatedly over something, but I couldn’t tell what. I hunted around among the gravestones, but most inscriptions were weathered to the point of illegibility. Everest’s grave has been exposed to the salty air of Hove for almost 150 years, so it seemed unlikely it would survive in identifiable form. One of the two arguing fellows stood up and had a pee against the boundary wall. As he did so, he took a simultaneous interest in me, and shouted questions at me over his shoulder in a vaguely hostile manner, asking me what I was looking for.

    I told him I was looking for the grave of a man named George Everest. He astounded me by saying, in quite a cultivated voice, “Oh, just over there,” and nodded at some gravestones a few feet from me. “They named Mount Everest after him, but he never actually saw it, you know.”
    “So I’ve read.”
    “Stupid fucker,” he said, a touch ambiguously, and hefted his organ back into his pants with an air of satisfaction.
    And so ended my first day as a tourist in Britain. I presumed that at least some of the following ones would be better.

Chapter 2
    Seven Sisters

    S OME WOMAN I HAVE never met regularly sends me e-mail alerts telling me how to recognize if I am having a stroke.
    “If you feel a tingling in your fingers,” one will say, “you could be having A STROKE . Seek medical attention AT ONCE .” (The alerts come with lots of italics and abrupt capitalizations, presumably to underline how serious a matter this is.) Another will say: “If you sometimes can’t remember where you parked your car in a big parking lot, you are probably HAVING A STROKE . Go to an emergency room IMMEDIATELY . ”
    The uncanny thing about these messages is how accurately they apply to me. I have every one of the symptoms, and there are hundreds of them. Every couple of days I learn of a new one.
    “If you think you might be producing more ear wax than usual…”
    “If you sometimes sneeze unexpectedly…”
    “If you have had toast at any time in the last six months…”
    “If you celebrate your birthday on the same date every year…”
    “If you feel anxious about strokes after reading stroke warnings…”
    “If you have any of these symptoms—or ANY OTHER symptoms—find a doctor at once. An embolism THE SIZE OF A DUCK EGG is heading straight for your CEREBRAL CORTEX !!”

    Taken together, the alerts make clear that the best indicator of a stroke is whatever you were doing just before you had a stroke. Lately the warnings have been accompanied by alarming accounts of people who failed to heed the signals. “When Doreen’s husband, Harold, noticed that his ears were red after he got out of the shower,” one might begin, “they didn’t think anything of it. How they wish they had. Soon afterward, Doreen found Harold, her