Rootless in Seattle

Right: How can you not love a city with a landmark building that looks like one of these? The Smith Tower

I returned to Seattle as scheduled in mid-August at the end of a comfy and blessedly uneventful flight from Heathrow. Of course the flight left an hour late, and I spent two of my four hours at the airport queueing up for flight check-in, but they were handing out bottles of water, and except for a loud and protracted battle of words between two women heading to Nigeria about whether one of them had jumped the queue (she hadn't), everyone was in pretty good spirits. They were at least flying, after 6 days of cancelled flights and protracted delays.

As an entirely unforseen bonus, I was treated to a full-body scan consisting of three artfully-posed x-rays. I suppose they had to pick someone utterly outside their target group, and I was the token white woman. I didn't mind, really, except for the fact that they wouldn't sell me prints.

After Indian food (cures jetlag instantly) and a couple days' readjustment, it was time for a road trip to L.A. One World Science Fiction convention later I came back just in time to go on another road trip, this time to Sacramento. I've lost track of the number of times I've promised myself never to go anywhere by car, but it's a lot.

Anyway, I'm settled into a basement room in Beacon Hill, and I'll be here until April, at which time I'll fly back to the U.K. and resume reporting my outsider's view of all things British with a few dozen more teatime chats between April and October. Between now and then I'll post anything earth-shaking that comes up.

Cheerio, mates!
Bridget

Friendly Skies

Unless you’ve been living on one of the outer planets since the 10th of this month, you know that a plot was uncovered to blow up a dozen or so airliners on their way from London to the U.S. Apparently the wannabe bombers who were arrested on the 10th had purchased tickets to fly Wednesday the 16th, by amusing coincidence (depending on how easily amused one is) the day I’m flying back to the States.

I’m assuming if anyone’s really worried about any bombers still at liberty holding tickets for that date and capable of smuggling explosives onto planes in the face of the security regulations currently in place (making something of a case for full body cavity searches across the board – “Welcome to British Airways, the world’s best-loved airline. Now bend over”) they’ll cancel all flights to the U.S. that day. Of course if they do I’ll be moving into the International Departures lounge at Heathrow, since my neighbor Steven will be moving into my room before the bed’s cool. His present room is even smaller than mine, and he’s trading up.

I was on the Tube on Thursday morning as all this was developing, and the driver announced that anyone who was on their way to Heathrow should call their travel agent and find out if their flight had been cancelled before going to the airport. About five minutes later he came on again and said anyone who was on their way to Heathrow should just turn around and go back. MI5 considers the U.K. to be under attack, the threat level (yes, they have that here, too) is Critical, and BA is cancelling 30% of their short-haul flights to keep their terminal staff from imploding under the pressure of thousands of cranky customers, thereby creating thousands more cranky customers. Still the city remains reasonably cheerful, and Tony Blair didn’t even come home from the Caribbean - I think he’s taking George Bush lessons by correspondence. There’s a deputy Prime Minister, but when all this came down the Home Secretary told him to go play on the motorway and took over the government.

So just another week in Old Blighty, thankfully a cool and rainy one. If I don’t see you in the Blogoverse before that time, I’ll be seeing some of you in Seattle on Wednesday afternoon. Remember, the best cure for jet lag is paneer butter masala with an order of garlic naan, and some baklavah with Lebanese coffee for dessert. Keep ’em flying.

Jack the Ripper? Or Nice Old Man?

Right: Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of Spain, by Walter Richard Sickert, collection of the Tate Gallery.

If one spends any time in the Tate Britain looking at late 19th and early 20th century British paintings, one will encounter the works of Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), currently the front runner in many peoples’ minds to have committed the murders credited to “Jack the Ripper.” Patricia Cornwell, author of the immensely popular Kay Scarpetta series of doorstop crime novels, spent a fortune pursuing her opinion that Sickert was indeed the infamous Whitechapel murderer, and if one credits her detective work and that of experts in forensic science who recently re-examined the evidence still held at New Scotland Yard, the implications seem pretty damning (Portrait of a Killer - Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, by Patricia Cornwell (Berkley, 2002). Not everyone agrees with her conclusions, most particularly surviving relations of the artist. Cornwell quotes someone at Scotland Yard as saying the re-examined evidence would make for an easy conviction, but her detractors quote their own experts as saying the evidence is still far from clear.

Sickert was in his own time a well-known British painter, highly regarded by his contemporaries. He studied under James McNeill Whistler, and was a personal friend of many artists of that period. He is credited with being a “principal conduit of French aesthetics into Britain (http://www.tate.org.uk/),” and with championing both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism when those movements were decidedly unpopular with British art critics. The Tate Britain owns a number of his works, and many more are in other museums and private collections. The late Queen Mother was an avid collector of Sickerts.

As a painter, Sickert seems to have been inordinately fond of browns: browns greyed out and toned down and stepped on with a muddy boot, reds and oranges made brown, blues and greens dirtied down to unpleasantness. Given the undeniable benefit of hindsight, his reds often resemble dried blood. He painted Venice as though there were no yellow in the sunlight, and in many of his plein air works seems to be painting from a shadow into a shadow, with the sun a distant presence barely making itself felt in some part of the sky. A few of his paintings of Dieppe are rather nice, but most are just brown.

I confess I don't get his elevated status in the art world. Most of the Sickerts I’ve seen are either forgettable or worse, not forgettable because they are more than a bit disturbing, especially those which feature people. Not beautiful and disturbing, but butt-ugly and disturbing, in my humble opinion. His portrait of Aubrey Beardsley is agreeable enough (though made up entirely of browns), but his self-portraits don't depict anyone I'd want to know (although a photographic portrait taken perhaps a year previous to his death shows a pleasant-looking bloke who doesn’t look within 15 years of his age, and who might easily be your friend’s grandfather or even your own), and his paintings of women are almost uniformly unpleasant in some way in addition to the palette. His women sometimes have faces too ugly to be from life, such as La Hollandaise, a fleshy nude by moonlight with the face of a nightmare, and Two Women on a Sofa – Le Tose. This is a nice composition of two young women in a relaxed pose, but he could not have found two faces that hideous had he advertised throughout France, so I’m left to suppose the monstrosity came from within. None of these opinions would be admissable as evidence in a court of law, but there you are.

One of Sickert's most fascinating works I’ve seen in person is Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of Spain (see photo above). This is a larger-than-life-size painting of an actress Sickert knew and admired, but I can never get over how inhuman is his portrayal of her. Even making allowances for stage makeup, the woman reminds me of an upright corpse.

So we’ll never know if Walter Sickert was indeed the man who murdered five prostitutes in London and wrote letters to the police and newspapers bragging about it, but we can still look at his art and wonder if it was created by a monstrous psychopathic killer, or if the old man who died in 1942 was no more than a prolific and well-regarded painter who may have had a slight problem with his attitude toward women. Either way he’s beyond harm or the ability to harm at this point, and standing in front of one of his monster-women at the Tate and feeling a slight frisson is – thankfully – as close as any of us is likely to come to the reality of Jack the Ripper.

The Tube

I had never ridden an underground train before my first visit to London. My years in the Los Angeles area were happily behind me long before they built theirs, and my one short visit to New York was accomplished without the subway experience. I admit to having been somewhat intimidated by the idea of the Underground, but one visit convinced me there couldn’t be a simpler or faster way of getting around a big city. If you know which station you’re in and which one you’re going to, and if you can read, you can get there with little or no hassle for a little more than the price of a bus fare, and a lot less than a taxi.

While waiting to pick up a Britrail pass before a long-ago visit here, I overheard a travel agent telling a couple of clients that they might find the tube too intimidating, and perhaps they’d be better off learning the bus system to get around town. It was all I could do not to rush into her office and set them all straight (and you know I could, too…). I’ll grant you that aboveground travel has its advantages, especially for tourists, but even the most casual tourist owes it to her experience of London to check out tube travel, and anyone interested in getting from one place to another quickly and easily had better either pony up for cab fare or head underground.

One of the things that makes tube travel simple is the universe-famous Tube Map, developed by an electrical draughtsman who did for the Metropolitan Railway what he did for electrical circuits: made it simple and easy to follow. By assigning a different color to each railway “wire,” and simplifying the geography considerably, Harry Beck created, 73 years ago, a travel diagram that’s been the inspiration for any transport map you’ve ever seen. Inside every train carriage is an even more simplified diagram of the line you’re riding, with the wire stretched out into a straight line. From any seat you can glance up and see where you are along your journey.

Everyone understands, of course, that the map is not the territory, and the Tube Map doesn’t represent the Underground exactly. But it wasn’t until last year, when Transport for London unveiled the actual map (see photo) that Londoners understood what a simplification it truly was. You can be sure they forgot again as soon as they possibly could.

Riding during rush hours can be a real sardine-tin experience, and during heat waves like the one we’ve been having here the last few weeks, you’ll hear recordings warning you to carry water. Last week a man was mugged for a 40p bottle of water by a well-dressed fellow-passenger whose thirst overcame him on a day when the recorded temperature underground was 47C (117F). When he wouldn’t surrender the water voluntarily, the aggressor snatched the bottle and drank from it until the train stopped at Bank, then he got off with it and walked away. I’d say carry some for yourself and some for your mugger.

What I Know About Cricket

Right: This man has no future in cricket.

I have not yet been to a cricket match, but living as I do within a half-mile of the Kennington Oval, I have listened to the roar of the crowd on a few occasions, and it made me wonder: suppose you were attending a cricket match and your team did something advantageous, like… score. How would you know? This burning question has led me to make a serious study of a sport that probably has more fans worldwide than baseball, but which is tragically misunderstood in less civilized nations.

There are no rules in cricket, but since 1744 there have been Laws. Built into these Laws is something called the Spirit of the Game, which is not entirely definable; players are nonetheless required to abide by it. One is not allowed to dispute an official’s decision, which means Gary Payton could never play cricket. No violence is permitted, which leaves out Ron Artest as well. Good thing us unruly Yanks have the NBA.

Violence in cricket consists of rudeness to an opponent, an official, or anyone, really. Also questioning a decision, or spiking the ball. Since rudeness is not covered in the Laws, penalties are decided on the spot by a referee. No-one knows what the penalty for actual violence might be, because it doesn’t happen.

A cricket side is made up of a bowler, fielders, and batsmen. A bowler bowls. Overhand. He does not pitch. The “pitch” is the 22 yards of ground between the batsmen.

Before a match, the captains meet up to decide on the boundaries of the playing field, how long the match will last, and what time everyone will retire from the field for tea. You probably think I’m kidding. A spur-of-the-moment match might be over the same day it begins; more leisurely ones can take up to five days to finish, and the team with the most runs doesn’t always win.

The batsman stands in front of something called a wicket. Breaking a wicket dismisses the batsman, and doing so is also called a wicket, and a wicket not having been broken, and the batsman not being out can also, if one chooses, be called a wicket. Now you begin to see why Americans often come away from a cricket match convinced they’ve just had one put over on them by thousands of practical jokers who showed up for no other purpose.

The bowler’s objective is to break the wicket, and the batsman’s to prevent him from doing so. The fielders (who can be deep, backwards, or silly) run around and ask the umpire to “give” the batsman out, because unless they do, he can’t. There are two batsmen on the field at a time, on opposite ends of the pitch, and now and again they run back and forth to one another’s wickets a few times. Because there are eleven players to a side, eventually there’s only one batsman left, who neither bats nor runs, but rather stands there until the captains tell him to go home.

In addition to bowlers, batsmen, fielders, umpires, and a referee, the following things have also been reported by reliable observers during a cricket match: Dollies, Ducks, Featherbeds, Gardening, Lollipops, Maidens, Minefields, Puddings, Rabbits, Yorkers, and Zooters. This is only a partial list, but should help you understand the innate seriousness of the sport, and the dangers faced by the brave athletes who play it.

I hope this explanation will further the cause of friendship between our two great nations. Perhaps instead of sending more troops to Iraq, Tony Blair would like to send a few cricket sides to America to teach the game to young Yanks. It couldn’t be any more ridiculous, and barring mishaps with Minefields (and for all I know, Zooters), the death toll should be far less.

Still Laughing…

I can still remember my first look at Oxford Street: I peeked around a corner at it and saw this wide thoroughfare absolutely packed to bursting with taxis and buses and merrily-jaywalking pedestrians – how did any of them survive? I didn’t have any reason to walk into that utter tumult, nor any desire to, particularly, so I headed in the other direction. On some later visit a friend asked to meet at a coffee shop in Oxford street, and I was so intimidated by the prospect that I went several hours early and scoped out my route and destination ahead of time so I’d have some degree of confidence when I went later. If you know me, you would be justified in thinking that degree of intimidation unusual, but never having lived in a really big city, I’d never encountered anything quite like Oxford Street. Now it only seems really big, rather than really big and unconquerable, but when I wrote a novel about Hell, I put a street there something like it.

Oxford Street tube station is the nearest to the Wallace Collection, one of London’s finest art museums. Like most museums in London, there’s no admission charge, only a discreet request for donations.* This was once the home and private collection of several successive Marquesses of Hertford, until the widow of one of them willed it to the State. It’s truly breathtaking, and contains stunning examples of furniture, ormulu clocks, sculpture, paintings, and arms and armor, as well as thousands of smaller items, covering several centuries. One visit would be enough only to take in a portion of the whole, but on every visit you really must see the crown jewel of the show, the painting for which some Marquess of Hertford or other paid more than for anything else in the whole immense mansion: Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, painted in 1624. He’s in the Great Gallery with a lot of other Dutch School pieces nearly as famous as he is, but he outshines the rest like the sun does a 60-watt lightbulb. Below are the notes I wrote during my second visit; I think I said it then at least as well as I could say it now.

“From Oxford Street I walk to the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. I came the first time mainly to see The Laughing Cavalier, by Franz Hals, the jewel of the Wallace Collection. Of course the entire collection is wonderful, with masterpieces by dozens of prominent artists, but I could hardly take my eyes off this particular painting on my first visit, and only tore myself away by promising to come back and see him again.

After visiting every other room in Hertford House, I finally enter the Great Gallery, and after revisiting the other paintings in the room, take a seat on the Victorian parlor settee in front of The Laughing Cavalier. It's an odd title, considering that while many of Hals' subjects actually do smile broadly or otherwise demonstrate uproarious good spirits, the Cavalier wears only the ghost of a smile for his portrait. Perhaps Hals knew something about his subject that we don't; certainly his good humor is evident in the painting. He looks like someone you'd really like to know.

Two British ladies walk by at a brisk pace, heels rapping sharply on the floor of the Great Gallery. One of them says, "Oh, look. The Laughing Cavalier. Ever think you'd get to see that?" By the time she finishes the question she's already past the Rembrandts, and I never hear her companion's answer. They continue on down the room without even slowing down, and disappear out the far doors. At that rate I reckon they got through the entire collection in under twenty minutes.

Other visitors stop, call their friends over, exclaim delightedly at his pose, his evident good nature, the rendering of detail in his costume. Last time it was just me and the Cavalier, but this time I'm enjoying the obvious pleasure of others at getting to know him. A British family have just discovered the painstakingly detailed lace on his sleeve, and I point out the change between this and the eye-fooling non-specific detail in his collar, as though Hals hadn't wanted any fussiness to compete with his Cavalier's face – the real star of the painting.

He outshines the Murillos, van Dycks, Rembrandts – all of them. They glow, but he sparkles. His eyes, which are so dark as to look brown from a distance, are actually a deep blue-grey seen up close. There are 67 paintings in this room, and his is the only one framed in black. The other 66 are surrounded by gilt frames, but some wise curator apparently knew how to make him stand out in a crowd, not that he wouldn't on his own.

Several people remark on the fact that his eyes seem to follow one around the room. The fact is that any subject who's painted looking directly at the painter will appear to follow viewers with his or her gaze. The adult figures in the two nearby Rembrandts do the same, but no-one remarks it. I know the secret, of course; The Laughing Cavalier stands out in this regard because as they walk away they keep looking back at him.

I strike up a conversation with a man who's nearly as taken with the Cavalier as I am. “I tried to tell myself I wasn't coming here today just to see this,” he says, “and then Voom! ” He pantomimes himself making a beeline for the Great Gallery. We discuss the composition of the painting and how the eye is led around it and always back to the face, framed by that rakish black hat.

I stay probably half an hour, then reluctantly tear myself away again, promising, as I do every time, that I'll be back again to see him.”

And of course I did go back, and thanks for indulging my deep love of a 400-year-old man this time – I’ll talk about some of the other Wallace wonders in a future installment.

*At the Victoria & Albert – the National Museum of Design – the request is famously less discreet, as guards stand by the perspex donations boxes and glare at you, daring you not to empty your pockets. If you can’t afford a donation, here’s the way to avoid them: turn left as soon as you come in the main entrance, and proceed down to the toilets. You’re going to be there several hours, so you’ll be glad you stopped. When you come out again, angle sharply to the left as you come up the stairs, and pass behind the pillars, boxes, and guards. It can’t be said I haven’t learnt to live here cheaply.

When in Bath

Right: One of many visitors to Aquae Sulis

Bathing is not allowed in Bath, at least not in the Baths. Of course one look at the water would encourage a desire to shower. Somewhere else. During Roman rule this place was called Aquae Sulis after the local goddess who provided Britain’s only natural hot mineral spring, a real attraction for bath-loving Romans. They had the good sense to roof the place over so pigeons wouldn’t shit in it from morning until night, which the Victorians who rediscovered it twenty feet beneath a row of flooding houses in the 1850s did not. So you probably wouldn’t want to bathe where the Romans did, but the water that flows into the spring is clean enough to drink after 10,000 years of natural slow filtering since it fell as rain in the local hills - and before it gets exposed to the depredations of pigeons - and the British have been drinking and immersing themselves in that water since before they ever heard of Claudius or Julius Caesar. It has been rumored to cure any malady you can come down with. Finding the Roman incarnation of the place conveniently situated to the springs they were still bathing in was a bonus for the 19th century residents of Bath. Even now, after nearly everyone has stopped believing in the curative powers of the waters, about a million people a year still show up just to see the place. My glass of Bath water was free with my admission, so before I left I took myself to the Pump Room, where Jane Austen used to partake of the local social scene, and tried a glass. It was quite warm, having been drawn from a bronze fish’s mouth directly at the “King’s Spring,” a little mineralish, and not at all bad compared to London tap water.

Jane Austen lived here for five years, off and on, and never warmed up to the place. Even in 1801 it was full of tourists, being right between its height-of-fashion pleasure mecca period and its British-equivalent-to-Florida retirement mecca period. It was too noisy for a country girl, and too bright (white stone neo-classic buildings were all the rage), and she wanted to be back in Hampshire. The day I went it was also hot and crammed with shoppers, and I got lost a lot on account of the rather cavalier attitude towards street names on the tourist maps, but a pot of assam and a couple of crumpets with marmalade in the tea room on the top floor of the Jane Austen Centre in Gay Street kept me from expiring.

I was feeling a bit pensive, thinking about Jane’s too-short life, too much of which was spent in relative poverty after the death of her father. At least she didn’t have to die to be successful; her books were popular once they finally saw publication, and made her some money in the last six years of her life. I’m an avid fan of Jane’s – I can read Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, particularly, every year or so, and still feel the same emotional suspense as I did the first time. That’s a gift: Jane’s remarkable gift, and her gift to me. “Here’s to you, Jane.” I raise my teacup in the general direction of Winchester Cathedral, where her headstone bears no mention of her slightly disreputable profession. “Here’s to you, old girl.”

Here There be Romans

Right: Quadriga and Roman Wall, Porchester, Hampshire

You probably thought there were no Romans left in Britain, but there were dozens of them running around Porchester on Sunday, and the proof is in the photograph (More are available via the link to photos at the right). Members of three Romano-British re-enactment groups – the Ermine Street Guard, Britannia, and ERA (End of the Roman Age) turned out in force and fancy-dress for English Heritage’s Roman Festival held there over the weekend. They fired ballistae, ran one another through with swords and spears, and demonstrated Britain’s first reproduction of a Roman racing chariot, here driven by Tony Smart, who provides horses and his riding skills for films and TV.

The four-horse racing chariot, or quadriga, was donated to English Heritage by Time Team, a popular archaeology show on British TV. The show’s archaeologists had excavated a chariot-racing track, and subsequently commissioned the reproduction of a chariot to run on it. Although no hard evidence had been found before last year , it had been long surmised that there must have been chariot racing in Britain during Roman rule. Chariot racing was bigger than football, bigger than lions eating Christians, bigger than anything in Roman entertainment. Chariot racers, who seldom saw the far side of 30, were celebrities on a scale we can scarcely imagine unless we envision David Beckham being canonized after winning the Nobel Prize. The most famous chariot-racing riot in history resulted in 30,000 deaths, which makes a football riot seem like a few of the lads messing about after a match.

Three more quadrigae are being built, and next year’s festival will feature a race among the four famous Roman racing factions: the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites. Perhaps English Heritage can organize modern Britain’s first chariot-racing riot, and if that doesn’t sell admissions, I don’t know what would.

Dev Agarwal had kindly agreed to chase Romans with me again, and we drove down to Hampshire (Jane Austen Country) on England’s south coast Sunday morning and spent the hottest day of the year to date watching demonstrations of battle tactics, sword- and spearplay, and Roman field surgery. I cannot imagine running around in armor, helmets, and in some cases bearskins, as these hardy re-enactors did, and they did it with smiles on their faces. There’s a photo of Dev looking remarkably cool in the ruins of Porchester Castle among the other “best-of” shots of the day – just follow the photo link at right. After collecting sunburns and souvenirs (I found the perfect desk accessory for you, Mr Dougie), we battled traffic back to Whitton and had coffee and dessert with Terri and Rani before I headed for home, nicely satiated with conquerors and tiramisu, to spend the evening reading slush. I would dearly love to be back next year for the big race.

Peter Pan

Right: Peter Pan, Kensington Gardens

American children of any generation later than mine have their image of Peter Pan from the same place they get entirely too many of their childhood icons: Walt Disney. I suppose that malady is worldwide now. People grow up without seeing the illustrations of Sir John Tenniel or Ernest Shepard, but carry a whopping technicolor image in their minds of Alice or Winnie-the-Pooh that’s just somehow wrong. So that’s Peter on the right, and the young lady looking up his little dress is Wendy Darling. Everyone else is a fairy or a cunning woodland creature. Every child or former child, finding him- or herself in London, really needs to pay a visit for childhood’s sake, as I did on Sunday, queueing up with much younger children for my chance to take this photo.

If you skipped Disney and read the book (I pre-date the animated feature, so got my Pan straight from Sir James Barrie), you might remember that Peter was scarcely the charming infant of the sculpture (created by Sir George Frampton in 1911 and placed in the park in 1912) by the time he was introduced to theatre-goers in 1904 and readers in 1911. Sir James’ Pan is a self-absorbed brat, and Tinkerbell is a tiny but murderous psychotic. Of course those are their darker sides; they’re really quite charming at parties.

But in spite of all the good, clean “Let’s go kill some pirates” fun to be had in the book, there are darker things being said here about the dangers of perpetual childhood. Children are creatures of impulse, mainly, and while we may scoff at civilization, it’s that process acting on us as children that, if we’re lucky, results in adults, or at least people who can wear the costume with authority. One day we’re merrily squashing bugs, and on some other day we develop compassion, and the journey to humanity has begun. Pan and the Lost Boys will be squashing bugs in the Neverland until the end of time. Girls – in the person of Wendy – are the civilizing influence the boys didn’t realize they needed until they had her. The Neverland makes you forget though, so you may be sure they don’t miss her now she’s gone. And as for Tinkerbell, she’s just laughing her ass off.

Touching the Mystery

Another day out. I could get to like this. My friend Alison White wanted me to meet her mother, who lives over here, and we decided to meet in St Albans, formerly the Roman city of Verulamium, even more formerly the Catuvellauni stronghold of Verlamio. Americans never quite get over how bloody old everything is over here. We live with a persistent notion that our country emerged from the brow of John Adams, et al, in 1776, and before that there just wasn’t anything. (Steve Martin, showing Victoria Tennant around Los Angeles in L.A. Story: “Some of these buildings are more than twenty years old!”). We all have to take American History in high school, but in my time at least, it was only the history of Europeans in America, which they could have covered it in six weeks and let everyone go home early.

Our plan was for lunch and a walk around the Verulamium Roman museum and the ruins of an amphiteatre that were somewhere about. We did get to the museum eventually, but skipped the amphiteatre on account of rain. Carolyn, along with John Thurgood, picked me up at St Albans rail station. Carolyn and John are delightful, warm, intelligent people, and I felt welcomed the moment I stepped through the station turnstile. We spent a chatty and companionably long lunch hour at a 700-year-old pub, the Old Tudor Tavern. Carolyn obtained some history from the bartender: The place was formerly two coach inns, the Swan and the George, and the very beams above our head were original to the 14th century, when pilgrims on their way to the monastery and cathedral stopped here. You had to be somebody important to stay at the monastery, so it was surrounded by inns like this one for the rest of us, around which the present town grew up. We were parked near the cathedral, so we decided to check that out first and find the museum later.

We had only been wandering around near the doors a few minutes when John alerted us that a guided tour was about to start, and we joined it. On our own we would probably have spent 30 minutes looking at the architecture and gone on in search of the real reason for the day out – Romans again – but once under the spell of our tour guide, a man who clearly loved this church and all it represented to him, we followed along to the end, which took at least an hour and a half. I won’t tire you with endless details, but a look at the nave will help you understand why we felt compelled to see the rest and listen to our guide’s seemingly endless store of historical anectdotes.

The longest and highest church nave in Britain is no-nonsense 11th century Norman architecture on one side, with faded frescoes on every pillar, and elaborate 14th century gothic stonework on the other side, owing to a partial collapse and rebuilding. In some places along the older side, parts of gothic arches emerge out of Norman plaster walls as though planned by some distant ancestor of H.R. Giger.

The original church, dating to the 8th century, was built around a shrine housing the remains of St Alban, the first British martyr. A wealthy Roman citizen, Alban had given his life in place of that of a Christian priest under his protection. There’s a very brave story involved, which is probably apochryphal, but that’s not the point; the point is that it is a brave story, full of compassion and selflessness, and it moved people. In addition to lots of other, more self-serving reasons, people journeyed here to touch the mystery of St Alban and be moved. They didn’t have TV, so they couldn’t just stay home and watch American Idol as one does in these more enlightened times.

In 1539 the Catholic church was outlawed in England, and the monks fled, one with a bag hidden inside his robe containing the bones of St Alban. The bones ended up in Germany, and would not return until about twenty years ago. The shrine that had housed them for centuries before the Reformation, a delicately-pillared structure of Welsh marble, was broken up into about 2000 pieces and hidden in nearby walls. Its location was forgotten, and when some of it was found by accident during the 20th century, the rest was recovered from hiding and painstakingly reassembled in a process that took a team of archaeologists more than ten years. It now rests on a dais in its own chapel, surrounded by an iron railing, still overlooked by a 700-year-old carved oak hiding place where monks once watched to make sure pilgrims’ gifts remained unmolested.

At the end of our tour, our guide explained that he was a Roman Catholic who held some office or other in a very ecuminical Anglican cathedral, and by exercising his priveleges (after apologizing for a demonstration of excess pride) he could allow us to touch the shrine. He opened a gate and we filed inside. I placed my hand on something created when my ancestors were driving the Vikings back to Dublin, something that had drawn people from all over Britain to St Albans in a time when most people never got five miles from the spot where they were born, and I absolutely felt something. All the centuries between those people and me just faded away, and I felt the weight of all those stories. The air around that chunk of carved marble containing a pile of 1600-year-old bones was thick with stories, and for a moment it felt like I was touching all of them. It was a mystical experience of the sort only a person as irreligious as myself could have – a person who holds no faith in Alban’s sainthood in the eyes of a personal God she doesn’t believe in, but is perfectly willing to accept (along with Joseph Campbell) that any place can be holy if you draw a circle around it and say “This is a holy place.”

But I Do Know What I Like...

Right: The Tate Britain, North Side View

There are about a thousand good reasons to visit the Tate Gallery (Britain). Only one of them is that it’s a mile from my Kennington digs, just across the Vauxhall Bridge. The collection is vast, and you never see exactly the same mix twice, but the most famous pieces are probably up all the time to avoid disappointing visitors. If you love art there’s nothing to compare with walking into one large room and seeing absolutely lyrical works by Sargent, Waterhouse, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rosetti, and Watts all around you. And I only mention the ones I came back to see again after my last visit two years ago. On a quieter day I would have stood and gazed at them even longer than I did, and having the luxury to go back when I like, you can be sure I will. Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot is worthy of long and loving contemplation, as is Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose, a study of dusk light and flowers and children, and Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, the most amazing portrayal of a man lost in love that anyone ever painted. Watts' Hope is an allegorical piece, somehow the perfect portrait of the word.

Only a couple of rooms over is John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, likewise breathtaking. Ophelia was praised by Millais’ contemporaries as a landscape, which is odd, because its central figure is a dead woman and they could scarcely have failed to notice that. The landscape features are remarkable: for one thing the entire painting is foreground; there’s no fading or diminution of detail from the grasses on our side of the bank to the flowers in dead Ophelia’s hands to the greenery on the far side. This lends an effect of in-your-face life to everything that surrounds poor Ophelia, who was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, floating in a bath warmed by lamps underneath. The landscape was painted from life, in Surrey, which proves there is life in Surrey (Hi, Molly!), or at least there was in 1851.

And that’s just some 19th century frost on the tip of the British painting iceburg: 17 rooms cover roughly the period from 1600-1899, another 12 or so deal with the 20th onward (and one entire gallery downriver, the Tate Modern). One immense room the size of six of the others is dedicated to the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner, who left his works to the nation when he died.

The first time I saw a Turner realtime, I was in the National Gallery (the one in Trafalgar Square, not the one in Washington, D.C.). I turned a corner and there it was, and I swear I stopped breathing. It was The Fighting Temeraire Being Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up . Now what, you may ask if you’ve never seen this painting, could be of anything more than historical interest about a picture of two ships going slow on an ocean? If you have seen it you probably don’t need to ask. Turner himself referred to this painting as "my darling," and refused to sell it. J.M.W. Turner was in the ground before the second half of the 19th century got out of first gear, but paintings like The Fighting Temeraire and The Burning of the Houses of Parliament should still be teaching painters something about modern art. The Turner Galleries at the Tate also contain a lot of earlier landscapes that don’t affect my breathing, but it’s amazing just to see so much of his life’s work in one room.

Of course another reason to go to the Tate Britain is to contemplate the paintings of Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). But that’s a subject for another (darker) day.

And so to bed...

Another issue of Æon SF put to bed, and this one was like a three-year-old after a cotton candy and three rides on the roller-coaster; for a while there we didn’t think it was going anywhere. It just stood there screaming, and we wished we were three so we could scream, too. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to keep my brains from leaking out my ears, and I can’t imagine what the Seattle crew must’ve been going through. It’s a relief, I can tell you. Now go out and buy a copy. It’s a brilliant issue – our seventh – and has a wonderful Alan M. Clark cover and lots of superb stories and articles and columns and poems.

I’m pretty sure we decided on quarterly publication because it was so long between issues, but it doesn’t seem that long anymore, and now it’s time to finalize the contents of the next one. But first, a day off. Maybe two.

I remember the days when I could put in seven 16-hour days a week for weeks on end before hitting a wall. We were building a publishing company from scratch with no experience but lots of ideas, most of which turned out to be surprisingly good ones. I think Æon was the most brilliant one of all, but by the time it came along I was finding 12-hour days plenty of work for anyone, and allowing myself a lot more downtime. Lately I’ve almost forgotten how to spell downtime, but I think I can just about remember again if someone will write it down for me. My next communication will treat on some delightful feature or other of England’s teeming capital city. I have a list.

Surveillance

Right: My Very Own CCTV Cameras!

“We live in a surveilled society” a British friend told me some years ago. I had already noticed the many signs in public places announcing the presence of CCTV, but because I’m from the States, and didn’t expect to see cameras everywhere I looked, I didn’t. But I’m starting to see them now, like the one I noticed only today outside my window.

Scientists who study human perceptions already know that we don’t so much see what’s actually in front of our eyes as we reference snapshots we’ve already taken, and if we missed a detail when we took our mental snapshot we may continue to miss it until it calls itself to our attention, at which time it pops onto our landscape and we take an amended shot for later reference. Leaving the philosophical ramifications of that for a much later discussion, that seems to be what happened when I looked out my window a few hundred times without seeing the camera. But it’s there, right there in the picture. Not surprising there’d be one outside a pub, I suppose.

Of course there’s closed-circuit surveillance in the U.S., too, it’s just not nearly as ubiquitous, and I suspect we give it even less thought. If we did think about it we’d have to go through some changes, American-style: first, we’d have to feel outrage at the intrusion into our privacy, then relief that someone was keeping their eye on those other guys. As a visitor here I don’t think much of it one way or another, really.

Meanwhile I do my own surveillance. Kennington Lane at 0700 is populated by dustmen and other early-risers, the traffic starting to pick up a bit from the relative quiet of the relative dark hours -- it’s never either dark or quiet in London. By 0830 the commuters are out in force, and the vans and lorries, and the pavements are populated by brisk walkers-to-the-dayjob and mums holding kids’ hands on the way to school. These have slacked off by 0900, and out comes Thistledown Lady to sweep her portion of the pavement. Thistledown lady lives over Kennington Lane and down a couple of doors in a neat little house with a neat little garden out front that blessedly missed the craze for paving over front gardens in the 60s and 70s. Her iron railings are covered with rose bushes, and she has a tiny patch of neatly-mown grass. She comes out every morning to sweep the pavement and tidy up the garden, dressed immaculately and neatly, her hair a white pouf that seems to have settled onto her head from above on some errant breeze from the nearest wigmaker’s shop.

On weekends the traffic consists of fewer cars and more tour busses from Wales and Yorkshire and France and Germany. I can’t imagine what the tour guide is finding to say as they pass through the modest borough of Lambeth, probably “Cheer up, folks – we’re less than a mile from the Houses of Parliament.”

Friends and Romans

Right: The Romans did show up in Leeds – August 2005

I took a drive to Old Sarum yesterday with friend and Æon author Dev Agarwal, a fellow Roman enthusiast. English Heritage were putting on a Romano-British day, and we bravely set out from Whitton only two hours behind schedule, armed with our wits and a road atlas, the latter item being what saved us from driving pointlessly around Salisbury all afternoon. But I’m hours ahead of myself here in Salisbury, so let’s back up a bit:

There’s a truth every Briton knows and every visitor soon learns: “Never plan any travel on a Bank Holiday weekend.” The reason is that those weekends when most people do travel are also the weekends Transport for London and the various regional rail services that used to be British Rail schedule engineering works and station closures. So a 30-minute tube-and-overland rail journey to reach our meeting place in Twickenham turned into a 90-minute snafu of closed stations and detours and busses, and we hadn’t even gotten a start on the day out proper. Once we did, we managed the drive to Old Sarum (actually I managed being a passenger, at which I excel) without getting lost more than twice. It had been raining all morning, but we outpaced the weather and arrived at a stunning English springtime in Wiltshire.

Old Sarum was there as advertised, and English Heritage, and there were interesting demonstrations of Roman cookery and engineering, but the actual Romans seem to have marched past the whole thing, and by now are probably encamped somewhere in Devon. Their participation was sorely missed; we had all come there expecting to see a cohort of Britain’s ancient oppressors smiling for the cameras, perhaps a few camp-followers and Romano-British brats running about. As it happens the entire event consisted of two couples at opposite ends of a field, one roasting parsnips in honey (pretty good, actually) and the other operating models of ancient inventions.

An hour or so sufficed to absorb all this and walk around the ruins, and we were on our way back to Whitton and a late lunch with Dev’s wife (transplanted American writer Terri Trimble) and daughter (the irresistible Rani) at a café near their home. After tea back at the flat, and making the acquaintance of several friends named Piglet, it was back to good ol’ Room 3. I had managed to take my first complete day off in several weeks, and without experiencing the tiniest pang of guilt. As I suspected, all the work I left undone was still here waiting for me this morning along with more rain, and a lovely day out had done tons for my outlook.

A Legal Alien

I’ve mostly gotten over thinking of Britain as a country where cars driven by passengers careen down the wrong side of the road intent on my destruction. I no longer look the wrong way when crossing the street (though some instinct still tries feebly to warn me I’m about to be flattened by a taxi rocketing up the A3 in the lane it’s not going to be in). I no longer anxiously consult the painted words at the intersections advising me to LOOK RIGHT (this cuts down dramatically on the number of dead tourists per annum). Of course I’m probably dooming myself to being run over by a Metro bus as soon as I get back to Seattle.

I’d be surprised if I ever came to think of this place as ordinary, exactly; the architecture alone is a constant reminder you’re not in Kansas anymore, and your ear is always bending itself around the remarkable range of accents that can be packed into a place smaller than California. No, I’m still a long way from home, but I feel less like a tourist every day, and when I look out my window, what I see seems somehow right.

I was thinking about it the other day: why I came here; why I went anywhere, really, when I liked it so well where I was, and why here. I can see that I needed a shift in my thinking, and that was going to be harder to come by in familiar surroundings. My life needed some sort of shakeup, and while we don’t usually need to go looking for those, I think maybe it doesn’t hurt to. It’s taken me a lot of years (and I mean a lot) to begin to work out who I am and where I fit into the larger picture. Removing myself from the far more comforting environment of Seattle and my family was perhaps a way to accelerate the process. I said I wanted an adventure, but what is an adventure if not a chance to meet yourself all over again in unfamiliar surroundings? Whether you’re being chased by headhunters in South America or attending the ballet in Moscow, you’re likely to experience self-discovery that might have passed you by at home on the sofa in front of this week’s Battlestar Galactica.

But wait, now, I don’t want my surroundings to be all that unfamiliar. I’m sure I could live better cheaper in Czechoslovakia, but I doubt I’d have mastered buying groceries by now, much less chatting with the plumber about my broken hot tap, although it’s possible cars there drive on the proper side of the road… No, I wanted to be in London, a city I already loved and knew a bit, where people almost speak my language, and even the most common things are not quite… common. Here every walk down the street makes me think about where I am, and having placed myself in an environment both comfortingly known and edgily unusual, I feel more aware of myself and my perceptions than ever before.

I have to admit I’m somewhat isolated and lonely; greetings from the convenience store owner and the odd hello to the bartender on my way out and in don’t take the place of having friends. But I’ve never minded time spent alone or needed constant entertainment from others, and it’s all part of the adventure, isn’t it? Besides, if ever I get to feeling blue – and I don’t all that often – I can get up and walk over to my window and be reassured that I’ve come to pretty good place.

Room 3

Getting settled into my new digs here over the Little Apple. If you look at the picture of the building, below, mine is the second little dormer window from the left. Here’s a picture of the room. It’s irregularly shaped, as you might expect in a U-shaped building. One wall is curved, and one is oddly angled, so that the room is neither rectangular nor pie-shaped, unless perhaps you assigned a blind person to cut the pie.

The bedbugs having been dispensed with (temporarily, my odd neighbor assures me, unless they seal all the walls in the building – he’ll deliver a lecture on the subject without the slightest encouragement) I have relaxed into a routine. I’m usually awake by seven, and on some mornings well before 6. Tea comes first, of course, some exercise (I don’t walk as far in a day as when I was looking for a place, so the plantar fasciitis that’s plagued me the last 6 months with extreme discomfort has backed off enough that I can at least do hindu squats now). My diet is limited to things that can keep on the shelf in my wardrobe for a couple of days, but as that includes bread, cheeses of various kinds, instant oatmeal, fruit (fresh and tinned), yogurt, cereal bars, and single cream (that’s half and half to you Yank-types) that’s been heated to within an inch of its life in order to keep better, I have a reasonably varied diet, and I have yet to become bored with it. If I want something more perishable, Tesco is a ten-minute walk away. If I need to heat up a can of soup there’s a stove down the hall, but so far I’ve been happy to spread half a wholemeal roll with Cambozola and pop the top on a carton of raspberry yogurt when dinner rolls round. Having at long last repaired my relationship with food, I only eat what I love, so I love everything I eat. Or is that the other way round?

So breakfast and then the commute to work, which consists of pulling the computer table over to the bedside, my shortest commute to date. I turn to the page in my “Invasion of the Monster Women” notebook (Archie McFee, Seattle – thanks, Mo!) and peruse my task list. I’ve usually done all the damage I can to Aeon and other creative concerns by teatime, when I’m off to the Aby Convenience Store to hook up to the 21st century as I’m doing now. Then home to the work I downloaded here, and on ’til betime, or movie time (Immense gratitude to youngest son Jesse for the widescreen laptop and movies, and thanks to Tesco for 97p DVDs, which aren’t all unwatchable). It isn’t always this bad, but we’re putting together an issue at the moment, so there’s always something that needs doing. In a couple of weeks when that pressure has eased somewhat, I should be able to incorporate some sightseeing into my schedule. I live perhaps half a mile from the Imperial War Museum, and like most government-sponsored attractions in London, it’s free.

So now it’s back to The Little Apple for your editor-at-large. I’m feeling rather at home by this time, having brought a few things with me for familiarity at the expense of luggage space, and having bought a few things to make life easier, such as my micro-mini desk cleverly disguised as a nightstand. I’m happy to be here, pleased with the way life is going, and basically relaxed. I don’t even listen for the patter of infinitesimal feet when I turn out the light. Not really.

Lambs and Violets

The fluffy white lamb is a symbol of spring everywhere in the Euro-American cultural monad, and traveling to Scotland and back by train, as I did a few days ago, will make you understand why. Lambs in their millions dot the landscape, usually in twin pairs, doing all the cutesy-lamby things they’re known for, and eliciting exclamations of delight from sweet British ladies on their way home to a lovely lamb dinner. For make no mistake, most of these fluffy little beggars are destined for the table. Lamb is a very popular meat in Britain, much more so than in the U.S., and somewhere I’m sure, probably in Scotland, someone is still eating mutton, though I can’t imagine why. But then Scots eat haggis, so there you are.

Even when I ate meat I never liked lamb, so I can’t say whether I’d have been able to ride through pastures teeming with live ones, serenely munching a bag of Walker’s Lamb and Mint crisps *, but one eats what one eats. According to their adverts Waitrose, a slightly upscale U.K. grocery chain, was granted some award for animal compassion because their pork is raised by farmers who bed their pigs down on straw. I know if they were stringing me up by my hind legs and cutting my throat I’d like to remember I got a soft bed out of the deal. Of course pigs, while not nearly as cuddly as baby sheep, are still considered somewhat appealing, at least in their infancy, and are widely known to be as intelligent as many dogs. People keep them for pets. They star in films with James Cromwell. Cows don’t rate high on the Cute Scale, though anyone familiar with the conditions in a slaughterhouse might think at least twice before eating one, and certainly few people, vegetarian or otherwise, get sentimental over chickens. Still they’re all outside my personal dietary restrictions, which is not to eat anything that had a momma.

Joseph Campbell said humanity has always been in conflict between our natural tendency to compassion on the one hand, and the necessity for what he called the “continual merciless killing” necessary for survival on the other. In ancient times we told ourselves that the animals sacrificed themselves willingly to us, or that we were in fact sending divine beings back into their true forms by ‘breaking’ the animal bodies in which they’d trapped themselves, or at the very least we asked their forgiveness and showed respect for their lives.

But ancient people were a bunch of bloody primitives, after all. Nowadays we simply pass the brutality along to hired hands whose jobs depend on how much product they’ve racked up at the end of the day. Then we toddle down to Tesco (or Waitrose, where we know they slept comfy) and buy a chunk of bloody muscle wrapped in cling film, tagged with a price per Kg, and entirely sanitized of any taint of actual slaughter. We not only didn’t know that lamb, we don’t know the farmer who raised it, or even in many cases what country it came from (though if we bought it at Waitrose we know it’s a British lamb, at least). We aren’t constrained ever to think of it as having frolicked in a field outside our train window the other day. Some of us will give thanks to a deity for providing the lamb, but it’s a safe bet not one in a million will be thanking the lamb; after all, it had no choice in the matter.

*Yes, meat-flavored potato chips are pretty weird (Hi, Daniel!), but on the other hand, in the U.S. you’ll never find violet-and-basil-scented washing up liquid.

Gunning for the Easter Bunny

Everyone in Britain talks about how foolish it is to go away for Easter, then they all do. Every possible business closes from Friday through Monday, so that if you have (to pick an example entirely at random) forgotten to pick up your drycleaning on Thursday, f’rinstance, you won’t be seeing in until Tuesday. Since I frequently find myself over here around that time to attend the British National SF Convention, Eastercon, I frequently have the pleasure of taking a train to one exciting holiday destination or other (such as Hinckley, Leicestershire) on overcrowded trains. The rail companies always put on extra trains, and it’s never enough.

A couple of years ago, when the con was in Blackpool, my fellow passengers consisted mainly of people who were planning to spend their four-day holiday puke-sick drunk in a town where that and gambling are the major entertainment options, and were getting a leg up on that condition on the train. One memorable portion of my journey that April was spent standing packed like kippers in the vestibule between carriages (which were even more tightly packed) with a dozen merrymakers and their duffel full of beer. At every station more people packed onto the carriage, but a sweet young thug on my right protected our cozy vestibule for the entire milk-run from Manchester to Blackpool by keeping his hand to the Door Close button at every station, smiling in a predatory sort of way at the increasingly desperate would-be passengers on the platforms, who were beating their fists on the window and screaming ineffective curses. There were only two carriages, and the loo – which thankfully was not at our end – was flooded, and here were all these people drinking beer as if there would be none where they were going. From the smell the rest of the weekend, they must’ve started pissing in the gutters and phone boxes as soon as they got off the train. Blackpool. Just say no.

Eastercons are held more often in Hinckley, Leicestershire than any other location, a fact that might puzzle anyone who’s actually been there. And yet if you hold it in Hinckley, they will come. It’s in the middle of England, not too far a journey for most people, and the hotel is cheap. To American fans and pros, who hardly give a thought to travelling 500 miles to attend a largeish convention, it seems odd to think how few Britons will go half that far to get to the biggest one they have all year. Move Eastercon a couple hundred miles in any direction from Hinckley, and the British stay away in droves. This year’s con was in Glasgow, barely across the Tweed, but might have been the site of an Avian Flu outbreak for the size of the crowd. In the end it probably comes down to population; even a large British convention is never all that large by U.S. standards, simply because we outnumber them. Still, although the hotel seemed strangely empty, I managed to have fun, meet new people, and eat great Indian food, and what else is a convention for?

This was my fifth visit to Glasgow, the first being in 1995, when Marti and I attended that year’s Worldcon along with our mate Lorelei Shannon and her wonderful husband Daniel Carver. One memorable evening we three ladies walked down to the site of the old Water Taxi with its Art Nouveau ironwork gate, and watched the starlings come home in great black clouds over the Clyde to nest under Glasgow Bridge. Of course bird netting had been installed long since, but when fifty million birds want something, who’s going to stop them for long? Just ask Alfred Hitchcock (and let’s not forget Daphne duMaurier). The sight was miraculous, and almost as much so was the fact that we were only shit on once the whole time.

It was good to get back to London and sunshine after being rained on and blown around for two days. In fact, almost as soon as I left the Glasgow gloom, the clouds blew away and the day was pure spring all the way over to Edinburgh and down the eastern route through York. So maybe all that gloom was just me.

Good Night, Sleep Tight…

(This one’s for Julie and Paul)

Consider the humble bedbug (Cimex Lectularius Linnaeus to his only friends: entymologists and other bedbugs). He’s an opportunistic feeder. If no warm body lies down at his buffet he gets by; he can go a long time between meals. But when nature provides he’s not slow to the table. “This character was alive when I found him on my pillow,” I told Jill, handing her one of my lovely Woolworth’s cereal bowls, unfortunately not empty. I had only moved in to Room 3 the day before, and dressed up the bed with a new duvet cover. “I accidentally killed him by putting the bowl on top of a cup of hot tea.” I knew instantly that this was not the first example of Cimex Lectularius Jill had seen. Turns out there’d been a general extermination performed no more that a couple of months previous, but apparently it didn’t eliminate the second generation; one tenant told me the only thing that might work permanently is sealing the little bastards up in the walls, and in a building this size and age good luck finding every possible crack.

Meanwhile, owing to the upcoming bank holiday, I won’t see my new mattress until Tuesday. That’s the bad news; the good news is that Gerry will be in Ireland another two weeks, and I can go back to his room.

And I have.

My other move was from Victory Holidays to Aby Convenience Store – a block away in the opposite direction – in the basement of which are 16 shiny new PCs with USB ports for the same hourly rate. No more hooking my laptop up to their too-short Ethernet cable and holding it on the tips of my knees. My back thanks me, though I will miss the music and bustle of Little Zimbabwe.

Empire

The Romans ruled Britain for about 400 years, until sometime in the 4th century A.D. Well, to be fair a number of those years were spent attempting to subdue the locals, building a wall to keep out some of the most ferocious ones, binding wounds, burying dead, and ringing up Rome for more troops. Britannia used up a lot of Romans, but there were always more on the way. The army was largely made up of soldiers from previously conquered nations, so the more you conquered the more you could conquer, and all without risking a hair on a single Roman head. They didn’t get as far as Britannia by being stupid.

Finally, what with invasions and insurrections and politics, Rome felt the need to pull in its horns a bit, and in short order the occupying Romans had got on their ships and disappeared over the horizon, leaving behind a considerable body of public works and a lot of puzzled Britons:

“That’s the last of them, then. They’re really gone. Left the walls and the roads, though, didn’t they? And those flash villas. Guess we could tear those up for huts and pigstys right enough. But what are we going to do with all these flippin’ ancient forests?”

“What would the Romans do, mate?”

“Good question. My guess is they’d chop down every last tree, build a whole lot of ships, and sail off to conquer lots of other countries and create an empire.”

“Brilliant idea, that. But what’ll we do when we run out of trees?”

“We’ll conquer Canada.”

“Right. Hand me that axe.”

And so, following the example of their conquerors, the Britons conquered. And they were good at it. By the time of the American Insurrection they had a cracking empire of their own. Even losing a round didn’t slow ’em down much, and I’ve never been entirely sure we actually won that one (though now that George Bush is dragging Tony Blair down like a Texas-sized anchor, it must seem ever more to the British like a genuine defeat). To and from Africa, India, China, and points beyond, the British Navy and its auxilliary fleet the British East India Company controlled the flow of such necessities as opium, textiles, and tea. Even in the far Antipodes, one could proclaim oneself Britannium civilus. So aside from the roads– yeah, all right, the roads – what have the Romans done for Britannia? Given them a degree of diversity such that a man with ritual scars on his cheeks can leave his cell phone in a launderette in Kennington Lane, SEll.

I gotta admit I love this place.

Elephants and Castles

Right: Still Life From Woolworth's
I heard the industrious sounds of someone sawing boards upstairs yesterday as early as 1 pm – a case of work ethic taking second place to tea ethic, I think – but who could blame Jill’s contractor for finding something better to do on the most beautiful day of the year to date? Not I, especially as the weather has gone back to being quite English today. Still, boards did get sawed – a few, anyway. My room is that much closer to being ready for me, and my laundry got done at the launderette down the road, at the shocking (to me) rate of £3.60 for one small load washed and not quite dried.

Just up the road in Elephant and Castle is a low-rent, down-home shopping centre whose anchor stores are a Woolworth and a Price Busters. In the last few days I’ve combed through both these emporia for all those things one can’t do without, like tea mugs, tea spoons, and a kettle. Where I come from a tea kettle is a closed stainless steel pot under which one puts heat, and which whistles when the water is boiling (Note to any editors out there: in U.S. English we distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive pronouns, and know better than to use ‘which’ when we mean ‘that,’ and know to precede ‘which’ with a comma. I think this rule may never have existed in British English, or if it ever did it has become subservient to a sort of grammatical ethos that says “We do it this way. Live with it.”). Electric kettles exist in the colonies, but hardly anyone owns one. Here in the land that has taken tea to its heart, everyone owns one, and it’s usually made of plastic. I think the upper classes probably have flash stainless steel ones, but the rest of us get by with good old white plastic, like our foremums for centuries past. They don’t whistle, but they do shut off when the water reaches the proper temperature. I’ve had mine two days and it’s already collecting scale on the heating element from London water. At least I’m getting my minerals.

The name “Elephant and Castle,” I am told, is a creative interpretation of “Enfanta de Castile,” dating back to when that person visited London some centuries back. Leave it to the English to make something sensible (sort of) out of incomprehensible foreign syllables. A large and colorful statue of an elephant carrying a castle (rook) on its back like a howdah stands just outside the abovementioned shopping centre (itself just outside the E&C tube station) where everything from African dresses and headwraps to duvets and bedsheets can be found inexpensively, if not always in the size or color you need.

For color, it’s hard to beat London. The U.S. of the 21^st century is certainly more diverse than the one I grew up in, but most of the places I’ve lived were pretty much white as mayonnaise by comparison to places I’ve been to over here since my first memorable visit back in ’95. Of course in the neighborhood I just left, Seattle’s Beacon Hill, it’s not uncommon to be the only caucasian on the bus as you ride from Beacon Avenue to the International District, and business signs are often in Chinese, Korean, Ethiopian, or Arabic first, and English second if at all. Still, London makes Beacon Hill look homogenized. Even in touristy areas the locals display a dazzling range of colors and speak a wonderful variety of languages. Here in Kennington, only one tube stop south of Waterloo Station, you can see beauty salons that advertise “European stylist available,” and get your email at the local Zimbabwean travel agency where English isn’t even a second language. Yesterday at the launderette I met a nicely-dressed man with ritual scars on his cheeks, and yet the stereotypical white Britons of the working and middle classes are everywhere to be seen, along with Brits whose parents hailed from you-name-it and beyond. I think it’s a carryover from Empire, about which more later.

The Yank Has Landed

New Directions:

Bridget McKenna
The Little Apple, Room #3
98 Kennington Lane
London SE11 4XD
U.K.

Jill has indeed secured me Room #3 as you can see from the address above. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the workmen aren’t finished laying the new wood floor in that room (the old one appears to be about as old as the building, which I suspect is nearly as old as the United States of America. It’s listed by Heritage Pubs, which implies a certain antiquity, as does the architecture). But the other good news is that Gerry left for a week in Ireland last night and left me the key to his room, so I have a place to stow my bags and sleep for now. Presumably they can’t work so slow that I won’t be in my own room by next Tuesday.

Gerry’s room is on the first floor, just upstairs from the pub. If you look at the picture below, I’m behind the right-hand window, almost directly above the front entrance. You can see in the picture I took that the window was slightly open. It still is. Jill says the Guv’nor’s neice lives in the room across the hall. The Guv’nor doesn’t yet know about the emergency housing scheme, but she’s going to tell him so he won’t worry about why someone who doesn’t work here is running around behind the Private Entrance. On the room side of the Private Entrance is a sign that reads “Please be sure this door is locked at all times.” As far as Jill knows it’s never been locked, but she gave me a key to it just in case, and one to Gerry’s room, and warned me that you can’t lock the room door from the inside without locking yourself in until someone can get you out with another key.

My room is upstairs of this one – I believe the third or perhaps the fourth little dormer from the left.

How D’ya Like These Apples?

One of the slips in my pocket while I was walking away from the horrid room in Willesden Green (2 April) was for a room that was going to be available Wednesday. Stephanie at Flatland hadn’t been able to secure an appointment for me, but I called the landlady Monday morning, and she said I could come down and look at it. So I returned to my new home away from home, the Earl’s Court tube station, and headed for Kennington, which is a bit south of Central London, but less removed than any of the places I had looked previously.

The room, Stephanie had told me, was over the Little Apple Pub. "It won’t be a noisy place,” said Stephanie, who used to live down this way. “It’s a sort of old man’s pub.” Because she told me the pub was in Kennington Road I got in quite a bit of extra exercise while not finding it where it has presumably always been, in Kennington Lane.

The Little Apple is in a very old corner building. Jill, a formidable, tattooed working class woman, runs the pub with the help of Gerry, a genial Irish bartender, Sharon, and Peter. It’s clean and attractive and nicely painted, and the large rainbow flag over the bar and a photo print of an American street sign for Gay St. makes me wonder if the clientele mightn’t have changed a bit since Stephanie was there last. Upstairs are six tenants sharing three bathrooms or fractions thereof totalling three toilets, one bathtub, and one shower. A little side hall holds a gas cooker and work surface; not exactly a kitchen, but clean and neat. I was shown two available rooms which were light and airy and pretty and architecturally interesting, with crown moulding, new paint, and new wood floors. I haven’t seen two of these things combined in any place I’ve viewed so far in more remote neighborhoods for 20-30% more money. I offered to pay rent and deposit on the spot, and the deal was made. I’m paying far less rent than I feared I’d have to, and will have a far nicer place than I feared I’d have to settle for.

Thanks to the Cosmos as always, and to Jessie, the Goddess of Finding Houses, and the Chesire Cat, for divine intercession. I move in tomorrow (Wednesday 5 April). I’ll post the address then, as there’s still a bit of confusion about which room I’ll have. Jill says one thing, and some bloke upstairs who wants to change rooms says another. My money’s on Jill.

Stalking the Elusive Domicile

Hunting for a place to stay has been frustrating. For all the folks at Flatland, the letting agency in Gloucester Road, do their best to be helpful, I’ve run into one dead end after another. The first place I went to look was in Shepherd’s Bush, an International District (for you Seattleites) turned up to 11, with the majority of residents hailing from Africa, India, and the Middle East. The room was not too small, freshly painted, and well lit. I’d have taken it on the spot despite slight reservations about the availablility of nearby Internet connections, but Mr Bursac, the gentleman showing the room, had little English and less interest. He wouldn’t let me leave my name and number, only saying they would call the agency when they’d chosen a tenant from their candidates. Apparently I was not one. Next I journeyed out to Acton (I really should have packed a cold supper and hired a sherpa) and walked ten minutes from the station to see a room exactly the size of the hotel closet I’m in now, but stuffed with furniture to the point where all one could do on getting out of bed would be do step into the wardrobe to dress. It was a houseshare, and I’d be sharing a kitchen and bath with five other women, two of whom lived downstairs but just had to use the upstairs bath for some reason the landlady couldn’t explain and didn’t care about. Besides that, this corner of Acton is so far removed from London that not even tube trains run there. I felt isolated before I’d even covered the ten-minute walk from the rail station to the house. And it was the most expensive place the agency had offered yet.

I had a couple of slips in my pocket for places that won’t open up until Tuesday and Wednesday, but I went back to Gloucester Road to see if I could find some more recent postings. They sent me up to Willesden Green, which is not quite as remote as Acton, and mostly a lovely neighborhood. On the way from the tube station to the house (the better part of a mile) I passed an Internet Café with remarkably low rates, and thought I might have landed fortunately after all. This thought began to dissipate when I saw the house, which stood out as the least attractive on its block, with a front garden that had been turned into a rubbish pit full of lumber and plaster and all the detritus of a none-too-recent redo. Raja showed me the kitchen and bath facilities, which were clean and modern, then led me into the room. I may not understand feng shui or other Chinese words, but apparetnly I know its diametric opposite when I step into it. Every sense I have screamed for me to step out again. So I did. I took down Raja’s phone number out of courtesy, and made the long walk back to the station with relief.

Phone calls to various other possibilities have led to nothing, and now I’m waiting for Monday to call about a room in a flat over a pub in Kennington, which is pretty close in compared to any of these others. Stephanie at Flatland says it’s an “old man’s pub” and not very noisy. At this point it could be a disco for the nearly deaf without putting me off much.

The Cruellest Month

While strolling through the Green Park this afternoon I saw that Her Majesty was in residence and called by to chat her up.

“I’ll be Mum, shall I?” said HM as she picked up the teapot. That was sweet of her, I thought, but in retrospect I think she might only have wanted to keep my hands off it – it was pretty nice stuff, all lions and unicorns, rather like a deleted scene from Narnia.

Once the state of the roads and the weather had been dealt with we moved on to politics. I suggested the government might take another look at their policies in Ireland over the past 900 years, and suggested a full withdrawl from the North, and a reparations scheme – something along the lines of forty acres and a mule? Her Majesty said that both acreage and mules were a bit thin on the ground at the moment, and would I like some Jaffa Cakes?

As I left, pleasantly surfeited on cakes and Assam, Her Majesty saw me to the door and waved me off in the royal fashion. She promised to look into the Irish thing. The weather had predicted rain around teatime, and didn’t disappoint, but Londoners are as blasé about rain as Seattleites, and this one scarcely raised a brolly.

May April be kind to you all.

Tea &c.

I fell asleep last night watching a real estate show on the BBC. Can’t imagine why…. Shows about buying and selling houses have been very big over here the last few years, and I have to confess a strange train-wreck sort of fascination with them. Anyway, my other choice was watching a retrospective on “Alive!”, and I’m a vegetarian. I managed at least six hours’ sleep before my Yank Time body clock rang the alarm on me, and by 0600 Real Time I was up and making tea.

However mean the accommodations in this country, I’ve never seen a room that didn’t come with a kettle. The alternative would clearly be barbarism. Knowing I’d quickly exceed my hotel-provided tea ration, I picked up some tea at Tesco last evening: Thompson’s Punjana for day, Tick Tock Rooibos for night.

Rooibos, or Redbush, tea is an African tradition I first became aware of while reading the abovementioned (28 March) books by Alexander McCall Smith. I’ve never seen it for sale in the U.S. except online, but over here one can bring it home from the supermarket. Africans have apparently been brewing this stuff off the bush since the discovery of fire, but it’s only been about a hundred years since it’s been available for the rest of us. It’s quite tasty, caffeine free, and loaded with antioxidants. Just what I need right now.

The first thing I often do after arriving here is catch a cold, which is not surprising given a 9 hour plane ride with several hundred strangers in super-dried recirculated air, then stepping off into a world of viruses one’s body has not yet been introduced to (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition. Sue me). One man on the plane – not Asian, strangely – wore a face mask the entire flight. To be fair, he did look a bit delicate, but it was only as we were deplaning that I saw his protective facegear in good light, and it appeared to have been sewn from an old washcloth, and exceedingly grubby. Hard to imagine what it might do for him besides making him look like a total git. Being somewhat less of a git, I brought along some Emergen-C, a couple of daily doses of which should keep me cold-free until my immune system can bluff it out with the locals.

Stepped into the breakfast room this morning and was assailed by country and western music, the popularity of which in the U.K. can probably best be attributed to the awfulness of mainstream British Pop. British Pop, in turn, seems to owe a lot to British advertising jingles, which are likewise pretty dire, even when not accompanied by animated bulldogs. The Geico gecko emigrated to the states so he could do better ads. You knew that. Breakfast in digs of this calibre consists of corn flakes and toast, juice, and your choice of weak tea or horrible coffee. If I’d been willing to pay £20 more a night I could have landed at a place that gives you a boiled egg on top of all that, but it hardly seemed worth it.

Following breakfast I walked up to Gloucester Road, since that was close to the first letting service I was visiting, then attempted to take a tube to the second. That went something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, due to a security alert at Bayswater there will be no Circle Line service to that station. If your destination is Kensington High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queensway, Bayswater, or Paddington, please take the District Line train to Earl’s Court and change there for the Edgeware Road train.” Still with me? Okay. Fade to Earl’s Court: “Ladies and Gentlemen: If you are waiting for the Edgeware Road train to go to Kensington High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queensway, Bayswater or Paddington, please get on the train that’s on the platform now and get off at Gloucester Road and change for the Circle line.” I was afraid I might end up doing this all day, but this time the train I needed was running from Gloucester Road, all so I could show up and be told that nothing could be done within my budget at that particular service. So tomorrow I’ll revisit the first service if I don’t find anything in LOOT, the local rentals paper. They, at least, were more encouraging, though I may have to stay further out and still pay more than I wanted to. The problem is that I’m not staying six months – Worldcon gets in the way – and short-term lettings are rarer and more expensive.

Spongebob sez: Welcome to Kensington!

The plane lifted off about 8:15 and arrived at Heathrow a bit before 3 p.m. local time. I had copped a 4 ½ hour block of sleep between movies and breakfast, which is why I feel nearly human right now. The usual long passport check queues, but Customs was a matter of walking through an exit while bored customs employees stood about chatting. I sprang for a £40 taxi ride to spare myself the experience of taking three pieces of luggage on a bus (no tube service from Terminal 4 until September) and two trains, followed by a walk of several blocks from the Earl’s Court tube station to the West Cromwell Hotel.

This was the cheapest hotel deal I could find for an ensuite bath in central London, and while quite clean and not exceedingly dismal, it is the smallest hotel room I’ve ever seen, reached by way of the smallest lift I could have imagined. I used to make jokes about the size of the lift in the Elysee Hotel in Bayswater, where I’ve stayed several times over the years, but this one is half that size, and I was barely able to cram myself and my luggage inside for the trip up to the third floor (that’s the fourth floor to all you Yank types). I knew I had made the right hotel choice when I walked in and saw the Spongebob coverlet on the bed. It’s like being in the guest room at a friend’s house, or – given the size – perhaps the guest bath.

Later I walked down the block to the Tesco supermarket to pick up dinner (wheat rolls and brie, red grapes and cherry yogurt). I was beginning to realize I was in London by that time, but this is the first time that hasn’t seemed exceedingly strange.

Fly Time

I arrived at SeaTac this afternoon with a cool three hours to spare before my flight, only to find the inbound flight had left Heathrow late and the outbound flight delayed nearly another three hours, officially. Unofficially British Air tell us they’ll have us off the ground an hour ahead of that, and presented us all with meal vouchers. After checking in, I killed an hour in Borders and picked up The Sunday Philosophy Club, first in a newish mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith. If you’re not familiar with Mr Smith, he’s the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and five or six later books in that series, which features Precious Ramotswe, owner of the first female-operated detective agency in Botswana. Anyone who loves Africa, or even the idea of Africa, should rush out and buy these, by the way. They’re quite cozy, which is not really my usual style, but the masterful combination of simplicity, innocence, wisdom, and quiet humor won me over.

This newer series takes place in Edinburgh, and the protagonist is one Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. I’m quite looking forward to whiling away the waking portions of my next 14 hours with her.

The terror has abated somewhat, replaced by wildly varying mixtures of excitement, resolve, and whatever feeling one calls it when one is saying “I have no idea why I’m doing this.” I have yet to identify this emotion by name, but I’m working on it.

All That Life Can Afford

"No, sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford." -Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

It's not like I needed to move again. I've moved a lot since coming to Seattle - from South Queen Anne/Uptown to Maple Leaf, to West Queen Anne to Hayden Lake, to Fremont, to another place in Fremont, to a stretch of Greenwood that Greenwood won't claim, and now to Beacon Hill. I can field strip and reassemble my bed in under five minutes. I am the Queen, the Empress, the Goddess of Moving. And I don't much like it.

I spent my childhood and adolescence moving frequently and on short notice, then did eight years as an army wife before I ever spent two years in one house, so all I really want is to find a home and settle into my comfy chair and be carried out feet first someday far in the future. This is my favorite of all the cities I've ever lived in and here, I determined, I would stay until they pried me from Seattle's cold, dead fingers. Seattle is perfect. It's not too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer. It's green and lively and full of interesting people and places and things to occupy the body, mind, and spirit.

So why am I about to move to London?

I've had a rather torrid affair with Dr Johnson's city since my first visit in 1997, when I walked all over town for eight hours with my nose in a borrowed "A-Z." I got lost and found again any number of times. I saw Shaftesbury Square and Charing Cross Road and Nelson's er, column, and Whitehall and the Green Park and Buckingham Palace and everywhere in between. I walked the length of Hyde Park and made the first of many pilgrimages to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, as any child or former child ought to do when in the neighborhood. I fell in love, and although I'm sure London does not return the full fervor of my affections it has always been kind to me. I've visited six times so far and my passion, at least, has not flagged. I have often thought of living there for a while, just for the adventure of it, but rents are high, and it never seemed possible.

So when, only a few weeks ago, my lovely daughter sent me a link to a page of quite affordable bedsitting rooms in central London I realized that the key to being able to have my adventure was to lower my sights and expectations just a few degrees. A small flat in Zones 1-2 costs about as much as a three-bedroom house in most Seattle neighborhoods, but I began to see that if one were willing to make do with more modest digs and a shared bath, one might be able to pull off an extended visit for little more than my current living expenses, and one might not actually starve to death (watch this space for real-world results of this theory).

I had received word that a film producer was ready to pay me an advance on film righs to a piece of short fiction I had published in 1994, so I was already planning on visiting the U.K. for a couple of weeks around Easter weekend. I can write and edit from anywhere, so I wouldn't need to be back in the U.S. until about a week before LACon. I could extend my visit to about 4 1/2 months. If I moved fast and seized the opportunity I could have my adventure.

And I was terrified.

Now I have my ticket and 24 hours from now I'll be cooling my heels at the boarding gate for British Airways flight 0048 from SeaTac to Heathrow. Yes, I'm still terrified, but that alone has never slowed me down much. To keep me from flying away tomorrow it would take terrified and an anvil.