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.