Home, Sweet Closet

Right: The Famous 3 Kings in West Kensington

New Directions, good from now until 18 September 2007:

21 Charleville Road
London W14 9JJ
UK

Through the efforts of the ladies of Flatland, I found a room in West Kensington on Sunday. It won’t be available until next Saturday, but meantime I’m renting a room in the landlady’s other house in Boston Manor, most of the way back to Heathrow. You can save quite a bit of rent living in the outlying districts, but you make it all up when you decide actually to go anywhere. From here you have to join a caravan at Brentford and trek through the wilds of Chiswick and through darkest Ravenscourt Park, fighting off wild animals the whole way. By comparison West Kensington is just slightly west of central London – coincidentally about ten minutes’ walk from where my course will be held in April – a thriving neighborhood of late-Victorian terrace (row) houses on the side streets, and lots of shops and restaurants on the main streets. The room – on the second floor (Yanks read third) of one of the aforementioned terrace houses – is all of a two-minute walk from the West Kensington tube, and perhaps five from Baron’s Court in the opposite direction.

The room itself is quite small; even smaller than good ol’ Room 3 over the Little Apple from last year’s stay, but not by much. It’s narrow and tall, with a nice big window at one end, and the furniture (wardrobe, table, shelves, chest of drawers, single bed) takes up about 80% of the floor space, but it also comes with a microwave, a mini-fridge, a toaster, a kettle, and a TV. There’s no sink, which is the main disadvantage. There is a tiny coal grate with an little mantel near the head of the bed that adds a certain amount of Victorian charm.

Before leaving Bayswater this morning I hopped a train to Flatland and delivered three bunches of tulips to Stephanie, Janine, and Lily, who had helped me find the place. Then I went home and trundled my luggage down the Stairway to Hell (two trips) and into a cab. No more four flights of steep, narrow stairs for me; I’ll be down to two now.

Stairway to Hell

My previous six visits to this corner of the world I’ve booked my hotel through hotel-assist.com, usually choosing the least expensive lodgings I could find there. Hang on to that “usually” – it’ll come in handy later.

This time I booked a month or so later than usual, and there were fewer choices. Last year’s hotel on West Cromwell Road was not available, but to my surprise I found one even cheaper, albeit with a shared bath. For the price, I could handle a shared bath. Apparently a couple of key brain cells had been lost to debauched living, because I booked a room for six nights.

Fast forward to me dragging my four pieces of luggage into the hotel lobby after six hours of detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Reservation in order, room ready for occupation. “It’s on the top floor…” the receptionist said, and there was something terribly sympathetic in her face that made me remember what I already knew from years of not booking this hotel. “…And there’s no lift,” I said. My God, I’m in the Kensington Court Hotel, the one I don’t stay in because it’s five storeys tall and – that’s right, weary traveller – it has no lift.

The man waiting behind me for his room volunteered to haul up the two heaviest pieces, saving me a second and third trip (at these rates you don’t get bellhops), so I was still able to breathe when I got everything into the room, but then it’s two floors down to the nearest toilet. Down and back up again, that is. And these stairs are half again as steep as stairs built to code in the U.S., because they have to lift you up the same distance while using up far less horizontal space. Grueling, is what it is. I must have gone to sleep with an overdose of either stairways or captivity, as I woke up about 0100 with a splitting headache that didn’t back down for almost twelve hours. Heading into night four, I begin to feel a degree of equanimity concerning the top floor, but that’s probably because I’m leaving tomorrow, about which more… tomorrow.

Immigrants

BA Flight 48 landed about an hour late yesterday, and I headed into the passport check queues without a care, as last year’s interview had been about 20 seconds long, with that officer concerned mostly with whether I had proof of a booked flight back to the States in case my adventure went south. This year a different officer left with my passport for a discussion with the nice folks in the darkened glass booth at the center of the room. She came back with two more of her official kind, one of whom served me with a paper that said I was liable to be examined further. Something of an understatement, that; for the better part of the next six hours I was the guest of Her Majesty, and this time no tea was on offer.

Mrs Shah – who informed me that they were going to find out “the real reason for my visit” – escorted me to the customs line, and in the presence of a few hundred passing travellers minutely inspeced my luggage, saving aside anything that might provide a clue, including but not limited to my notebooks, debit cards, business cards, receipts, and pretty much anything made of paper with ink on it. She kept up a running interrogation during this, but didn’t write anything down. She was polite in a meaningless, by-rote sort of way that did nothing to reassure me. I tried to like her and failed.

My luggage repacked I was taken behind several layers of closed doors, where I turned out my pockets for the uniformed officer with the electronic wand, and suffered the sour gaze of the evidently senior bloke in the suit who I feared might be in charge of my eventual fate. I was then escorted into the detention area to get acquainted with my fellow suspicious travellers from Nigeria, India, Mexico, China, and Canada (I always thought there was something off about those guys). The two Nigerians, the Indian, the Canadian, and I spoke English. The three Mexicans spoke only Spanish, but the Canadian, the Indian, and I had enough of that language to communicate with them in a very limited fashion. The Chinese bloke didn’t speak a word in any language while I was there. He slept a lot. One side of the room was windows, so we could be observed by Immigrations officers walking past, and there were three 360-degree cameras in the room being monitored from a desk outside so we didn’t get up to anything. In one corner was a little TV tuned to inane cartoon programmes, which we soon began to suspect was some kind of torturous softening-up scheme.

After perhaps an hour, Mrs Shah returned and led me into an office at the other end of our little goldfish bowl, where she filled out forms and took my fingerprints. Apparently I have very unusual fingerprints (remind me to avoid a life of crime), as the computer kept rejecting them. “Finger not recognized” is the error she got at least 40 times before she could convince it to bypass the last print and send the result to my official dossier, which will be on file with the Home Office for ten years.

Now you might be curious how I was doing at this point, and the answer is I was focussed on my outcome for the whole mess, which was the feeling of slipping between clean white sheets in my hotel room that evening, happy the whole thing was over. Every time I felt like I’d stepped into a large royal cowpat I’d replay the image of that bed and the feel of those sheets. I aimed myself at that bed in my imagination. I didn’t know where I might go before the getting-into-bed part, but I wasn’t accepting the notion of any less perfect outcome. So I was actually not doing too badly. Meanwhile the Indian man would get up every hour or so and say “I’m getting out of here. Who’s coming with me?” Then we’d laugh, and he’d laugh and sit down again. He sang to us a lot. The Canadian, who was apparently being sent back to Canada, complained loudly and profanely, but he was laughing, too. The Mexican family, which included a mother, a grandmother, and a boy of seven or eight, were mostly confused. They had come to visit relatives for two weeks and had no idea why they were there, en prison. “Vivimos aqui ahora,” I told them, and we all had a laugh at that too, though it may have been a bit on the nervous side.

Late in the afternoon yet another Immigrations officer came in to do the real interview. His name was Chris, and he was the first British person I’d seen since stepping out of the queue at 1300 who seemed genuinely interested in whether I stayed or was summarily shuffled onto the next flight back to Seattle. We spoke for perhaps half an hour, and he wrote down everything I said. Then he went to talk to his superior and much later came back and said I’d be “allowed to land.” Heck, I thought I’d landed five hours ago, but apparently I’d been circling the whole time. My arms were really tired. “I’m going over the wall,” I told my cellmates when I came back to the detention area. They all seemed happy for me with the possible exception of the Chinese man, who was glued to the cartoons.

The last wait was for the paperwork that would allow me to sign myself out the door and out of Heathrow and into a cab, and finally into those white sheets. But first I walked myself down to the Tesco on Queensway for a long-delayed supper of bread and cheese and fruit. On the way back to my hotel a low-slung quarter moon in the crook of a barren elm in Princes Square reminded me that it was all still perfect: the universe, London, and everything. Just perfect.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Right: In a previous century, I had not yet even left Las Vegas

You know, last year when I was getting ready to fly to the U.K. for the purposes of having a (safe) adventure, I was merely terrified. This year terror has given way to a strange sadness to be leaving 99.9% of the people I know on this planet 6000 miles away from where I'll be for the next six months. Last year the thought of going to a foreign, if not exactly strange, country for the better part of five months crowded out a lot of other thoughts. I knew I'd be uncertain and things would be unfamiliar, but I was unprepared for how lonely I was going to be, and the depth of my isolation came as something of a shock. This time I feel it before I've even stepped onto the plane.

And step on I will, this very evening. And if six months living in a rented room in London were my only object, I'd probably be cashing in my ticket, much as I love the place. But this time I have cleverly included a purpose in my visit that will keep me walking down the jetway: I'll be attending a practitioner training in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) in April, and a further training in September. See how I got my hooks into myself?

I wouldn't want you to think I'm not looking forward to my stay in Dr Johnson's city, 'cause if I couldn't provide all of you with some entertainment between now and mid-September my life would have exactly no purpose worth mentioning. So watch this space for sparkling travel commentary, and if you can't find any of that, please read what I post. It'll make me feel good.