The Book of a Thousand and One Teatimes

2010-08-16T20:33:00.001+01:00

Greenwich, meantime

2010-07-19T20:50:00.010+01:00

(Right: the place where time begins)
Today I left my hotel in Earl's Court with an invitation to visit an old mate from Master Practitioner training, Rabiyah Patel. Rabi and her husband Nigel, her brother Farid, and her adorable baby son Nour, live in a lovely apartment in Greeenwich, overlooking the Thames, just west of the Cutty Sark, a 141-year-old clipper ship - the last-built merchant sailing vessel, the only remaining tea-clipper - that some arsehole tried and failed to burn three years ago.

My feet being the kind of ruined they've been since I had to give up my orthotics, I nearly contacted Rabi on any number of occasions in the past week to turn down the honor of her invitation, especially once I scoped out the distance between the nearest Docklands Light Rail station and her apartment. Doubling that distance for a round trip, and adding the trek through Bank station to the DLR tracks seemed like asking for trouble.

But one doesn't have adventures by avoiding trouble, even supposing it could be done. So after braving The Horror That Is The Breakfast Room, I walked the very few yards between my hotel and the Earl's Court tube, and headed east.

The world standard of maps and driving / transport / walking directions is the Google map, but when Google goes head-to-head with London, put your money on London. I had not yet arrived at this useful conclusion when, armed with my walking directions from you-know-who, I set out from Cutty Sark DLR station, already a bit late for the lunch Rabi's mum was making for me: homemade Dal and Basmati Rice.

Londinium is about 2000 years old, having been built by Caesar's lads, who laid out streets much as they are in Rome, along cartpaths, footpaths, and cowpaths. The way in which streets begin and end, rename themselves seemingly at random, and fade into nonexistence in the middle of council housing estates is either quaint and charming, or diabolically perverse, depending on how much your feet hurt. Outfoxed by London's streets, I wandered around Deptford for 45 minutes, aided by three sets of conflicting directions from locals, before asking a west African man near Deptford Green. He was new to the neighborhood, so he reached into the back seat of his car and pulled out his A-Z.

The "A-to-Zed" is the London standard of maps and directions. Every one of those deliberately perverse little bovine trails is represented somewhere in its pages. We found the street, and he offered to drive me there, as it was a miserably hot and humid day in Caesar's little riverside town. When we had no luck finding a way in to Rabiyah's street, we asked a passerby, who sent us 180 degrees from our destination. As I began noticing streets I'd walked down forty minutes before, I alerted my benefactor, who turned the car around, then noticed that the end of the street was right in front of us, nowhere near the location indicated by either the A-Z or Google. He dropped me off, and I walked around for another 20 minutes looking for the right building.

So in the end I got my Dal, and some water, and then Rabiyah and I walked to Greenwich Park, and up the hill to the Royal Observatory, where time on this planet begins and ends, then down through the park to the Old Royal Naval College--one of the architectural marvels of 17th-century Britain. Then we turned past the Cutty Sark (still undergoing restoration), and back to the DLR station.

My feet still haven't forgiven me, but the rest of me is glad I opted for a bit of adventure on my last day in town.

Alarums and Excursions

2010-07-16T20:39:00.002+01:00

Right: Leicester Cathedral

Ask anyone who knows me—I hate alarm clocks. I’ll do almost anything to avoid having to wake up to any sort of buzzing or beeping. Sometimes “anything” includes getting to work late, but don’t tell my boss.

In England, though, one is much more likely to wake up to church bells. Every city has a cathedral, and every village, town and market town has at least one church. Sizeable towns and cities have sizeable numbers of them, and that means that you’d have to be pretty far off the beaten path not to hear church bells announcing every hour of the day, and specialized bells for canonical hours, to call the faithful to prayer. As I’m not faithful, I don’t know one of these tunes from another, except to say, “Oh, it’s that one. Nice.”

The executive flat where I’m staying on this trip to Leicester has about four times more space than my hotel room at the Travelodge, where I stayed week before last, about six times more than my London hotel room between trips, a kitchen, a leather couch, a huge television, and Leicester Cathedral. Well, the latter’s not actually in the flat, but just a little way outside where I can see and hear it, and by hearing, know the time.

Bells have a certain authority that mere clocks lack. Let’s face it: your kitchen clock can say one thing, your oven clock another, and your bedroom clock something unlike either. One can quibble with a clock, but bells are another matter; they leave no doubt what o’ the clock it is. They give the clock a voice. And they give a tired traveller a buzzless, beepless way to wake up in time to get to her seminar.

So today was the first day of Chris Hall’s three-day seminar on “The Paradoxical Nature of Change” at the lovely old Ramada Jarvis Hotel here in good old Leicester, wherein our heroine learned that problems are paradoxes, and “stuckness” is a result of not knowing how to resolve them via a sort of unified field. Golly. Wonder what I’ll learn on day two?

Life for the Win

2010-07-15T07:56:00.008+01:00

As I’ve been restricting my running about to save what’s left of my feet, I’ve no exciting tourist photos to build a story around. But the other night on the BBC I encountered this story, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

In October of last year, Richard Rudd was riding his motorcycle past a filling station near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, when a car exiting the station struck him and threw him 20 feet. Rudd, 42 and the divorced father of two teenage daughters, could initially move his limbs, but a post-operative infection caused his organs to begin shutting down, and he went into a coma. When he emerged, he was completely paralyzed.

He was moved to a special neuro-intensive care unit at Addenbroke Hospital in Cambridge, where doctors determined that the damage to Richard’s lower brainstem was such that he would never recover movement in his body, or the ability to speak, or even to breathe on his own. His father and his children agreed that Richard himself would not want to live in that condition.

They related stories of Richard saying things like “If anything like that happens to me, I don’t want to go on.” Richard’s father said he felt that keeping his son alive would be “like playing God.” There was “no way in a million years” Richard would want to live in these circumstances. It seemed pretty clear that if Richard had thought to draw up a living will, it would have included a provision to withdraw care at this point.

The family’s consent to take Richard off the ventilator having been given, it was now up to the doctors in the unit to come to a decision. There seemed to be a general agreement that there was no point to keeping a man alive who wouldn’t want to be under these conditions. But Professor David Menon, a leading expert in treating brain injuries, and the creator of the neuro-intensive care unit, felt there was still some input missing. Richard’s.

He went to visit Richard, shortly before the time scheduled for shutting down the respirator and removing the tubes that fed oxygen to his brain. He asked Richard if he would move his eyes to the left. Richard did, then to the right on Menon’s second request. A BBC film crew was present, and caught the expression on Menon’s fact that seemed to say “This changes everything.” Richard performed those eye movements over and over at Menon’s request, but was unable to respond to a more complex suggestion that involved holding on to an instruction over time.

Menon determined that Richard was not capable of giving a meaningful answer to the question of whether he wanted to live…yet. His responsiveness hinted at higher brain function still intact. He decided to wait for the final life-or-death decision until Richard himself might have a chance to weigh in.

Menon put a speech therapist on the case, who interviewed the family for Richard’s likes and dislikes, and facts about his life. She came to his bedside every day with a list of 23 questions to which he could answer yes or no by moving his eyes to the left or right—questions that included tests of long- and short-term memory. Every day for three weeks, she asked the same questions and got the same answers. Sometimes after the questions, she'd have a conversation with him. Richard passed all tests easily. At no time did anyone ask him about withdrawing care. It wasn’t yet time for that question. Menon wanted to give Richard time to consider his life as it was now.

What Richard had been experiencing since waking from his coma is what doctors are now calling “Locked-in Syndrome.” The patient’s total paralysis and inability to speak are much the same as in vegetative states, but as demonstrated by the recent case in Belgium of a man who reported having been conscious during a 23-year vegetative state, locked-in patients are awake and aware, although unable to communicate. David Menon had demonstrated that the nerves controlling the muscles that moved his eyes—located higher up on the brainstem than the worst of the injury—were still intact and responsive to Richard’s will. He had given Richard Rudd a way to communicate with the outside world.

Once Professor Menon was convinced that Richard was capable of understanding his condition and prognosis, and of considering the question of his own future, he began to have that talk, and ask those questions. Three times on separate occasions, he asked Richard if, under the circumstances which he now understood, he wanted to live. Three times Richard answered yes.

The photo below was taken in March of this year, five months after Richard Rudd’s motorcycle accident. He had, by this time, learned to move his head an inch in either direction. He had also recovered the use of some of the muscles in his face, allowing him to smile.

Richard’s case has inflamed renewed debate over living wills, which are legally binding documents. A spokesman for a group opposing the use of living wills says: “This case shows the weakness of giving legal force to documents which, by their very nature, can never cover every possibility.” And no matter where you come down on the subject, you might agree that there’s a difference between an imagined future and a tangible present.

David Menon puts it this way.“There may sometimes be differences between what a patient declares when he is fit and healthy, and what he feels when he is the one in the hospital bed.” Richard Rudd is living proof of that.

Manhunt

2010-07-12T19:53:00.008+01:00

As events of the trip so far would be of little interest to non-Jedis, I thought I'd tell you a true story, as I watched it unfold on TV. This was going on for most of my first week in England, and I thought you might find it interesting:

Last Friday, as I was preparing for this year’s trip to London and Leicester, Durham prison was releasing Raoul Thomas Moat from a prison term for assault. Though it would not come out for some days, Moat had already been arrested once for conspiracy to murder, and the prison authorities alerted the Northumbria police upon his release that he might pose a threat to his former girlfriend, Samantha Tobbard. The warning was filed and ignored.

Sam Tobbard had written Moat a couple of weeks earlier from Northumbria, just north of Durham, telling him that she was breaking up with him for another man, who was "better looking." In an effort to frighten him away from confronting her, she said later, she told him her new partner was a Northumbria police officer. He was actually a martial arts instructor. She had just sentenced Chris Brown to death.

A couple of hours into Saturday, UK time, Raoul Moat went to Sam’s house on Tyneside, near Newcastle, and started shooting. Brown tried to protect Sam, but Moat shot him three times in the head, and shot her in the stomach. Brown died of his wounds; Sam Tobbard lived to regret taunting a psychopath.

So far, although it was a sad case, it was not yet newsworthy in the long term. But 24 hours later, as I was boarding my plane for Heathrow, Raoul Moat rang 999 and announced he was going to kill another police officer. A few minutes after that, he walked up to a parked patrol car, and shot unarmed Northumbria Police Constable David Rathband in the face and upper body, possibly with a sawed-off shotgun. The BBC declined to air the photos of Rathband’s injuries.

If terms like “firearms officers” and “armed response teams” create a certain sensation of disconnect, you might be a Yank. Police in the U.K. “serve by consent” and do not, as a rule, go armed. So while Moat was in no danger from P.C. Rathband, the response to his shooting was as might be expected: Coppers with guns descended on the formerly sleepy village of Rothbury, north of Newcastle, where Moat had liked to camp, and where some intelligence they’d received led them to believe he’d be.

Meanwhile, Moat had gone to visit an old friend, and had given him a 49-page handwritten letter to deliver to the police, in which he promised to “keep killing police until I’m dead.” The police had already interviewed the friend, but were not keeping him under surveillance, so missed their chance to arrest Moat, much as they had missed their chance to protect Sam Tobbard and Chris Brown, and possibly arrest Raoul Moat for a lesser crime before he shot two people, then picked David Rathband as his next victim. Another letter from him was found later in the week in an abandoned tent near the River Coquet.

Suicide by Cop?

The situation seemed custom-made for “suicide by cop,” but for a few things: Moat took no hostages, provoked no armed police, and did not go to ground to make a last stand. He disappeared into the wooded rural area surrounding Rothbury, helped by friends in the area and occaisional forays into empty houses. One family reported someone had broken into their house while they were away, took some food, and slept in a bed. Despite the ubiquitous police presence in Rothbury, it took police three hours to respond.

The search for Moat, and the bizarre sight of hundreds of armed men and women patrolling the village streets (at the height of the hunt, 10% of all Britain’s firearms officers were involved, along with aircraft, helicopters, and lots of fancy technology) was on the front page of every newspaper, and at the beginning of every news broadcast on every channel all that week. BBC1 even ran live coverage of a town hall meeting in the village hall, where police attempted to reassure townspeople they’d be safe, while also reminding them there was a dangerous criminal nearby, and they should remain indoors. Even the spy exchange between Russia and the U.S. was small potatoes next to the biggest police manhunt in Britain for 30 years. It was an inescapable dramatic narrative.

“You’re better off dead.”

Photographs of a three-year-old Raoul Moat reveal a lovely, round-faced, ginger-haired boy with sparkling blue eyes. These were frequently shown on TV and in newspapers alongside his mother’s advice on hearing of her son’s alleged crimes: “…you’re better off dead, son.” Just something to reflect on if you’ve ever wondered if psychopaths are born or made.

Newscasters and armchair investigators wondered why the massive search effort continued to narrow until it contained little more than the village of Rothbury, but when Moat was spotted on Friday evening, it was very near the center of town, lying on a riverbank near a bowling green, a few yards from the entrance to a storm drain—a favorite dog-walking area for villagers. The drain was connected to a tunnel that ran under Rothbury to a drain on the other side of the village. Raoul Moat had probably been under the police's feet on and off for days.

On spotting their target, police officers surrounded Moat, but not too closely—he was holding his sawed-off shotgun to his own neck, and they'd publicly promised a peaceful conclusion to this business. Negotiators were brought in, and the quiet standoff continued for seven hours, while officers stood by with guns and tasers, and rain came down in buckets. At the end of that time, Raoul Moat apparently heard some officers who had been creeping up behind him in the darkness, and shot himself. The manhunt was over, and so was a life that must have been a painful one to leave so much pain behind.

P.C. David Rathband will live, but has already undergone the first of many facial reconstructive surgeries, and may never regain the sight in one of his eyes. He says he holds no malice towards Raoul Moat, and that he wants to continue to be a police officer. Chief Constable Sue Sim has assured him he'll always have a future with the Northumbria Police.

You may find it somewhat disturbing—as I do—that some people in and around Moat’s native Newcastle consider him some sort of Robin Hood figure. They’ve been leaving candles, floral tributes, and notes outside his former home, expressing sympathy with him, his actions, his bravery. Perhaps they’re short of heroes up there.

The Churchfitters

2010-02-09T16:40:00.003+01:00

When one is invited to a musical event at the Garboldisham Village Hall (and if one is me, which might be even less of a shared experience), one might be forgiven for wondering if one is in for a long, long, evening. I left Seattle last month with just such an invitation in hand, fresh from experiencing The. Worst. Live. Band. In. Seattle – possibly in all creation, so I may have been more concerned than I would have been otherwise.

Carolyn White, John Thurgood and I arrived in Garboldisham at a quarter to seven on a Saturday night in late January, and had no problem finding good seats towards the front of the hall. In fact there were so few people in evidence that we feared the acts would be playing to a sparse audience. We soon learned we had arrived an hour early due to misinformation in the local paper, and by a quarter to eight, every seat had been claimed, and the bar was doing a good business in Old Chimneys Ale, a local brew.

The opening band was a husband-and-wife duo at least the equal of T.W.L.B.I.S. They sang original but indifferently-composed-and-written songs, and while she could sing and he could play, she was so enamored of her own style and so in her own head during her performance that she did sing-along numbers flourished up with her own vocal meanderings that had the audience totally unsure where to go next. Good singers have rapport with the people they’re singing to; this woman, despite having a lovely voice, was not a good singer, in my opinion, at least as humble as the one in paragraph one. By the time they’d left the stage I had grown even more concerned with what I was going to hear for the next 90 minutes.

But history is not prophecy, and neither is the quality of the first act. The Churchfitters had me in the palms of their hands from the opening chords of the opening number. The spine of their music sounds like very solid and proficient Irish trad, but onto that they build every possible rock-blues-folk sound and more, including a bit of Breton flavor, and playing a staggering number of instruments, including hand-built bass viols and bass guitars created by Boris, the bass player, who might have come straight from an audition for an Addams Family revival.

The degree of sheer musicianship would have been impressive by itself, but the band is also practiced and tight and innovative and original and FUN. Though becoming better known all the time in the UK and France, they are not a worldwide phenomenon…yet.

The astounding live experience of The Churchfitters is not to be replicated in an audio-only medium, so have a butcher's at this. You can also listen to a wide variety of album tracks on their website, and if that prompts you to buy a CD and tell a friend, so much the better. On the way out the door I told Boris, “I’d go around the world to see you guys again.” I hope their fame grows and grows, so I won’t have to travel quite that far.

Return to Elysium

2010-02-08T14:58:00.003+01:00

Above: Size really, really doesn't matter.

Some of you may remember my fond tales of the Elysee Hotel in Bayswater and its two-person lift (luggage not included). Believe me, you haven’t heard them all, but that’s as it should be. Suffice it to say those anchors are still in place, and I remain quite fond of it, even though they enlarged the lift.

Ye olde Elysee been somewhat modernized since my last visit, with wireless access in the public areas, and the addition of some tiny garret rooms on the fourth (fifth) floor. I booked one of these “compact singles,” expecting it to be a hole in the wall into which I could insert myself and my bags, and to my delight it turned out to be a charming and nicely-appointed little space with a nice view of the street, where a light snow is falling. There’s a TV on the wall at the foot of the bed, and they’ve even managed to find space for a desk. The bathroom is predictably tiny, but quite nice. After living 12 months in a 6x12x10, this roughly 8x7x7 space seems quite livable, at least for three days.

Last night I walked out and bought a supper to eat in my room. I passed places I’d eaten and shopped and done my laundry in, and in the process reminded myself how much I sometimes miss dear old London. That said, I’ll be happy to get back to my life and my people and my projects, none of which are here.

I’ll be off with Dev Agarwal and Terri Trimble tonight, to the streets around Waterloo Station, to find a good curry.

This is Your Brain in Leicester

2010-02-07T14:33:00.002+01:00

Leicester used to be the place from which I caught a train to Hinckley. I spent so much time in Hinckley during 2008 that I developed a fondness not only for that place and its wide variety of cheap curries, but for the unprepossessing railway platforms of Leicester. One incident in particular stands out: I had just come on a Sunday night from enjoying a leisurely coach journey from Hinckley, necessitated by engineering works on the railway. The journey was so leisurely, in fact, that when I arrived on the platform I’d missed the last train to London.

I remember well the compassion of the Midland Mainline employee as she regarded me with head cocked in disbelief: “The LAST train to LONDON left TEN MINUTES AGO!” as if I alone in all the land had not memorized the timetable. I had to find a hotel room.

Now in those days I was living in London on £400 a month, something many people, including my friends at Her Majesty’s Customs and Immigration, thought was impossible. And I was living well, eating three meals and a TV time snack in a comfy room in a nice neighborhood. But even with what help my loved ones could give, the travel demands of my training were hard on the budget. Rent included utilities, so everything I had left after the landlady came around on Monday for 80% of my weekly budget was divided into a) food and b) everything else. Everything else often included a monthly rail journey to Hinckley for my Master Practitioner training.

So when I found myself facing taking the cost of a Leicester hotel room out of the bank, you might imagine my dismay. A lovely taxi driver drove me to a hotel quite near the rail station, where I negotiated a rate that made me feel a little better, and all was well, as usually happens, does it not?

So now Salad’s trainings are being held in Leicester, where I was for the past week. I had no internet connection worthy of the name, hence the lateness of this post. So I’ll say that Leicester was a great place to spend a week, that Carluccio’s and Mem’Saab offer a great menu for the price, and that the U.S. needs more pie shops. I ate most of my lunches and a couple of dinners from Urban Pie, and a fellow delegate, seeing me tuck in to my pie and mash, said “Oh, that’s so ENGLISH!” And so it was. And so was she; I was the only Yank in the room aside from our trainer.

Christina Hall has got to be one of the most amazing trainers in the world, and that sentiment was echoed by several delegates who had taken NLP trainer training with others at the top of the field, including from Bandler and Grinder themselves. The training was spectacular. When she’s through with me in July I ought to be able to teach any subject with a lot more skill and a lot more understanding of the learning process; when this is done I may actually have earned my “Jedi Master” title. I made new friends and continued old friendships, and made new understandings from previously-acquired knowledge, and ate lots of pies and mash. What else could one ask?

Sneaking in (and out)

2010-01-28T02:00:00.008+01:00

Left: Look closely - I'm in row 27

It's Wedsneday afternoon, and I'm waiting for my flight to Heathrow to start boarding. I'll only be in Old Blighty for two weeks this time, and another two in the summer, so I hope no-one's expecting any mind-expanding travel commentary, but I'll do what I can.

The occasion for these next two trips is NLP Trainer training, which I'll be doing in Leicester with Christina Hall. Chris is a big name in NLP for a few reasons: one is that a lot of people think she's a fantastically good trainer (I had the privilege to spend three days learning from her a couple of years ago, and I agree); one is that she's been in this field since Richard Bandler was a slender young man with a full head of hair. Last but not least, she's famous for being the person RB sued back in 1990-ish over who owned "NLP." The court ruled nobody did, and that's about all I know about the whole matter. I respect and admire both parties in the dispute, and my interest pretty much ends there.

When I came back from my training with Chris in 2007, I rhapsodized to my friend Michael Perez, who said "Now you know how Richard used to teach, many years ago." Dr Bandler is famous these days for teaching in ways that impact the unconscious mind more than the waking one. The result is that you learn a lot, but aren't necessarily sure what you learned until you find yourself doing it. He has training partners who handle the more cognitive bits, but what he does is more indirect and...dare I say it...sneakier. He's a sneaky genius.

Some people, it must be said, find Dr Bandler scary. A friend once asked me if I did. I replied that I find being held at gunpoint by a psychotic for several hours scary (and after that, not a lot else is, when you think about it), and I think RB's a very eccentric genius with a tremendous amount of compassion. I'm glad I was able to learn from him, and I'm glad I'm going to be spending two weeks this year soaking in as much as I can from Chris Hall. She rocks.

Before and after training I'll be visiting with friends and re-igniting my love affair with London. When I land I'll go directly to Cambridge to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who've been the inspiration for several of my earlier posts, and after a few days enjoying winter in East Anglia, I'll head for Leicester, then on to London after training. Meanwhile, as it occurs to me to write here, I will. I miss the old blog, and it's good to be back, even if only for a while.

Au revoir, Seattle! Look out, England!

Martha and Me

2008-06-30T16:36:00.004+01:00

Right: DIY Queen and Chia-Bot - Photo by Jill Greenberg for Wired

A few days ago Martha Stewart, American media icon, was denied entrance into the U.K. This – according to a lawyer unaffiliated with Martha who commented on the case – was “bonkers.” As this worthy observed, and as I can personally attest from my last two experiences being allowed to land in England, it’s all down to the individual who looks at your passport. I looked suspicious enough to be detained for six hours in 2007, and unsuspicious enough to be passed through in 30 seconds in 2008. The legal expert commenting on the case confirmed my own suspicions: it’s all down to the luck of the draw.

What Martha needed was the luck to draw the same passport control officer who allowed convicted rapist Mike Tyson to visit the U.K. after he served his sentence. The U.K. is officially opposed to "the entry to the UK of anyone convicted of "serious criminal offences abroad," but apparently that offense didn't qualify to keep the champ out of England.

It would be one thing if lying to a government prosecutor was a crime held to be more heinous than rape on either continent, but as the lawyer chappie remarked in his comments, the crime that was worth a whopping five months in a federal lockup in the States (which Martha did while knitting sweaters for all her fellow inmates) is in any case not a criminal offense here.

So there would appear to be no clear guidelines for deciding who constitutes a threat to the public welfare, which is presumed to be the guiding principle in either allowing an alien to land or putting them on the next plane back to their airport of origin. A conviction for rape can be overlooked, but one for lying – not perjury, I’d like to point out, but lying in the course of an investigation into insider trading – may not, depending on who’s doing the looking.

In my own case, not appearing to have a satisfactory (to someone) reason for coming to London to live for six months may have aroused enough suspicion for detention. But we might want to consider that the answers that marked me a possible threat to public welfare in 2007 were never uttered in 2008 because those questions were not asked. The questions that were asked were the same initial questions as in 2007, roughly: “Where are you going?” “London” “How long will you be here?” “Six months.” and “Do you have family here?” “No.” And while last year those answers resulted in six hours confinement at Her Majesty’s pleasure while getting photographed, fingerprinted, searched, and multiply interviewed, this year they resulted in Stamp, stamp, “Next!” A perverse part of me wanted to ask why I wasn’t a threat this time, but I clapped my hand over its mouth and walked through the “Nothing to Declare” line into Terminal 4 with my jaw still hanging open just a bit. Finally I got my wits about me enough to manage a mental fist-pump and a silent “Yessssss!”

So Martha, though I may be of the opinion that you’re slightly pointless, you’re a highly-successful slightly-pointless multi-millionaire who emerged from a stint behind bars with your public reputation very little affected by what most Americans seemed to think of as a more than slightly-pointless prosecution and conviction. Publicly you maintained your sense of humor and your sense of self, and turned something that could have killed your career deader than Caesar into a sort of triumph, so I doubt you’re going to let a few of Her Majesty’s customs coppers take the shine off your life; heck, most of them can’t even knit a sweater.

The Last TV Post

2008-06-26T16:18:00.004+01:00

Television – in any nation – is not exactly the most fascinating subject, but it is a certain reflection of its culture, and in case you’ve conceived from my previous post that British TV is all about painfully-polite, tea-sipping Brits making their Yank cousins look like a bunch of Bud-swilling barbarians, I’d like to put the entire subject to bed – so to speak – with this post.

Lots of Americans (many of whom actually are Bud-swilling barbarians) think of the British as prudes, but after having been exposed to a limited amount of British evening TV as a substitute for having friends, I’ve come to suspect this is a classic case of projection. I’ve seen things at 10 pm on the BBC that I’d never have been exposed to on the roughly analogous U.S. broadcast networks at any hour, and what I have not observed are vociferous bands of picketers protesting it. In the States we have decency groups counting how many times SpongeBob holds hands with his friend Patrick, or whether Tinky-Winky should be seen by three-year-olds.

Even confining my informal survey to the past few weeks I can recall a documentary on men who have sex with their cars – and other people’s when they can get away with it – and one on women who have sex with fences, bridges, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, to name only a few willing partners. Sheer educational value notwithstanding, in the States this would have been strictly late-night cable, and one reason for that is the FCC.

As I understand it, the Federal Communications Commission was established 80 years ago or so to determine who would be licensed to broadcast along a limited spectrum of AM radio waves. Over the years, the commission became the Decency Police of American broadcasting, holding its powers over the heads of announcers who might utter words which shouldn’t be heard by decent Americans. Except, perhaps, at home or in the schoolyard. Broadcast is a slowly-cooling dinosaur in American entertainment, and the FCC is starting to draw flies, though they’re also drawing federally-funded salaries. But they’re not the disease; they’re more like the symptom. The Brits got rid of their Puritans, who survived the crossing to become…us.

So you’ve really read this far to find out about men who shag their cars, haven’t you? I knew it. The BBC documentary focused on two American men, a young man from the Midwest whom you wouldn’t be able to tell from your cousin Fred, and a middle-aged man from – ready for this, folks in Seattle? – Yelm, Washington. The younger man has friends and a life and other interests, but the bloke from Yelm seems pretty much content to stay home and pork his classic VW. He’d be only a little out of place at a science fiction convention, or perhaps less. Despite his rather hazy notion of what other people are like (can doctors transplant mirror neurons yet?) I’m pretty certain he’d never have allowed an American documentary crew to tape him rhapsodizing about the exhaust pipes of cars on the highway, or drooling (and worse) all over a Trans-Am in a motel parking lot. Yelm is a small town.

The following week’s doco explored women who can only respond sexually to objects. No, not those objects, but things the rest of us might consider rather impersonal, asexual, and even public, like the Eiffel Tower. One of the women the show followed had married La Tour Eiffel in a private ceremony, but they’d been unable to consummate their love due to all the bloody tourists. Fortunately she has a liberal attitude towards these things, and has been busily shagging bridges and fences in the meantime. She had a mad affair with her bow, but it cooled, and so did her archery career.

It occurred to me that what might be operating in all cases – NEWS FLASH! – was an inability to relate to other human beings. Most of the people profiled were technically virgins and had no interest in sex as we (well, as I…) know it. One of them had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and the rest had not, but almost all seemed to me to be out on that end of the neurological spectrum. None knew there were others like them until they went looking on the Internet. Now they’re starting to link up, and even to share lovers.

“Ten P.M. is the watershed hour,” a gentleman told us when a visiting American friend commented on the adult content on the BBC, which is, for any Yank barbarians who don’t know, a government-controlled-and-funded entity. “It’s assumed children will be in bed after that.” Well, if they’re not, they’re getting an education I was denied in my FCC-controlled childhood in the Puritan States of America. And if they happen to like boinking cars and bridges, they now know how to google up some friends.

COPS in Essex

2008-06-05T10:28:00.004+01:00

Right: Fridays, 8 p.m. GMT

So there's this show on BBC 5 called Police Interceptors. Among the terrestrial channels BBC 5 is the one that runs American crime dramas like CSI, NCIS, and Law & Order, but this is a homegrown show about a homegrown high-speed police interception units. To be fair, I've only seen part of one episode, but I've gotta say it seemed rather typically British to me that it concluded with the Essex interceptor unit pulling over a young woman who was driving without insurance. In addition to an automatic six points on her license, they impounded her car. The excitement was very nearly unbearable.

Now I know the Essex interceptor unit regularly bag drug dealers and other major criminal types, but the fact that they chose to focus on the plight of an ‘Essex girl’ – over here Essex girl jokes occupy same evolutionary niche as ‘blonde’ jokes in the States – illustrates a major difference between U.S. and British shows that deal with crime. In Yank crime drama a suspect who protests his innocence nearly always turns out to be guilty after the cops leave the interview and talk about what a liar they think he is, and then go out and prove it. British TV cops are far more likely to argue that the suspect seems genuine, so they’d better go out and find the real perp, and far more often that turns out to be the case. In general – and admittedly based on an incomplete knowledge of the shows involved – American TV cops seem to me to focus more on the dark side of human nature than their British counterparts.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked: “If all T.V. shows about the police went of the air, and instead we had an equal number of T.V. shows about landlords, how would this change the average American reality-tunnel?”

Of course British TV’s already done landlords, from Basil Fawlty to Peggy Mitchell of EastEnders. They’re okay with that. And the majority of the crime drama on offer seems to be imported from the States: those same endless series with either strings of initials or Ice T, where the majority of civilians turn out to be perpetrators of one kind or another. It's difficult for me to imagine shows like this coming out of the U.K.

One would hope not too much of that attitude will rub off on our British friends, but then the Brits have already embraced Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so there may be no hope for them at this point.

Where's Henry?

2008-05-07T16:52:00.006+01:00

Right: A door behind which ghosts have been seen

After a whirlwind bus tour of London with Michael Watson on Saturday, Sunday was reserved for a more targeted outing to Hampton Court Palace, home of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, among other notable Englishmen and women, most of the latter having been married to Henry at one time or another. Here Elizabeth was kept under house arrest by her sister, after whom a famous drink is named (hint: it's not the Martini). Here royal children were born, christened, and died. Here yeoman guards stood watch in the Watching Room, and tilted in the tiltyard, where I munched an egg and cress sandwich. History's layers run deep around here: from Cardinal Wolsey to my sandwich, a distance of five hundred years.

Thomas Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace - not with his own hands, you may be sure - and was wont to say it belonged to Henry when people complimented him on its grandeur, as it was widely held to be more beautiful, and its visitors more influential, than the royal court. So when Wolsey failed to obtain the divorce Henry needed from Catherine of Aragon in order to produce a male heir to inherit his throne, Henry took him at his word, booted him out, and took residence. There he lived with Ann Boleyn and his subsequent wives. The one who outlived him, Catherine Parr, he married there in the Chapel Royal with its fantastic golden-starred blue ceiling.

The house goes on for acres, and when that's through there are even more acres of garden and "wilderness" - actually another garden. It would require a couple of days to thoroughly tour it all, and though we were there most of a day, a look at the map shows a lot we didn't see.

One thing we didn't see was ghosts, but members of the staff claim to have seen someone on the other side of the door above (one of the staff entrances) who then faded away. Spooky...

Now Hinckley sings its siren call once more, and tomorrow I'm away on that Nottingham train for Jedi Master School, Part Deux. More adventures as they happen.

Once I couldn’t even SPELL Hypnotheripest…

2008-05-02T00:02:00.006+01:00

…and now I are one.

Right: Look into my eyes. Do it. Just kidding.

I just finished up a hypnotherapy certification course with Michael Watson, a delightful teacher I’ll be meeting up with again this coming weekend for a couple days of sightseeing around London. I’ve been doing Hypnosis by the seat of my pants for a while now, and some formal training could hardly go amiss, though I’m not sure one could call any training with Michael formal, exactly; his idea of gravity is something one puts on potatoes.

So eight delegates, a couple of lovely assistants from the Salad Ltd family, and a trance dog (if your course does not include one of these, ask for your money back) explored the many varieties of trance at the Hinckley Island Hotel, which now has an entirely new set of anchors to add to the ones I aquired there in 2003, though the fact that the upholstery in the dining room remains unchaged managed to fire off a few of those as well.

Now I’m off for St Pancras International (It's a rail station! It's a shopping Mall!) to buy tickets for my next training adventure, as the fact that I have a U.S. billing address for my debit card is more confusion than East Midlands Trains’ ticket system can safely handle , so I can’t buy them online and pick them up the day of my journey. It’s the little things that make life interesting.

When it’s not the big things.

Oh, Lord, Stuck in Hinckley Again

2008-04-21T12:41:00.005+01:00

(with apologies to John Fogerty)

Right: Hinckley and environs

After a lovely Thursday evening out with Michael Perez, formerly virtual mate from NLP Connections, I spent Friday with Kate van Loon (also formerly virtual), the world's sparkliest master change-maker. I arrived back at my room to an email from the folks at Salad, asking me if I could come up to Hinckley the following day to assist on a two-day course. My immediate guess was that all the other candidates for assistant had been run over by busses, and I've gotta admit I was grateful for that.

There were no trains running early enough to get me there in time for the start of the morning session, but Elsted House had a room left for both nights, so two hours later I was on my way to St Pancras International, bound for darkest Leicestershire.

I do not claim that Hinckley is less than an absolutely charming place to be, nor could I; my knowledge begins with the rail station and ends with the Hinckley Island Hotel, a conference center inexplicably plunked down miles from the nearest traces of civilization. Somewhere in the middle is a very nice B&B, and a Texaco station where one can buy egg and cress sandwiches. Check back with me in August for the number of egg and cress sandwiches I've consumed in my room in Hinckley. You'll be amazed. I'm amazed that convenience stores run by Hindus don't carry a greater variety of vegetarian food, but maybe that's just me.

The course was brilliant, I met and re-met wonderful people, I got to direct the testimonial videos at the end, which reminded me of my old Public TV days, and unlike the previous weekend, I wasn't actually stuck somewhere trains weren't running, did not stand out in the cold for hours on end, missed no busses, and did not have to spend the night in a Best Western in Leicester. What more could one ask?

Now I'm taking a day off from trains and training, but tomorrow it's back on the rails. Yes, Hinckley beckons me again for a further eight days of getting my brain tinkered with. Ros, my landlady at Elsted House, wonders why I don't just move in.

I've considered it.

There's No Place Like... Hinckley?

2008-04-10T15:59:00.011+01:00

Right: Ted comes with the room

Yes, dear ones, tonight's post is coming to you direct from Hinckley. Hinckley, Leicestershire, that is - former hosiery capital of England, gateway to Rugby and Nuneaton. I've landed here for my next round of NLP training with the nice folks at Salad, Ltd. I'm staying in Elsted House, a nice little B&B that furnishes each guest room with its own Teddy Bear. How English is that? Earlier a man walked by outside with a bulldog. I'm pretty sure they hired him to impress the Yank tourists. We're easy.

I've been here before, actually, for the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) a few years back, but then I only saw the rail station, the hotel, and the inside of a taxi. This trip I've already been up to the Texaco station for an Egg & Cress sandwich, and in Hinckley, my friends, it doesn't really get any better than that.

So now the window is dark, I'm sleepy, and I'm about to tuck myself between those cool white sheets, hug my furry roommate to my chest, and drift away. More tourism excitement as it happens. Don't touch that dial!

“Terminal” is one word for it…

2008-04-08T16:36:00.005+01:00

Right: London Heathrow Terminal Five: the Great White Despair

It’s big, it’s beautiful in a super-mega-industrial sort of way, and it was supposed to be the answer to British Airways passenger prayers for wide-open spaces, shorter queuing times, and the latest in fully-automated baggage-handling. What it’s turned into, however, is a £4.3 billion homeless shelter, currently crowded with passengers sleeping on departure lounge benches and waiting on the tarmac in excess of four hours inside planes that never take off.

Twenty-eight thousand suitcases went walkabout when the baggage system crashed almost immediately after the terminal’s royal launch on 27 March, and at least five thousand of them have never returned home. And baggage continues to be a major issue (not that that’s exactly a news flash to BA). Because the system required almost no-one to operate it, there was almost no-one trained to take up the slack when things went south.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and as of yesterday British Airways was out £85 million in compensation, including the cost of renting up every hotel room and room for rent they could get their hands on for stranded passengers. And there’s no end in sight.

As for me, I have both my suitcase and a roof over my head (albeit in Brentford for the time being), more than many recent London travellers can claim. On my way to Heathrow last week, thankfully to the shamefully outdated Terminal 4 where the baggage carousels actually have baggage on them, my fellow passengers and myself were offered travel vouchers for filling out complaint forms about malfunctioning onboard entertainment. I don’t expect to see my voucher anytime soon, especially if BA have automated their complaint system.

Isn’t it so?

2008-04-03T12:18:00.002+01:00

New directions – good until 1 October 2008:

21 Charleville Road
London
W14 9JJ
UK

I left Seattle on Tuesday 1 April with my usual mixture of sadness and exhiliration and other more complex emotional ingredients. The proposed 2008 trip to London had become somewhat less nervewracking when I’d heard from Ana, my landlady from the Charleville Road house, that she’d rent me a room in her family home while I sorted out permanent digs. I hadn’t wanted to spend nearly £300 on a hotel for 5 days and hope I could round up a place to live in that time after shelling out another £80 in letting agent’s fees. And given the general snafu that is Heathrow Terminal 5 these days, hotel rooms are next to impossible to get anyhow, because the airlines are buying them up for the passengers they’ve stranded, sans luggage, sans destination, sans everything, to paraphrase Master Jaques (and Master Shakespeare). Flights cancelled today: 32. Pieces of luggage vanished into the aether since the baggage system crashed: 29,000 and counting. Heads will roll.

I got in a bit before noon (to Terminal 4, thankfully) on the 2nd after a perfectly nice flight, and spent a whole 30 seconds in Passport Control. That’s roughly 1/720th of the time it took last year just to be allowed entry into the country. Given that experience I had come prepared with emails from the training company, course schedules, and a return ticket printout. I needed none of it. Then my luggage miraculously appeared on the carousel within two minutes of exiting customs, and two minutes after that I was in a taxi headed for Brentford. “That’s how I want the rest of it to go,” I told myself – “Just like that: Effortless.”

When I got to the house in Boston Manor Ana told me that two days ago a tenant in the Charleville Road house gave notice unexpectedly, so I’ll have a permanent room there on the 13th for the duration. As Ana says, “Isn’t it so that you plan for something and it doesn’t happen like you plan it, but it happens better than you planned it?” I couldn’t agree more.

I’m Already Gone

2007-09-14T20:07:00.000+01:00

My strategy for leaving England used to be to save my packing for the day before the flight. One memorable trip saw me throwing stuff into suitcases as the taxi was waiting downstairs to take me to the airport.

This time it’s been different in more ways than one. My baggage allowance coming over in March was three pieces of checked luggage. Flying home from Heathrow, British Air are restricting me to two. There are interesting problems of folding not only space, but an entire extra suitcase. The pain I always feel at my departure, which used to be sudden and sharp, is being drawn out over several extra days, and I still have Tuesday and actually leaving to look forward to, much as one looks forward to the next jolt of pain from a bad knee.

I have felt myself getting closer to Seattle and the folks I left behind there almost since the moment I took my luggage out of the cupboard. Such is the power of symbols on the mind. Strangely, this has not made me more distant from where I am. I see everything that’s become familiar to me, and suddenly I remember that it’s actually strange. It’s like having eyes in two realities, and it’s exceedingly weird.

Since I already know I’ll be back next year – I’ve got training lined up from April till September – I’m disinclined to leave all my household stuff for the next tenant, only to have to buy it again in six months. Since Ana has offered me a rental room in her house in Boston Manor while I’m looking for digs next spring (that’s if I can’t move back in to this house), I’m pretty sure she’ll agree to store a couple of Tesco bags full of things in one of the houses. Having a Brita jug and some seasonings to come back to makes me feel less like a visitor and more like I might almost belong.

But that’s neither here nor there to London. Just as London didn’t notice when I arrived, it will probably take neither pleasure nor pain at my leaving. I am not even a blip on London’s radar. Sometimes I wonder why I bother, but never for long. I know why.

So here’s to Tuesday. Here’s to leaving one life and returning to another, and to familiar and beloved faces at the airport. Here’s to bending time, as one does going west, so that a 9-hour flight will take only an hour and a half by the clockface. When they can apply that magic to the check-in queue at Heathrow they’ll really be on to something.

Au revoir, London. See you in dreams.

Land of the (Smoke-) Free

2007-08-19T14:09:00.000+01:00

England went smoke-free in all public and work spaces about six weeks ago. For most of us that was a banner day. The process of arriving at that day (1 July 2007) was not easy and not free of strong emotion and strong beliefs on both sides.

Celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the more famous anti-ban campaigners, argued that “Pubs are not health clubs…” and “Death awaits you whether or not you smoke.” True enough on both counts, Mr Hockney, without having jack to do with the subject at hand. Of course there’ll be a few people who disagree (still!) that smoke is harmful, and they’ll probably also argue that the fact that the NHS estimates it’s been shelling out £1.7 billion per annum on treating smoking-related illness (often, it must be said, unsuccessfully), doesn’t mean those people actually sickened and in some cases died because they or people around them smoked. Whatever. Many of us used to believe (spoiler alert!) in Santa Claus, too. Now we're adults and we know better.

And then there are people who believe that smoke is harmful when they take it into their own lungs, but not to the people around them. See above.

In 2004, I remember being amazed and amused to learn that Ireland would have a smoking ban in effect before England. The Irish seemed even fonder of their smoke than the English, but there they were cleaning up the air. In fact, not only the Republic of Ireland, but also Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all had bans in effect before England.

But now it’s official. Loopholes are built in for some bus shelters (depending on your local council) and phone boxes, and smoking has another year to run in psychiatric wards, until 1 July 2008. Then you’d better watch out for a lot of really cranky British psychos.

Unlike the state of Washington, where I live when I’m not here, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about smoking in doorways, so as I pass by pubs these days, the doorways are often crowded with smokers obeying the letter of the law. There are metal boxes on a lot of lamp-posts for depositing fag-ends, and I’ve actually witnessed smokers using those, though dropping them on the pavement is still more the rule than the exception in some places.

And what of public opinion? It all depends who you talk to, of course. Some smokers interviewed by the newspapers and TV say they don’t mind the ban – “It makes it nicer for non-smokers.” “I’ve been smoking a lot less.” Some non-smokers don’t seem to get the point – “I don’t smoke myself, but I think the smoking ban spoils the atmosphere.” Of course that person is 21; she may someday have the sense to be grateful for the extra years she’s been given a chance at.

And while few will still argue that smoking doesn’t kill, we’ve already had a tragic case of it contributing to murder. On 23 July at a nightclub in Fulham Broadway - just south of where I live - James Oyebola, a retired boxer, asked some customers to comply with the law and put out their cigarettes. One of them shot him in the face as he left the club. His family took him off life-support four days later, after he was declared brain-dead.

I’d like to remind any Americans out there how rare firearm deaths are in the U.K. Unlike our own country, gun crime over here is less than 0.5% of violent crime and less than 0.01% of total crime. If you adjusted for population the U.S. would still have 34 times the U.K.’s number of gunshot homicides, according to crimeinfo.org.uk., and that statistic doesn’t mention those who are shot, but don’t subsequently die of their wounds. So a guy getting shot to death for any reason is headline-worthy, top-news-story-worthy, even in a city the size of London. For the reason to be a request to put out a cigarette makes it that much more horrifying. For it to have happened in easy walking distance of my house makes me even sadder than I might feel otherwise, as though I owned some part of the tragedy. I probably heard the sirens that night, and wondered what was going on.

So cigarettes are bad, o-kay? Let’s be grateful if we don’t smoke ’em, and grateful if we live somewhere smoking ’em is banned in public. While we’re at it, let’s be grateful for no good reason other than feeling gratitude. Peace out.

Still Learning After All These Years

2007-08-03T16:00:00.000+01:00

Right: TFT Simplified

While I was on my NLP training this last spring I chanced to witness a remarkable thing. A few of the delegates were out to dinner with one of the course assistants, Kevin Laye, an NLP master practitioner with a practice in Harley Street who's also a certified trainer of Thought Field Therapy. TFT works by tapping the start-points of acupuncture meridians to alleviate a number of physical and emotional problems. I'd already heard some interesting things about it; a friend of mine had used it to instantly eliminate someone’s post-surgical pain, so I already had the idea you could do cool things if you knew this stuff.

As we sat down to dinner one of my companions, Stephanie, told me that Kevin had recently treated her using TFT. She'd been suffering for some time from myaesthenia gravis, a serious condition with a dim prognosis. I'd only met her that day, but she was as full of fun and energy as anyone I'd ever seen, and she assured me that less than a month before she'd been more or less bedridden. I was impressed; this TFT stuff was even more interesting than I thought.

Another of our party - Elizabeth - had found walking to the restaurant quite painful. She suffered from a spinal condition related to an old injury, and her doctors had assured her it was all downhill from here. She dragged one leg behind her as she walked, and she told me recently that the pain had been so bad at that point that she would walk along hoping no-one she was with would talk to her, because it took all her concentration just to get through the next step.

So after dinner Kevin remarked that Elizabeth seemed to be holding a lot of tension in her shoulders, and he did something that fixed that. She felt better immediately, and told us about her condition, never mentioning the pain, but that was evident to anyone who'd been paying attention. So Kevin did another treatment on her – total time two or three minutes for both. Then he suggested she go look at her reflection in the restaurant door, 'cause her face had entirely transformed, and she looked at least ten years younger than she had walking in.

A moment later someone said "Where's Elizabeth?" and I turned around to see her sprinting down the block. When she reached the end she turned around and ran back again. That's the point at which I turned to Kevin and said "I've GOT to learn to do that."

And that's how I came to be at Kevin's TFT training in Nottingham in June, getting certified again (hey, it happens...). I've had some successes since, though nothing to rival Kevin's dinner-table miracles. One of the most fascinating things about it, to me, is that no-one can explain why it works. That’s not to say they don’t try, but the explanations sound (to my ear at least) like twaddle. Those of you who know me know I have a low tolerance for twaddle. Just reading an explanation or description wouldn’t convince me TFT necessarily had any merit as a healing modality, but I’m not inclined to deny direct experience. Kevin is a physicist by training, and if you ask him how it works he’ll tell you “It works very well.”

Elizabeth has a slight limp, but she's free of pain, full of energy, and making her doctors scratch their heads. Stephanie, too, is still the picture of health. When her illness was at its worst she was making plans to put her 3-year-old daughter up for adoption, since she could no longer do the simplest things for her, and there was no-one else to turn to. Now she and her daughter run around and do things together, and she has a wonderful new man in her life, and plans for a healthy future.

Before I head back for Seattle in September I'll be taking another training with Kevin, this time in his method for helping people stop smoking. He has a very high success rate with a combination of TFT, NLP, and hypnosis, and he strongly advises his students to go forth and make a living helping people.

So if you see me out in Pioneer Square in Seattle dragging clients off 1st Avenue and into my office, you'll know that I've taken Kevin's advice. Hmmm... "Send me your phobics, your depressives, your hacking smokers yearning to breathe free..." Yeah, what the hell? I just might.

Extraordinarily Close to the Dear Departed

2007-07-21T16:19:00.000+01:00

Right: Angel and friend, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Today was the annual Open Day at Brompton Cemetery, a Victorian necropolis with more than 200,000 residents, all of whom were unobtrusively present for the games, handicrafts, organ music, face-painting, and bouncy castle, as well as tours related to various interests. “This is tree number 26 – lovely cones…” I overheard on my way past the sparsely-attended Cemetery Trees tour. I am not making this up.

I invested £2 in the once-a-year opening of the Brompton Catacombs (or catacoombs, as one says locally). I had walked over from the neighboring borough of Hammersmith and Fulham under glowering skies – the perfect light for photographing graves – so I barely squeaked in to the tour.

Apparently there was a certain amount of status involved with where Victorian ladies and gentlemen were interred, and when the Brompton Cemetery opened for business in 1841 they offered, in addition to earth burial, the option of spending eternity on a shelf. This had been popular on the continent, and the cemetery planners seemed to think it was going to take off like a house afire. Plans were made for enough catacomb space to store around 100,000 customers at luxury prices, but in the end less than 500 bodies ended up in Brompton’s upscale burial suites, and the remaining catacombs were never excavated.

Our guide led a dozen hardy 21st century folk down a stairway and into a narrow brickwork hallway lined with shelves holding coffins in various states of decomposition. Lest that word conjure images of rotting Victorians, you’ll probably want to be reassured that each body was first put into a plain wooden coffin, which was then placed in a 9-lbs-per-square-foot lead box, and hermetically sealed by a plumber. Sometimes a lighted candle was left inside to assure a vacuum after sealing, and disinterred catacomb corpses have been found to be perfectly desiccated and quite well-preserved even after more than a century.

The lead coffin was in turn covered by one of wood or metal which might be decorated with brass fittings or upholstered in leather or cloth and sometimes further embellished with fancy pins. These were not mere burial caskets meant to lie unseen, these were the post-mortem boudoirs of departed loved ones, meant to be visited regularly by entire families with rugs and picnic hampers. It is these outer coverings that are in some cases moldering away to dust and ruin, exposing the lead cases beneath, with the plumber's diamond-shaped markings attesting the coffin had been properly sealed.

But even with the brick walls whitewashed as they would have been in the 19th century, and with tiny skylights – now covered over – admitting a bit of natural light, the atmosphere in the Brompton catacombs cannot have been conducive to a pleasant visit. The hallway is too narrow, the floor too damp, the dead too close for comfort. Although unworried by cold or rain, a visiting family might not have felt at home there, cheek to jowl with not only their own dear departed, but everyone else’s as well. Visits, I’m thinking, would have been brief and to the point, unlike the long summer-afternoon picnics common at ground-level gravesites. The great Brompton Catacomb scheme went belly-up.

Brompton Cemetery covers about 16.5 hectares (41 acres), and if you’re wondering how you get more than 200,000 graves into that space, the answer is, use the Y axis. Graves purchased to hold families were dug up to 24 feet deep, then filled in and re-excavated as each family member’s turn came to move in. Gravestones were filled in progressively as the plot filled.

On my way out the skies over London stopped threatening and started delivering. I was sodden when I reached home, at least partly from stopping to get the picture above, of an angel whose job it is to hold a succession of pigeons heavenward for eternity.

Boudicca Country

2007-07-18T16:22:00.000+01:00

Right: Boudicca and her daughters, Westminster

Earlier this month I went to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who starred in a blog entry from last year, Touching the Mystery. The occasion was the celebration by three expatriate Yanks and one good-natured Briton of American Independence Day (John prefers to call it “Good Riddance Day”), complete with Carolyn bravely grilling burgers and yes, Boca Burgers ™ under the patio roof in a pounding Suffolk rain. East Anglia is, John assures me, a veritable desert compared to the rest of England, but with the summer we’ve been having there’s no way to tell they get less rainfall than any other part of the island. Dineen Edwards joined us for our cool and rainy cookout (and in), and as the three of us overwhelmingly outnumbered our one Brit, victory was again assured for the Yanks.

In between celebrating quaint holiday customs of the colonials, we spent a couple of days driving about in the wonderful countryside of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, and visited even more lovely English villages than last year, including Lavenham, the best-preserved medieval village in the country. Some people here still live in 700+-year-old houses half-timbered with trees that predate the come-lately U.S.A. by half a millennium, and sometimes painted that particular English pink that originally resulted from adding ox blood to white plaster.

Along the way from somewhere to somewhere else we passed The Devil’s Dike, an earthwork stretching over 60 miles of East Anglian countryside, reputed to have been built by Boudicca while defending Norfolk from Romans. Every British schoolchild knows about Boudicca, though she’s largely unknown to Yanks except through various fictional depictions, the latest being Manda Scott’s excellent historical/fantasy series beginning with Dreaming the Eagle. East Anglia is Boudicca country, former home of the Eceni, the British tribe Boudicca was either born to or married into.

In 61 CE, when the Romans had barely begun to make a Roman province out of Brittania, Boudicca raised a formidable army of Eceni and Trinovantes, and burned the Romans’ British capital, Camulodunum (now Colchester) to the ground, taking no prisoners. She then moved on to deal with Londinium, a center of trade, finance, and taxation much as it is today. The attacks were timed to take advantage of a Roman action against the Druids in Swansea, so when Caius Suetonius Paulinus, the provincial governor, rode from Wales to Londinium to check the situation and found 100,000 angry blue Britons two days’ journey from Zone 1, he said whoever wanted could come away northwest with him, but he wasn’t sticking around. The result, which Suetonius and his inferior forces could certainly not have averted, was the first Great Fire of London, and the slaughter of all its remaining inhabitants.

Boudicca’s third target was Verulamium, a former Cattauvallani city these days known as St. Albans. She did to that place what she’d done to Colchester and London. By the time the ashes cooled the death toll for all three cities was around 70,000, and among other things the Romans had lost an entire legion – the IXth – to a rebel ambush. Boudicca excelled at ambush and surprise attack, and had gained much from the Roman assumption of military superiority.

But now Suetonius knew where she was and where she was headed – straight for him and the forces he had led into the west against the Druids. He now had the luxury of choosing his battlefield, which is something you should never let Romans do. He took the high ground just southeast of Towchester with his relatively small but technologically-superior army and waited with his back covered. Boudicca’s forces marched uphill into a slaughter that cost 80,000 rebel lives, a lesson Robert E. Lee should have heeded at Gettysburg.

Boudicca is said by Tacitus (writing 50 years after the fact) to have taken poison to avoid death at Roman hands, though no-one knows for sure what happened to her other than that she doesn’t seem to have died on that battlefield. Her grave, reputed to hold the majority of the treasures of the Eceni, has never been found. Suetonius made sure there would be no repeat of this rebellion with an ethnic cleansing of the Eceni and Trinovantes that left what is now Norfolk almost entirely unpopulated. It would take a thousand years for that part of the country to recover enough to become an important part of British economy and culture.

But recover it has, from Romans and Saxons at least. More recently they’ve had to co-exist with the U.S. Air Force, who at least don’t charge them taxes or burn their villages. It’s a lovely part of the world, and my visit next year is scheduled to include a trip to the coastal regions, which are reputed to be well worth a look. Meanwhile archeologists are still looking for Boudicca’s treasure in north-west Norfolk, which has already yielded more Iron-Age precious metal than any other part of the island. The present dig has already produced some historically-significant finds in the heart of Boudicca country, and the next few years may see the discovery – just possibly – of the lost treasure-trove of Britain’s warrior queen.

Boiled in the Tin

2007-06-15T10:42:00.000+01:00

The tube is a real experience in closeness at rush hour. You think your carriage isn't all that crowded, really, and then you stop at a station and a few people get off, and twice as many get on. And then you stop at the next station.... And only six more to go until your stop!

At some point the driver will announce – with commuters still trying to bend the laws of physics at the open doors – that the train is full, and it’s leaving now. There’ll be another one along in a few minutes, the friendly, hopeful voice says, but those damned souls on the outside know that yet another train with all carriages packed to bursting isn’t going to make any difference.

And what of the damned souls inside? Everyone wants to be near the doors so that they have a prayer of leaving at their stop, but only if people obey instructions – “Please move right down inside the carriage!” – can more be packed in. So eventually your stop is coming and there are a couple dozen bodies between you and the nearest door, and it’s time to negotiate that squishy gauntlet of flesh before the doors open and more of it packs itself inside. Pickpockets do their best work in rush hours, ’cause who can tell if sombody’s touching your butt?!

Rush hours in the summer add a certain subtle dimension of dehydration and heat-stroke on top of all that, and though it hasn't been really hot yet this summer, it will be. And when it's 90-ish F up here, it can get to 115-ish F down there, and rails deform in the heat, and trains stop in the tunnels 'cause they can't move without risking derailment (which happens), and more trains stop behind them, and people who've forgotten to bring water can be in real trouble. Did I mention there's no air-conditioning on tube trains? The ventilation comes from open vents and windows taking in air from the tunnel while the train is in motion. It would be illegal in any first-world nation to transport animals to slaughterhouses in those temperatures. Mooo!

I hear it's lots and lots worse in Tokyo, because the Japanese are better at the skill of turning off that natural human aversion to packing in with strangers long enough to get to work and back. My theory is they enter a sort of commuter trance where the rules are different, and effectively dissociate from the press of alien flesh for as long as necessary. Their trains are really crowded. The persistent thing one hears about Tokyo commuter trains is that someone can have a heart attack and die, and not fall down until the train empties out again. So let's all give thanks that we're not in Tokyo (those who are not), and meanwhile I'll be thankful that I very seldom have to travel in London during rush hour. But that doesn't mean I won't be packing water this summer, ’cause trains get caught in tunnels when it's not rush hour, too.

Crowned Heads

2007-06-07T18:44:00.000+01:00

This June marks the 54th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Now I happen to be from a country that doesn’t have hereditary rulers; our royalty are film and TV stars, hastily crowned and easily deposed. But I’m also old enough to remember the occasion of Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, and even in the U.S., the atmosphere was carnival, with 1950s matrons snapping up commemorative souvenirs, nothing else worth talking about for weeks leading up to the 2nd of June 1953, and everyone gathering around the archaic midcentury television to watch the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Communications satellites were only a gleam in Sir Arthur Clarke’s youthful eye in 1953, so I suppose we must have watched a filmed and quickly-flown-across-the-Atlantic coronation in the States, but the thrill was palpable.

I lived with my aunt and uncle at the time, and I recall that as my aunt and I settled in to witness history, my uncle found something else to occupy him for political reasons. I was far too young for rebellion in those days, but in his lifetime Ireland had fought a bloody and protracted war, outmanned and outgunned on their home turf, to win independence from English rule. They call those years “The Terror” for a reason, and it had all ended scarcely more than 30 years previously. James Patrick McKenna was immune to the borrowed glamour of British royalty.

I don’t think I gave Elizabeth II or royal families in general a great deal of thought after that, and my only childhood brush with political fame was meeting the president of Turkey, another strange childhood moment from the heart of the desert. So I was rather taken by surprise when America erupted with royalist fervor once more over the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. I mean you could only escape it by going home and barring the door and unplugging the TV. What it must have been like for the British I can only imagine, but I felt downright assaulted by it 6000 miles away, so my heart goes out to the poor Brits.

The world has changed since those innocent times – either of them – and now the vulnerable young Queen of my scratchy black-and-white images is eighty-something, and Charles has Camilla, whom it would seem no-one likes but him, and Channel 4 is airing tapes of a dying Diana against the express wishes of her sons, and my uncle Jim is 12 years in his grave, a rebel till the end. I have yet to go see guards changing into whatever it is they change to, though there’s absolutely no politics involved – just apathy. I’ll await visitors from the States to give me an excuse to do such a shamefully touristy thing. I hope they don’t take forever to get here…

Going Postal

2007-06-01T14:37:00.000+01:00

The first time I went to a British post office, back in 1995, I was amazed to find all sorts of wrapping and packing supplies for sale. Within a couple of years you could buy anything you needed along those lines at any United States post office, but that’s about where the grand U.S.P.S. improvement scheme came to a grinding halt: A little wrapping paper, a little tape, money orders, and the commemorative stamps which are, I suspect, the real post office cash cow.

The British have really nice commemoratives, too, but you’re likely not to notice them over the roar of the amazing multi-service biz that is the Royal Post Office. Although this multiplicity of exciting things to do probably contributes to the interminable post office queues, we do have to remember that the British will queue for anything. They’ll latch on to the tail end of a queue on their way home, nevermind knowing what it’s actually for, and then good manners keep them from asking, and there you are. Sometimes they don’t get home for days.

But that’s not to take away from the heightened levels of sheer stimulation to be experienced at your local Post Office anywhere between Northumblerland and Cornwall. Forthwith: a list, probably not complete, of things one can accomplish there.

Buy and sell any of 70 currencies.

Cash several varieties of government cheques.

Purchase gift vouchers for goods and services from various high street businesses and hotel chains.

Get mobile phone and land line service.

Pay for mobile phone top-up for the top six U.K. mobile providers.

Purchase home and life insurance.

Purchase travel insurance, and travel money cards preloaded with £, $, or €.

Pay household bills.

Recharge your electricity key or gas card (pay-as-you-go utilities).

Send and receive money.

Deposit and withdraw funds, and check your bank balance.

Open a savings account or trust fund.

Buy any of several flavours of bonds.

Rent a car.

Pay several kinds of tax and government licence fees.

Print digital photos.

Apply for a driving or vehicle licence.

Buy a fishing licence.

Buy a phonecard.

Apply for a Post Office credit card

Play the National Lottery.

Apply for a loan.

If I didn't have a perfectly nice room I'd be tempted to move in. It’s not enough that Britain’s postal service has made the U.S.P.S. look like a poor relation who can’t even sell you insurance or Zlotys, but now they have their own Oscars, the Best Post Office Awards, most recently won by the branch in Hungerford Road, Crewe. And I don’t know it for a fact, but I suspect no R.P.O. employee has yet gone on a shooting rampage at work, at least not in Hungerford Road, Crewe. You may be sure I’m going to miss a couple of things sharply about Old Blighty when at last Her Majesty evicts me in September, and one of them will be the Royal Post Office.

These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For

2007-04-24T14:52:00.000+01:00

right: No, really. Not.

As I mentioned in my first teatime post of this year, I came to London to take practitioner training in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). Did that, and I’m now looking forward to being able to get further training before I fly home in September.

I first heard about NLP through a friend who went on a course (as one says on this side of the Atlantic) in the early 80s. I went out and bought some books, and was impressed with the attitude and ideas behind it, but it didn’t occur to me then that I might go further down that path. I remembered to remember a few things about NLP, but forgot to remember a great deal more. About a year and a half ago I brought one of the books back out and read it with new interest. This seemed an entirely new take on how we can use our knowledge about the nervous system and language to make huge improvements in the way we think, and by extension the way we choose to feel about events in the outside world. I began to take the idea of training in this knowledge more seriously. A way of dealing with human perceptions that can in a matter of minutes cure a lifelong phobia or residual fear from a psychological trauma, or turn a smoker into a nonsmoker (and I’ve seen this happen over and over again since then) was something I had to get my hands on, and soon.

Last year Æon author John Meaney took practitioner training, and when we met up on my last visit to London, he talked with me about his experiences. Then and there I made up my mind to come back this year and go to “Jedi School,” as we call it in the family, and see what I could see. What I didn’t see was the usual rah-rah motivational talk that sends people out feeling terrific until they figure out nothing in their lives has really changed. What I did see was real change in people’s way of thinking and acting in the world, over and over and over again.

Since I took up a renewed interest in NLP I’ve encountered a certain amount of disbelief and even a bit of hostility when I’ve discussed it with some people. The dominant psychological paradigm insists that change is – must be – slow and painful. Traumas must be discussed in detail and relived over and over again. Phobias must be treated by training the phobic to tolerate greater and greater degrees of terror, or by prescribing drugs. Troubled people must spend years in therapy in order to “deal with their problems,” and statistically not that many come away from that experience materially improved. Change that is fast, painless, and permanent seems to defy all that is holy in our beliefs about the human mind, but those old beliefs – originally the teachings of a man who also told us that all dreams are wish fulfillment and that we all want to have sex with our parents – are a century out of date. Therapists who plan to see their clients once to three times and send them home with their problem sorted once and for all seem like something out of the realm of dreams, but I promise you they exist, and what they do works.

One reason it works is that your brain can most easily comprehend patterns that it perceives quickly. A wise man expained it this way: a flip-book is easily seen as a moving picture when you view the images in rapid sequence, but if someone were to hand you a piece of paper once a week with a stick figure drawn on it, you wouldn't have the same experience. Even if you knew what it was supposed to do, your brain just wouldn't get it. The same wise man compared traditional therapy to masturbating at the rate of one stroke a week. With sandpaper. Your brain also prefers pleasure to pain as a learning strategy. Go figure.

Probably the “fast phobia cure” has created the greatest amount of disbelief and derision towards NLP, but it’s also the easiest to demonstrate. The other day I watched the most arachnaphobic person I’ve ever seen (wouldn’t allow a sealed plastic spider container into the same room – though 30 feet away – when she started) smiling and giggling and quite obviously delighted while a tarantula crawled over her hands after about 20 minutes of going through a few NLP techniques to deal with her phobia. The woman who was “paralyzed” with fear at the very thought of a snake was asking “Can I hold her?” in about five minutes. Former claustrophobics crawled out of trunks they’d been shut into, grinning from ear to ear. In one afternoon I saw dozens of people set free from having constantly to arrange their lives so that they’d never be exposed to the thing they were terrified of.

As for me, I’ve always described myself as “mildly arachnaphobic,” in that I was perfectly happy to trap small spiders and put them outside, but moderately fearful of larger ones, with that fear increasing with the size of the spider. One thing I knew for sure until three days ago was that I was never going to hold a tarantula and let it walk from one of my hands to the other, over and over again, and be reluctant to give it back to the spider wrangler from the zoo when my turn was over. Not under any circumstances. Not this girl. But in that, as in many things I used to think were true, I was wrong.

So there's my experience, or a very small slice of it, and you may do with it what you will. The usual travelogue will resume with the next posting.

Unglued to the Tube

2007-04-09T10:38:00.000+01:00

Right: Okay, not this small...

Ana, my landlady, has thoughtfully provided me with a small television that brings in the basic five free channels: ITV1 and BBC 1, 2, 4, and 5. Most everyone but me on this island has cable, but I get by. For instance, this evening I have the opportunity to watch:

7:00 The Trees That Made Britain
Conifer: 6 of 8. Tony Kirkham visits the glens east of Inverness to view the Scots pine in its natural habitat.

7:30 Johnny Kingdom – a Year on Exmoor
The gravedigger and amateur cameraman profiles the area’s countryside, beginning by attempting to build a badger hide.

8:30 Return to Lullingstone
4 of 6. Jim and his son are disappointed when planners refuse to give the green light to a poly-tunnel for storing exotic plants.

And I haven’t even mentioned soap operas or cricket…

Lest you think I’m making fun of British television – perish the thought! – the free airwaves are absolutely clogged with things worth watching: plenty of good BritTV, and a lot of the Yank stuff too - Friends reruns, House, The Simpsons, Law and Order CI, and all flavours of CSI as well as hours of really terrible old American films and Everybody (but me, apparently) Loves Raymond. There are even NBA games now and then if one can stay up late enough to watch them. I confess to a liking for cookery shows (and wishing Feline would fly over and cook dinner for me) and Antiques Roadshow, and I retain my odd fascination with real estate programmes like Escape to the Country, which make me long to live in a quiet cottage somewhere far from the nearest Tesco. But most of the time the tube stays cold and grey, and I read or surf or go out and walk the neighbourhood, which is what I think I’m going to do now.

Right after Cash in the Attic.

Here’s me, then…

2007-04-02T18:34:00.000+01:00

My room was ready on time, freshly painted, curtains washed, new nearly-wood floor, and the most horrifying coverlet in Britain. I tried flipping it over, but it’s the same thing on the other side. Feline would love it, and the Ladies of Beacon Hill know why. Not ducks, though; horses. Damn thing gives me nightmares.

The TV brings in five channels, one of which enabled me to watch a new production of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which is my favorite. Breaks my heart every time, though I know the guaranteed happy ending. Good ol’ Jane. Most of the rest of what’s on is crap, same as at home, but whilst in a Jane Austen sort of mood I picked up a DVD of Sense and Sensibility at Tesco today to watch on my widescreen laptop tonight. That’s entertainment.

Meanwhile I’m getting comfy on my bed with the fourth Steven Saylor Roma Sub Rosa mystery, looking forward to some delicious tomato soup, and watching the sun get low over the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham through my 7-foot-tall window. I live in a street of white houses, so the changes in light can be quite wonderful. This morning when I woke up all the east faces of the houses were pink. Mind you I don’t make a habit of waking up at sunrise, but my Yank body clock is still making a few adjustments. At least I’m past the falling-asleep-on-my-feet-every-day-at-teatime phase.

Home, Sweet Closet

2007-03-26T15:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-25T19:40:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-23T17:42:00.000+01:00

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. “Vivamos 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

2007-03-21T16:24:00.000+01:00

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.

Rootless in Seattle

2006-09-18T21:15:00.000+01:00

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

2006-08-14T19:16:00.000+01:00

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?

2006-08-07T19:54:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-31T10:10:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-18T19:18:00.000+01:00

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…

2006-06-19T18:57:00.000+01:00

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

2006-06-12T19:05:00.000+01:00

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

2006-06-06T19:39:00.000+01:00

Right: Quadriga and Roman Wall, Portchester, Hampshire

You probably thought there were no Romans left in Britain, but there were dozens of them running around Portchester 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 Portchester 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

2006-05-30T14:39:00.000+01:00

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

2006-05-22T19:02:00.000+01:00

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...

2006-05-16T19:44:00.000+01:00

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...

2006-05-12T20:05:00.000+01:00

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

2006-05-05T18:22:00.000+01:00

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

2006-05-01T19:39:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-27T19:25:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-24T18:47:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-22T18:09:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

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…

2006-04-12T17:46:00.000+01:00

(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

2006-04-10T15:31:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-07T17:14:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-05T14:22:00.000+01:00

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?

2006-04-04T18:05:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-02T16:42:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-01T13:04:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-03-31T13:51:00.000+01:00

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!

2006-03-29T18:18:00.000+01:00

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

2006-03-28T16:00:00.000+01:00

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

2006-03-22T20:02:00.000+01:00

"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.