Day 15

Odds & Ends

One of the fun things about London, a city with a long, complicated history, is that the odd, if not normal, is at least interesting. I had gone out one sunny day in October thinking to ride my local underground train to the end of the line to investigate the market town of Walthamstowe, only to discover that the whole line was closed for refurbishing.

Refurbishing is British for "repairs," "upgrade," or "mending tracks."

As a result of the closed line, I changed plans and walked south toward St. Paul's Cathedral, the Thames, and the Globe Theatre. On the way, I saw a notice for an art gallery, so I turned in at that small street and found this horse emerging from the wall.



The horse does not belong to the art gallery, which was closed, but to a cafe next door. So who thought of this -- the art people or the restaurant-business people? Or the imaginative cook? Worth a picture, I thought.

Within the photograph, I was also drawn to the pattern of bricks around the horse, although I would not have taken this picture just for the bricks.

Well, maybe I would have. Brick walls with similar patterns are everywhere in London, some of them very old, no doubt, but many not so old. Many walls (however deteriorated, worn, broken, moss-covered the bricks) actually date from the post-war years(1945 and after) when whole neighborhoods had to be rebuilt from the devastation of German bombs. Although the photo below is much older than that, it show the rebuilding that has gone on for centuries.



I will be writing about this elsewhere, but the brickwork and stonework speaks to me of a number of things: of our desire for permanence, of the flimsy fabric of life, of decisions supplanted by new decisions, of shifts in thinking, of changes of fortune, of our need to shore up what time and weather break down.

I don't yet know how to see individuals from these walls, but they are there.

My helpful friends usually remark that there must be a poem in this somewhere. I don't think so. I just like the possibilities. A difficult interest to explain, I admit.

* * *

Also attractive to me are the odd, grotesque faces one finds on medieval castles. This one, and the next, are from Windsor. Whatever their original function, and they did apparently serve a purpose, at least symbolically, these faces now look down at the tramping of modern tourists and express their ageless emotions: fear, anger, surprise, horror, or even, I suspect, distain.




Some serve as drain spout ornaments. In the rain they will appear to spew down upon the clueless slickered or soaking masses whatever reproach might be engraved in their stone faces.



These odd creatures pay the weather tax -- unless they are removed and hauled into a protected museum space to live under sterile and controlled conditions, where they suffer the indignity of the quick glance. Here they are routinely ignored by swarms of often bored or preoccupied students, by information-saturated tourists, or by obsessive museum goers.

Not to worry, if you miss them in the galleries, you can always buy a small model of this creature with his bulging eyes in the gift shop for . . . well, for a lot. Take him home. Plant him in the garden. After a while he will hide there too.

Out of their natural environment these little creatures are no longer interesting; their faces no longer strong conveyors of fear or anger or anthing else in particular. High on the castle wall they are just oddly appealing. Better to be out in the weather, above the frey, or like this cat, all but hidden from traffic on a ceiling at Canterbury Cathedral -- overlooked but still in the game, doing whatever it was made to do.

Look up!



Gotcha!

In this respect, I think the white horse running throught the brick wall in its obscure side street must have a better life than it would as a museum piece. It is neither tamed by its isolation nor trivialized by money making replication.

* * *

Something similar might be said for this last oddity. I was intrigued to find a fighter jet hanging nose down in the Tate Brittain a scant 12 inches or so from the marble floor. People were taking turns lying down beheath the bullet shaped nose cone for pictures. As with the horse, the jet took me by surprise.



For a second life as a museum piece, this disarmed, motionless bit of war armour still carries the emotional weight of its lethal design in this most august of final hangers.

Day 14

The Wild Man of Windsor

It defies the imagination, boggles the mind, confounds the mirror, leaves me speechless.

Well, almost speechless.

No wonder I avoid being caught out in someone's photograph. Not only am I the white haired old guy in the picture, but my cover has been blown. My claim to perennial sophistication is ended. His dudeness is dude no longer.

What folks back home want, apparently, are not pictures of buildings or landscapes that can be seen in better color from the internet. They want people.

Judging from the poses of people being photographed in front of ancient, historic, significant, picturesque, or just plain famous places, the current fashion, especially among the young and beautiful (or those who want to be seen that way) is the ta-da pose. Groups hugging, laughing, signing with their hands. Groups of teenage girls jumping in unison -- the let's-appear-spontaneous pose.

I have seen the heroic pose, the mock heroic pose, the ganster-hand-sign pose, the withering glare pose, the arrogant dismissive pose, and the happy tourist pose. So many choices!

I was pondering which of these might work when this picture was taken. I will call it the moment of indecision pose. It's the tell-me-'when'-before-you-take-it pose. It's the senior moment pose. The clueless pose.

Well, in that modern all purpose phrase, it is what it is.

We are at Windsor Castle, after all, the home of kings and queens for the better part of a millenium. One ought to be dignified. Or if not dignified at least stiff, which is the American cousin of dignified.

I have come to see that I can play the role of the senior citizen. It is fairly easy. The white hair, as seen here in halo effect, and the wrinkles are pretty convincing, although one young man selling tickets for Romeo and Juliet actually carded me.

It was very considerate of him.

It doesn't matter. Here is the picture that proves I went to Windsor. I got the senior discount, too, which is no small benefit.

And in real life I play a much younger man.

Day 13

Scratching on the Walls, Or the Vandal Within


Among the things my son Ian and his wife, Kristen, wanted to see during their short visit to England was Canterbury. So we got on the bus at Victoria Station and headed out of London.

The bus was nice, the ride was smooth, the driver hollered at other drivers in a startling way at various points; but passage was otherwise unmemorable.

Canterbury, on the other hand, is memorable.

The town visually is dominated by its Cathedral, which appears above the trees before the town itself, and then as one approaches by its ancient rubble wall. It is the kind of experience that enthusiasts of the middle ages get crazy for – castles, cathedrals, ruins, cobblestone streets, knights, war horses, and lots of clanging swords and armor.

The knights and war horses have to be imagined, of course, but that is no stretch in this environment. Ruins are made to be re-imagined. For me that means, how did these men and women and children manage to live? How did they cope with the obstacles they faced every day, obstacles we have all but eliminated in modern life.

For some it means imagining the forces of history that converge here, that led to battles and high stakes intrigue, the struggles and daring that broke new ground. To the fantasy enthusiast it may mean imagining knights and kings and ladies into a “former glory” they never actually knew.

American history does not take us back to the middle ages, so we come with a kind of reverence for the “ancient.”

For us, places like Canterbury are laden with historical magic that is clearly impossible in America. So it is more than a bit disheartening to discover – after the glory of bright sunshine through stained glass windows, after the grandeur of the vaulted sanctuary, after the instructive and provocative plaques, after the stunning art gracing the stunning architecture, after the deeply sobering scars of ancient violence, after the soul stirring call to worship – it is more than a bit disheartening to find the etchings and scars of recent vandalism on the walls and pillars and woodwork.

Some of the wall scratching has historical significance. So I suppose we can forgive someone held in the Tower of London awaiting a future that might end at the executioners block from carving his name into the walls to remind posterity of his plight. But the new marks I don’t understand. Except for the very old, historically important etchings, most of the scratching and chipping is selfish, vandalism pure and simple.

I don’t think the issue is lack of reverence for the past or disrespect for religion or even a hatred for things British. Most folks who take a stone or a knife or a piece of metal and scratch something into the old stone surfaces or who cut lines and figures into the wood can’t be motivated by anything as noble as a desire to protest through vandalism.

No. I think the motive is both banal and self-centered. Look, I was here. But even that human tendency toward self assertion does not quite explain the marks that are just marks, the chips that just wear away, the gouges that resemble nothing so much as gouges.

A week after our trip to Canterbury, my wife and I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the Raphael Cartoons and Tapestries. At one end of the exhibition room was an enormous altar piece, depicting many things, including St George slaying his dragon. Along the bottom is a series of paintings depicting moments in the life of Christ.

As this bottom series of paintings is roughly at eye level, I took off my glasses and examined the paintings with my face just inches from the surface. When I got to the painting depicting Judas ‘s kiss of betrayal, I was shocked to note that Judas’s face had been scratched off with a pointed object. The face of Christ was untouched. Someone got back at Judas, I thought.

As I went down the row of paintings, I discovered other figures disfigured, vandalized, scratched out. It was, uniformly, the bad guys who got hacked. I looked again at the Judas painting. It was not a recent obliteration; the gouges were old. It’s both encouraging and disheartening to conclude that the urge to this kind of destruction is not a recent acquisition. We are neither better nor worse as humans than we ever were, apparently. Still, I can’t understand why we keep doing it. My memorable trips to memorable and timeless places will always now carry the scars of this banality.
Our urge to leave our marks, even if it mars or destroys the priceless, is not the worst in us coming out. But it just may be the most pointless and shallow.

Day 12

A Night for the Ballet

Last night during the second interval at the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, I passed the time by thumbing through tickets that I keep in my small notebook from my entertainments in London. The list, which does not here include museums, art galleries, walking tours, and popular tourist sites, and time wandering about with a vacant expression, looks like this:

9 plays

2 concerts

1 foreign film

1 opera

1 ballet

I total these up, I suppose, to impress myself as much as anything else.

I have been busy during my seven weeks – to the day – in London. The last four weeks have entailed necessarily monkish living. My wife has been back in the States to oversee the arrival of my fourth granddaughter and to visit again my third granddaughter, herself a very new arrival. Tuesday next she return, and not any too soon as it is clearly time for us to end this monkish separation.

Nine plays. The drama is becoming a bit addictive. It will be a shock to leave London, with its many daily dramatic options, to return to my real life, my normal life, my previous and future lives (all of these) in the rural village I call home.

The opera, I was reminded, emphatically, is drama too. Drama with all the elements of stage plays and music. Such drama! I was encouraged to see an opera before I came to London, so I was acting partly out of that sense of directive. I chose to see Faust, mostly because I am interested in the Faust legend and in the various versions of his story that have been told through the years. This operatic Faust was a visual spectacle, including as it did, both an exploding atom bomb against the backdrop as the curtain rises and a thirty foot tall white cross blazing in the foreground at the play’s climax.

But the real drama of opera happens with the ears. Faust is an aural drama, astonishing, compelling, and moving, with a breathless, draining climax. “Intense” is the word a much younger person apply to the experience.

What drama does with spoken word and opera does with sung words, ballet does without words. Movement, primarily dance, and expression is all.

Here too I had been encouraged to attend a ballet. But I had other motivations as well. Having seen, to date, three Shakespeare plays in the last month and with plans to see Hamlet when it opens in November, I thought I ought to see what Romeo and Juliet would look like as ballet. Then, too, I have become interested in those arcane aesthetic things that are easy to dismiss or to belittle (I am guilty of both): staging, performance, use of space, gesture and expression, costuming, suggestion, lighting, projection, rapport with the audience, uses of tradition, and so forth.

It is likely I will not become a fixture at the ballet – well, my village does not have one anyway – but I came away properly chastened and humbled by the performance. True to the story I know from Shakespeare, our young lovers kill themselves, needlessly, in this rendering too. Or maybe it would be better to say convincingly. I was as entangled as intended as the story played itself out.

I am glad now that I went to the trouble of getting to the theater. I almost let it go. A mere two hours before the curtain was set to rise, having been shut out yet again from seeing another drama, I noticed that the 7:30 performance was to be the last. I went on line but found the online ticket option closed.

To add error to urgency, I left home 45 minutes before curtain trusting the bus would get me there, only to see it move away from the bus stop as I approached. The next bus was 20 minutes off.

Thirty-five minutes till curtain, I began the race walking stride I hoped would work.

I made it by the skin of me teeth.

I was at the ticket counter when “One minute till performance. Take your seats, please,” came over the PA system. It was a lie, of course, as so much in the theater is. The lights did not dim for another five minutes. And I was thoroughly put out by the people who had dallied about the lobby until the last second.

But the lie had done its job – I was seated. Hot and somewhat breathless, but seated.

And it was a fine seat too – best seat in the house for my pensioner’s discount. Unobstructed but for the man and woman in front of me who kept bobbing about, locking faces and looking gooey eyed at each other from start to finish. Has all sense of what is appropriate been lost? I went to a lot of work to see Romeo and Juliet! This is serious drama! Do you think we could just pack in the public displays and watch the ballet please?!

Day 10

An All Saints Day

Let me tell you a little about my Sunday. I went to three churches, attended two and a half services and an organ recital.

I attended my usual service at St Augustine's Church Highbury New Park from 10:30-12. Actually, I stayed until 12:30 talking. It is Anglican, but clearly a believer’s church, very friendly, informal and family friendly. Lots of kids. Great pastor about my age.

My comment, “Anglican but clearly a believer’s church” comes from my background, I am afraid. We used to say, with a large hint of incredulity in our voices, “he’s Catholic, but he’s a Christian.” We often treated main-line denominations this way, sometimes as a matter of course. Living in London and attending St. Augustine’s has been humbling for me in this respect.

Before service at St. Augustine’s, I attended Mattins at an old old church abutting Clissold Park, a 10 minute walk from our flat. We have gone many times after dinner to walk the paths. We passed this old church building many times, and I wanted to see the inside, but the gates have always been locked. So I noted the service time in case I should have opportunity in the future.

Yesterday I went.

Mattins is a service of prayer, hymns, liturgy, and Bible readings. The term as I understand it essentially refers to the time of day, morning, and indicates worship. I walked in at 9, midway into the first hymn. There were four of us in the pews, all older people, as one might expect. I was the only young person there, but my white hair helps me disguise it. Then there was a priest leading the service and directing the liturgy, and also an organist.

The interior is tiny, with latched doors on the well worn pews, cracks in the plaster on the walls, marks of use everywhere, and different building materials. Columns made of sand stone on one side, red bricks on the other; to the front, wood panels about five feet high with faded gold-painted inscriptions below the stained glass window showing Mary and the Christ child.

I sat in the last pew, trying to be inconspicuous, clumsy as I was finding my way through the book of common prayer, the hymnal, the order of service, and the liturgy pamphlet. Too many things for a plainspoken Baptist to handle; too many places to look. Five rows ahead of me, the other three congregants occupied the front row!

To my great amazement, in this tiny place, being played with great skill and sensitivity by a man with a great grey beard and a tweed jacket, was a pipe organ!

Anyway, I felt the service, strange as it was to me, was spiritually meaningful. I prayed for many people, including myself, during intercession time. The word of scripture spoke to me.

Originally built in 1563 to replace an earlier church on that site dating from 1100, St. Mary’s had taken a direct hit during the Nazi blitz, now 70 years past. The demolished brick wall was replaced with sandstone blocks. The other male congregant told me the post-war rebuilders had done a poor job, so the church was raising money to reconstruct the reconstruction.

He noted that St. Mary’s is one of very few surviving Elizabethan churches. Besides dating from Shakespeare's era (!), I found his little footnote both puzzling and humbling. Puzzling because of the destruction and rebuilding: How much need be saved to let us say the church “survives”?

Humbling because uncounted generations of believers, the Church itself, have worshiped in that place.

In the late afternoon I went to St Paul's Cathedral, which is very very high church. Huge, ornate, prosperous, well maintained, impressive and noteworthy in many respects. And clearly, too, a believer’s church, although one might miss that for all the magnificence.

What I missed was the early part of Evensong because the buses run less frequently on Sundays and I had not accounted for a travel delay.

This service, too, was without a sermon. Most of it was sung by an all male choir, professional essentially, which sounded other worldly in that huge space. After Evensong I stayed for an organ recital, which was compelling and profound. I say as much even though organ is not always my favorite instrument.

My notebook records this: The organ fills the enormous space like a deep and prolonged thunder on a hot summer afternoon. One has the feeling that a great dark bank of clouds should be rolling in. We expect the ray of sunlight to break through. I look up and the word GREATNESS on a gold background seems to jump out at me.

When it ended, I was somehow both energized and exhausted.

Then I walked several miles through center London to the spot where I often pick up the 19 bus home. I could have taken another bus from right outside St Paul's, but it had stopped raining and dusk had not descended. And I needed to walk. I needed time for my day of worship to work itself out in my heart.

Day 9

Welcome to London

My first memories of Russia include a certain unpleasantness.

We had been primed for customs when we landed in Moscow. Stand in line, papers in hand and in proper order. Keep your mouth shut. Certainly no joking or horsing around.

Border crossing in our time has become a exacting, tense experience. Even the US - Canadian border at the Peace Bridge in Buffalo, that used to be "Hi" and "U.S." to the citizenship question, now requires a passport and twenty no nonsense questions -- if you are lucky. If you very lucky, the Canadian customs agent will give you a smile too.

But in Russia it is all serious business, even though, I am told, things have lightened up considerably. Step up to the booth when the soldier inside signals. Hand him the passport, visa, and entry declarations. Know how much money you are carrying when he asks so you don't have to dig it out and count it. Smile if you can't help it -- they expect that from Americans -- but no jokes.

So we did that, one at a time, as summoned. The soldier turned out to look extremely young. He may have been a teenager, for all I know. But for any child of the cold war, as I am, the familiar Russian military uniform is sobering regardless of the person wearing it. The difference between Russian Federation and Soviet Union seems negligable as you stand there rigid with concentration. This was 2004, but it could have been 1964 for the residual fears that somehow bob to the surface. A few tense moments while he examines the paper and looks you in the face, then relief when he waves you through.

Once through, the first thing we wanted was a bathroom. Relief from all that tension comes in many forms. And we had a long ride ahead of us. We had heard the toilet stories and had been told to expect the worst.

The bathroom when we found it tucked in under a set of stairs reminded me of older sections of the New York City subway system. A whole lot better, all in all, than the-hole-in-the-floor stories we had been treated to; however dated, this was a good bathroom.

So, I had taken my turn and was waiting to wash my hands in the sink when an old man lurched through the door, staggered over to the lone sink, and vomited into it with great force and noise.

Stunned, we all stepped back as the old man, with his long white hair, long white beard, and dark clothes, layered and deeply soiled, straightened up and lurched back out the door.

So, my friends: Welcome to Russia.

I was reminded of that sobering experience Tuesday morning on the streets of London. I was returning from Heathrow, where my wife had just left for home to see a new grandchild into the world, and had decided to walk through center London to pick up a knife-sharpening steel at John Lewis.

Heading down Tottenham Court Road in the general though distant direction of Foyles, the landmark book store, I encountered twenty-five young people pulling large suitcases traveling slowly in the same direction and effectively obstructing the sidewalk. Feeling confident from my four weeks as a Londoner and, no doubt, a tad amused at that familiar initial suitcase hauling ordeal, I made my way to the front of the suitcase crowd by side-stepping and moving up into gaps.

I had just reached the front of the crowd, where an efficient sounding young woman was shouting directions toward the sluggish stragglers, when a tall young man coming toward us, suddenly bent over and vomited with great force and noise in the middle of the sidewalk.

He was almost upon us, I might add. I managed to avoid splatter by hopping to the side.

I turned quickly to gauge for myself if the young man was sick. He straightened himself, mostly, and staggered forward. I recognized on his face the same mask of drunkenness I had seen on the old drunk in Moscow, the same flushed skin, at once abnormally pink and colorless, the same concentration of the eyes that focus on nothing but the next step, the same set jaw and fixed mouth as if grim determination will get them through just this one more time. His sports jacket and slacks had the sheen and varigated staining of many nights on the ground.

Many things might be said here, but they've been said before. And those who need to hear them most aren't listening just now. The differences between the young drunk in London and the old drunk in Moscow -- or the ones I used to walk past sleeping in doorways in San Francisco -- are almost incidental compared with the damning similarities.

Oh, my young friends, no one starts out thinking he -- or she -- will end up a public drunk. But sure as you are reading this tale to its end, when you reach that point, the rest of us will have only one option -- to step aside and move away as quickly as possible.

Day 8

Villages and Cow Paths

The appeal of London is legion, varied, and personal. It is also, sometimes, self-contradictory: what draws one may also be what repels.

One aspect of the city that I have found fascinating as well as difficult is the apparently unplanned layout of roadways. A younger me might call it "random."

A few days ago, my wife and I went in search of St Martin's Theatre, hoping for a matinee of The Mouse Trap, an Agatha Christy mystery play that has been running continuously for 58 years. St. Martin's is in the heart of the theatre district, just a short walk from the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Charing Cross -- landmarks I have used many times already to orient myself as I head out for other places.

We found St. Martin's without a lot of fuss -- but no matinee for The Mouse Trap. Just steps away, however, we discovered the Ambassadors Theatre with Stomp on the marquee and a matinee about to begin. As Stomp was also on our short list, we bought tickets and went inside. Our seats were perfect in every way in terms of seeing the performance, but were clearly built for people closer to my wife's height, 5'4", than to my own six foot one.

I don't know how genuinely tall people manage the short spaces between rows of seats in places like this; but once I had gotten myself wedged in and the seats next to us filled, I was locked in. I need movement to keep my joints from hurting, but there was none here. In a 100 minute performance of wordless drumming, dancing, and pantomimed vignettes I was not able to get into it with so much as a toe tap. The theatre was cramped and temporarily crippling, but the show itself was nothing short of masterful entertainment -- precise, inventive, funny, and astonishingly performed.

When we emerged from the theatre both energized and exhausted, we decided to wander around the neighborhood shops before heading home. Ambassadors Theatre is on one of seven street that converge at a roundabout, or circus, called Seven Dials. Cars zip through the intersection as though randomly syncronized. The shops, small and ecclectic, offer interesting displays.

We wandered about, ducking into a few book stores (because we are readers) and into a few toy stores (because we are grandparents). We found a store with inexpensive books, rare in central London, so we bought a few (because, in fact, you can never have enough).

Tired now both from theatre and from discovering this new, interesting neighborhood, we tried to find our way out -- but couldn't. We knew we were only a 3 or 4 minute walk from Charing Cross Road and another 3 or 4 minute walk to the bus stop we wanted, but it took us a good twenty minutes to find our way. We were thoroughly disoriented.

Initially the problem involved locating familiar street signs. That is a story in itself. Some streets are a hundred feet long. Or less. Many appear essentially unmarked. Many are bisected at odd angles by other tiny streets or alleys. I am good with maps, but the map I was carrying omitted many of the streets and alleys because there are simply too many for space. The detail is overwhelming.

Then once we managed to locate Charing Cross Road, I could not tell which direction I should head. I had gotten so thoroughly turned around, I could not make my way even though I had managed from that very spot many times. In such circumstances, I am generally able to use the sun to give me headings -- that is the country boy in me -- but here too I was lost. In late afternoon, with partial clouds, in a canyon of five or six story buildings, I could not tell with certainty where the sunlight was coming from.

Guidebooks explain the layout of London by giving capsule versions of London history, which by American standards is very long and very complicated. We don't commonly have the patience.

But I have another explanation, which if not entirely historical at least allows me to imagine how the city came by its present layout. I live in a village in western New York that owes its present shape to its geography, that is, to its many hills and to the river that runs through the valley. It also owes its shape to its main industries, namely, dairy farming, the canal and railroad that once ran through and beside the river, and education, the college and secondary school that have given the village purpose and focus for the last 125 years.

My village, Houghton, has a logical layout only in relation to its geography and its present industry. Multiply this village by one thousand, fill in the farmland and the hills between Houghton and Fillmore to the north and Belfast to the south with new villages, each with its own road-shaping industries. Then double, triple, quadruple the population of each village in the process. Build rows of houses where single houses stand and business along the central streets. Let the towns grow into one another.

Eventually, you will have a metropolitan area that resembles the labyrinth of London.
My ninety year old London neighbor explained the London tangle this way in response to my comments about London roads: "Oh, they're all paved over cow paths, you know."

I have never seen cows wandering through my home village, but I can imagine it easily enough. Our agriculatural past is still present at the edge of town. I have a harder time imagining London developing from the city planning of cows.

Still, my neighbor claims to have lived in the same flat for 69 years. That ought to be long enough to know a place. Long enough to have weighed the charms against the frustrations of London street. History may be more complicated than that but who am I to argue?