Phoctober the second

A year ago today was my big trip to England. Well, a year ago today is when my flight was supposed to depart Chicago. Instead we sat on the runway for hours and hours and someone threw up on me and we didn't actually get airborne until a few hours into October third. You can click the "England" tag to read more about my trip (after the inauspicious start, it was a really great trip). As a bonus, the pages will load in reverse chronological order, so it'll be a bit like if the film Memento was about a guy going to England on vacation (or "holiday" as they say over there for some reason.)

It was on this trip that I began to realize that I needed a better camera than the cheapo consumer model I had brought with me. Here are some of my favorite shots from the trip. Many more here.

Much ado about nothing

The news I alluded to in my previous post is nothing big. I'm sorry if y'all thought it was gonna knock your socks off. Just a couple of things I've decided lately that mean something to me, but which aren't likely to impact your lives at all.

The first piece of news is I have decided to return to London for a week in early May. This isn't exactly official yet, but I worked out a budget (factoring in how badly I'd like to return) and I think I can swing it. I didn't get to do all the things I wanted to last time, and just loved the city so much that I thought it would be a nice treat after all the work I've been putting in lately to take a small vacation (with my new camera) and wander those unfamiliar streets once more. For those of you who live there, I'll be the gloomy-looking American with the notebook and camera, sipping a cafe mocha in the sun or asking you if this is really the right tube to my destination. Or I'll be the one crouched down to get a close-up of something rusty or broken while 40 other tourists are taking a picture of something noteworthy.

Again, not exactly official. I should make my final decision by the end of the week, though.

The second bit of news concerns my writing, and the pursuit thereof. I feel like I've gotten my writing to an acceptable level overall, but think I still need work on my storytelling skills. To that end, and bearing in mind how difficult it has been to get any real work done on the novel lately (while working full time, and often nights as well) I have decided to concentrate on a couple of short stories. My plan is to polish a handful of tales into what I would consider worthy of publication, and submit them to some of the bigger fiction journals. I'm guessing I won't get anything published, but I thought it would be nice to find out, and possibly get some editorial feedback as well. And on the off chance that something is accepted, well, that's just a bonus.

This is a bit frightening for me. I've never submitted my writing anywhere. This more or less includes assigned work in school, which I tended to shirk unless absolutely necessary to avoid failing or when a rare assignment came along which captured my interest. I've written for publication before, but never without knowing my piece would be published (or not caring if it would be), and never fiction.

I think I'm up for the challenge. It's probably high time I started putting myself out there into the world at large to see what there is to see. I'm quite certain that I will share any successes or failures here.

The last bit of news involves your writing, Blogreader. I had initially planned to host a second fiction contest at the beginning of May, as that would put me on track to do about four a year. As I will likely be gone during that time (did I mention? to London!) I'm guessing I'll either do one later in May, or at the beginning of June. I was so happy with how you guys responded the first time that I know I want to do it again. There will be some changes to the rules for this one. I'm still working out the kinks and figuring out how to do this stuff.

Incidentally: we have two days left in our faux-spring before the needle dips back into the blue, and I was out enjoying the weather with my camera again. 22 new shots made the cut onto my Flickr page, if you wanna check it out. I appreciate the comments you guys gave me about the last round of pics. It's really a good feeling to be able to share my city (or my view of my city) with you.

Repost: Some people I've seen in London

I have nothing to say tonight, so I thought I might repost this entry: some character sketches written in London during my trip there in October, when only four or five people were reading me. I was framing some pictures from my trip today, and one of these people came up in a conversation, so it seemed appropriate. I'm hoping it'll be new to most of you.

*********

My first morning here I kept walking past a policeman who looked exactly like Johnny Lee Miller (Sick Boy from Trainspotting, pretty much nothing else). I didn't think much of it, filed it in my head as what would likely be the closest I came to a celebrity encounter. He was on my street, just a couple of blocks north, so I've walked past the place several times since. I started to notice that there was always a policeman standing there, a different one each day. Curious, I looked at the buildings by where the cop was always posted. And that's how I found out where the Iraqi embassy in London is located.

*********

On Abbey Road on Saturday, I saw an elderly woman walking up the street while I waited for my bus. I asked her if she'd lived in the area long.

"All my life." She puffed up a little. This may have been some sort of accomplishment I didn't understand.

"So were you living here when the Beatles recorded here?"

"Maaaahhh," she said, making a sign to ward off evil, and then moving away from me.

*********

A woman in the coffehouse I frequent asked a man (an American, as it happens) for a sheet of paper. He said he didn't have any.

Thirty seconds later he reached into his bag and pulled out a sheet of paper without any rooting around. He knew exactly where it was. He gave it to the woman.

She thanked him twice immediately. The second time contained all sorts of extra words meant to convey the depth of her gratitude and her humility for having bothered such an obviously august personage with such a trifling request.

I got the impression that this was exactly the response he wanted. That perhaps he always said no before saying yes in order to produce a disproportionate amount of thanks for even the smallest of basic, common-courtesy gestures.

Which would be a weird, although perhaps gratifying, way to go through life.

*********

Grabbing lunch in the same coffeehouse, I took a comfortable seat in the same little chair cluster as a woman whose unhappiness was so palpable as to fill the two seats between us and brush uncomfortably against me.

Her mouth turned down at the ends in two vertical lines which seemed permanent. Even just looking out the window her expression was of utter disappointment or perhaps disgust. She threw a couple of baleful stares at me when I sat, even though she had no drink or food in front her and arguably, therefore, far less claim on the table. It wasn't clear if she was even a customer or just someone who came in out of the rain.

She dropped her umbrella and, before picking it up, she grabbed what might have been a small sliver of nut, a shell from a seed, or perhaps a fingernail from where it lay on the floor in a footprint next to a cigarette butt. She put it in her mouth.

I started to think maybe she was homeless. Her hair was clean, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Her clothes were plain but not dirty. Homeless remained my best guess until she pulled out a cell phone and sent a text message. Then I didn't know what to think.

She grew tired from all her angry staring, curled up in her chair and went to sleep.

Later she awoke in time to dart like a squirrel across the room and snatch some sunflower seeds off an empty table which hadn't yet been bussed. Eating them, she placed a phone call. When she spoke, it was in a surprising high-pitched baby-doll voice with a heavy French accent.

I don't know what was said by either party, but the call appeared to have changed her life for the better. Before I left (during a bizarre jazz arrangement of Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines") I actually saw her smile.

*********

A guy outside the National Gallery took off his shirt to eat his lunch. Somebody must have said something or just been staring because, as I walked by him, he screamed "Well, if you don't like it you can bugger off!" at a seven-year-old girl.

*********

A woman with a ridiculously deep fake tan and vertigo-inducing cleavage runs the coffeehouse on my way to the Baker St. Tube stop.

My first time there was on my dawn walk my first morning in London. I stopped there largely because they were the first open coffeehouse I had seen. I had some trouble figuring out the coins I was paying with, and she patiently waited while I checked the backs and counted it out for her.

The last time I was there, a middle-aged woman with Elvis Costello glasses revealed herself to also be an American. She was having the same difficulty with the money as I had had.

After about a second, the woman who worked there barked, "They're labelled, yeah? Right on the back. Work it out!" And then walked away without taking her money. The other counter girl had to fill in until she returned.

From some similar observations I have concluded that she is nice only to male customers and people she knows. Which seems like another weird way to go through life.

Information request

Hey, UK readers of The Moon Topples. We here in America have no idea what Boxing Day is. Please enlighten us.

Sure, there's Wiki, but many of you are terrific writers. I'd rather get my info from one of you if possible.

It sounds positively pugilistic, but I'm guessing it isn't.

Sunday in the park with Ronald

It turns out that my last day out and about in London was Sunday. I wandered a bit, and ended up in Regent's Park in time to watch the sunset. Which I guess balances somehow, since I went to the same park to watch the sunrise on my first day.

I had bought a couple of sandwiches and a giant mocha, and I found a park bench facing the sun. I had only been there a moment, barely gotten my sandwich out of my pack, when an elderly man came along and asked if he could use my bench to do a bit of stretching.

I nodded assent, and started to eat my sandwich. I was a bit worried about birds since I was very close to the water, and there were thousands of them in and around the water. I thought they might smell my sandwich and flock around me. I guess they're better behaved than that, or conditioned to wait for humans to offer food or something.

I had encountered less polite behavior from the city pigeons. Aside from the ones I photographed swarming around the table at the outdoor cafe early on, one actually stood on my foot later in the trip, to get at some crumbs on my pant leg. Pretty ballsy, if you ask me. But I guess the fowl at Regent's Park are a bit classier.

The man finished his little stretching regimen and asked me where I was from, what I did and all that. He seemed nice enough, and genuinely interested, so I answered truthfully, and he told me various things about Chicago that he had heard, or such-and-such famous designer from London.

As we continued talking, I mentioned my intent to get back into writing. He was delighted. We chatted about books for a few minutes until his wife said something I couldn't hear, reaching into her bag.

She produced a book, entitled The Law is A Ass, by Ronald Irving, and handed it to me. He said that some of the illustrations heading the chapters were by an artist friend of theirs. I thumbed through it, finding it to be an anthology of legal quotations, anecdotes and sayings. The title comes from Dickens.

And then he revealed that he was, in fact, Ronald Irving: author of the very book I held in my hands. So we talked about the law a bit, and retired life, and London.

In the back of my head I was wondering if, provided I get published, I would carry a copy of my book with me. And soon that was really all I could think about. I had done nothing at the outset to encourage conversation. Was it possible that he and his wife trolled the parks of London, striking up conversations and producing the book at the appropriate moment?

I decided that it was possible.

And very human. My guess is that he wanted to feel relevant. That he was a vital man in his prime, and that age and retirement had robbed him of the external validations that had told him he was important.

Amazon tells me, though he did not, that he studied at Oxford, practiced law in London for many years, and also co-authored Know Your Rights, published in 1976 and apparently no longer in print, although it is described as a "classic" in his author blurb.

I liked Ronald, his quiet wife and handy book. I liked it that he trolled about looking for tourists to talk to. There was nothing pompous about it. He just wanted people to know what he'd done.

He walked away with his wife, leaving me to my sandwich. I called my brother in Denver, and as we began chatting some guy behind me started throwing bread to the birds. It was landing near me, and I was completely surrounded. He seemed genuinely embarrassed about how he had essentially attacked me with birds.

So I moved to another bench, ate my sandwich, talked to my brother, and watched what was essentially my final sunset in London, there by the little lake in the park.

Where are the rubbish bins?

The first thing I noticed walking around London was how clean it is. For such a large city, London is nearly immaculate.

The second thing I noticed was the paradoxical lack of trash cans.

In Chicago, there are garbage cans all over the place. And there is also garbage all over the place.

I'm not a big litterbug even at my worst, but with the clean streets here, I am extra careful to hold onto my trash until I can find a receptacle. This is often several blocks. I once walked all the way through a rather large Tube station without finding a single can in which to throw away my empty cigarette pack. There probably was one, but I never found it. I ended up carrying it back to my hotel room, and throwing it away there.

As trash goes, I have seen only a can here or a bag there with one exception: outside of a British Rail station I saw the lawn had a huge amount of crap on it. Food containers, newspapers, all sorts of stuff. I had been here long enough that the sight shocked me, even though there are plenty of places in my neighborhood at home which are worse. I almost took a picture of it before I caught myself.

I mentioned the clean street conundrum to a couple of friends this past week. One had been to London earlier in the year and said that he too had noticed how strange it was, but had no explanation to offer. The other had been to Tokyo, which has a similar lack of both street refuse and trash cans.

On Friday night I finally got a possible answer to my question from a local. Apparently, in the 1970s, terrorists used to throw bombs into the trash cans of a crowded area. The cans would then transform into shrapnel when the device went off.

That would never have occurred to me. It makes me sad.

And it still doesn't explain why the streets are so clean. But now I'm not so sure I want to know.

I take a pop-quiz in Social Studies

I've noticed that some of the people here are very keen to talk to an American. We either confuse or fascinate them, maybe both. Spending some time in the pubs of Merry Olde England, I have found some people want to talk about what is going on in the world, and what the American mind is thinking about things.

I always assure them that there is no collective American mind. Like any other group of 300 million people, our thoughts on all subjects are varied and complicated. We are not the Borg. This does not sate them.

A common question is: What do Americans think of Tony Blair? That's one I feel safe answering. We really don't think of Tony Blair. I then try to explain how the "average" American cannot name even all of the states in our own union, let alone form an opinion about a foreign leader with whom we are not at war.

A common observation is: I didn't think Americans smoked. Well, statistically, more don't than do, but I think they are referring to all the cities who have banned the practice in certain areas. That's apparently big news over here. I tell them about the Surgeon General's warning on an American pack of cigarettes, how small it is and how politely phrased. Here, a little more than a third of the front of the pack is a huge box which reads (in the case of my current pack) "Smoking kills." The back of the pack gives an entire half to a similar box, in this case reading "Your doctor or pharmacist can help you quit smoking." These boxes dwarf the branding of the item, which could never happen in America. I was told that in Thailand and other places, instead of verbal warnings they'll put an autopsy picture with an open chest exposing the lungs, or just a picture of carbonized lungs on the pack instead. So we're way behind in that area. I also try to remind them that stereotypes about all the people in a given country are not always accurate, illustrating my point with an anecdote about how last week a French woman fake-coughed at me until I finished my cigarette.

I was asked about the relative strength of the individual state versus the strength of the federal government. I explained that the states can pass all sorts of crazy laws to govern this or that, unless that issue is already addressed by the federal government. But that with the exception of a couple of hotbed issues like gay marriage or capital punishment, the "average" American's most meaningful interaction with his or her state is likely to involve income tax, a tollway, or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I have also had to explain to nearly everyone who has discovered that I live in Chicago that the whole "Windy City" thing has nothing at all to do with actual wind.

But I kinda dislike having these conversations, despite how well-meaning and genuinely interested the other party is, because at best I'm just giving them new generalizations to use. And I don't speak for all Americans. And I'm not an eighth-grade Civics teacher. What I am is a guy who gets an embarrassingly high percentage of his information from Jon Stewart. And who isn't too crazy about the America he sees taking shape around him these days.

I have been told that acknowledging the complicated nature of an issue, and admitting that there isn't one right answer that holds true for all of my compatriots isn't the kind of answer they were looking for. Not American enough. They really expect us to be certain about everything.

Last weekend, when I mentioned the novel I'm working on, I was accused of being pessimistic about it. I thought about that for a minute (because it isn't necessarily an "out-there" assertion when speaking of me) before saying:

"It isn't pessimism. It's just that I haven't written it. I'm sure I'll talk it up once it's finished, but you just don't brag about something you haven't done."

My accuser, a highly attractive Norwegian woman, grew thoughtful.

"That's not a very American thing to say," she finally muttered.

Maybe not. But I never claimed to be the ideal American.

Americans!

Last night on the bus there was a boisterous group in the seats behind me. I shared my seat with an elderly woman. The group got louder and louder and when they finally disembarked, all six of them were making some sort of ungodly whooping noise. The lady next to me met my eye when they were finally gone.

"Americans!" she said, rolling her eyes.

I chuckled and muttered "quite."

Before I left for England, I had heard that Americans can have a tough time overseas. They are perceived as loud and rude, impatient and difficult. I read that to avoid trouble, one should purchase something with a Canadian flag on it (a backpack or a sweatshirt) to aid in the pretense of being Canadian. Surely all of this is an exaggeration, I thought. After all, some of my best friends are Americans.

I have noticed, though, that many of the stereotypes seem to be true. 90% of the time I hear someone talking very loud on the street or (sadly) inside the otherwise quiet National Gallery, I have recognized the flat pitches and pronounced "r"s of American speech. When a bus stop queue has choked off the sidewalk rather than forming a line along it, I tend to hear Americans chattering within the group.

The room next to mine was, for a couple of nights, occupied by an American woman who seemed to neither leave the room nor adjust to the time difference. She made incessant calls from her cell phone, which always began with a statement of the time and an expression of exhaustion.

"It's 12:05 here. I'm so tired." She began one call as I began trying to fall asleep. The walls are thin enough that I could hear every word of each conversation she had. Sometimes I could even hear the voice of the person on the other end.

When I heard her say "Oh, I'm just exhausted. It's 1:37 here..." I had finally had enough.

In a normal speaking voice I said, "Why don't you try going to sleep, then?" Which seemed to startle her and she was quiet after that until she checked out the following morning. But it was too late. By this time I knew all about the problems her son, Robbie, was having at school and was concerned that he would not make good on his promise (repeated in three separate calls) that he would feed the fish that night. I knew about the server malfunction at work, and that Greg was taking steps to correct it, even though he was ill-suited for the task.

Some of my irritation undoubtedly has to do with a dislike I seem to have for tourists. Which apparently holds true even when I am one. In Chicago, when I used to work in River North, I was forever being asked for directions by people with cameras. That's not so bad. It's easy to get lost in an unfamiliar place, even (I suppose) when that place is laid out in a very easy to understand, North/South grid with major intersections every half-mile.

Whenever my hair was dyed blue or green or red, however, I couldn't so much as go to a bookstore on my lunch break without having to pose for pictures with an Asian group who would excitedly yell "Punk Lock!" while I was within their sightline. This seriously happened many times. I am no doubt a minor celebrity in some foreign land: the embodiment of the ubiquitousness of punk rock in America.

In a way, it's worse when I am a tourist as well, because in addition to irking me with their cries of "Jesus! That's 60 dollars!" they are embarrassing me as well. They are making my country (and by extension, me) look bad.

I guess I don't consider myself a regular tourist. I have spent most of my time away from the tourist traps, as crowds irritate me. I try not to make my getting lost someone else's problem. I have access to (and an ability to read) maps. I tend to ask for directions in only two circumstances: 1.) I have been lost long enough (usually several hours) to begin to freak out a little or 2.) the person from whom I am getting directions is someone I find attractive. So far in London, I have really only had to rely on the second reason.

I have been pleasant and polite to virtually everyone I have met. So much so, in fact, that I am often mistaken for English.

"You are English, you know," my mother said the other day. "Your father was purebred."

"My father was inbred. There's a difference," I replied. We both chuckled, although it was meaner than it was true, because you can never go wrong making fun of my father in my family.

But English descent really isn't the same as being English. I am no more English than I am Persian or Ethiopian. Except that I've seen more English movies, listened to more English music, read more English books.

Which I keep in mind now that I've been in the area long enough to have lost that frantic, tourist look which so readily marked me as an outsider. Now that I pass for English (in crowded or noisy places, this lasts until my third or fourth sentence) I am asked directions several times a day by visitors to the city.

"Shit, I don't know," I say. "I just got here myself."

Saturday in the park

I hadn't been to Hyde Park since cutting through a corner of it getting off the Tube from the Airport. It's nearby, though, so yesterday I grabbed my pack and set off to walk through it and end up at Royal Albert Hall.

I don't normally take many nature pictures, but the scenery was quite nice and I was in the park for hours. Serpentine Lake being true to its name, I ended up quite far from my intended exit, and walked and walked until I thought I found it again, but my sense of direction was faulty, and I ended up exiting on the far west edge, near Paddington and Kensington.

The sun was shining for most of the day, and I think I enjoyed it more knowing that once I leave here I'm back to the chill of Chicago's autumn.

Finally got to the hall just as the sun was slipping into the last of its hiding places for the day, the one behind the earth itself. So my pictures didn't really turn out at that juncture.

You can see a ton of pictures on the Flickr page. Some of the ones I'm most fond of have to do with the fact that the leaves have finally started to change colour.

I mean color! Dammit.

Domestic Thursday

After a bout of food poisoning last night (the same as American food poisoning, except the output is measured in metric), I awoke to moving day here at the Lincoln House Hotel. My original reservation over, I faced prospect of having to switch rooms as many as five times throughout the duration of my stay.

It took me almost two hours to get everything ready: shoved into bags and suitcases; sorted, folded and prioritized. On my way out, I stopped at the desk to drop off my key, and to see about minimizing the amount of my remaining time I'd have to spend packing and unpacking. The staff informed me that there was good news: I wouldn't have to move at all. Which is great, but I could have used that information a bit earlier.

I wandered off to do my laundry. A single load in the Primus Economy 7 machine at my local laundrette costs £4.40 to wash, plus 60p for each nine minutes of drying. So my load of laundry, which was still wet when I pulled it out of the dryer (having run out of 20p coins) cost about $11 American. One load, not counting the box of detergent I had to buy. There was a sign posted which read: "Please Attendant for Change," which is something I'm not sure I'd be willing to do. At any rate there was no attendant to please. Another man at the laundrette seemed to have inherited some of my traveler's luck. His machine kept bursting open, sending sudsy water streaming all over. The first time the door opened, as the water was gushing out, he shrugged helplessly a couple of times, then looked at me and said "Shit," with no inflection whatsoever. He had to hold the door shut with his knee to get through the spin cycle.

There were a bunch of trucks and such on the corner for a film shoot. I approached a red-headed gaffer in his mid-40's with a nose ring and a skull t-shirt and asked him a couple of questions. They're shooting a film called And When Did You Last See Your Father, with Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth. The gaffer was astonishingly friendly, especially compared to most members of American film crews, who don't like to answer questions and just want you to get the hell away from their location. I caught sight of Mr. Broadbent peering out a third story window, which makes him my official celebrity sighting for the trip.

And no: I didn't take that picture.

What isn't in the pictures is the pictures

My long walk on Tuesday netted almost a quarter of all the shots on my Flickr page (the 45 or so black and white shots on the first few pages), but most of what bowled me over was stuff I wasn't able to photograph: the contents of the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.

There is a rather large exhibit on now of Cezanne's work at the National Gallery, entitled "Cezanne in Britain." It's a pretty thorough career retrospective, so as you stroll through the rooms, you can actually see him changing as an artist, which is pretty cool.

Early on, he was drawn to some pretty dark subject matter, and his "The Murder" (1870) is an almost perfect example of what might be referred to as anti-impressionism. While Impressionists called themselves "light painters" and revolutionized the way light is portrayed on a canvas, "The Murder" is all about darkness. He seems to be trying to make the painting as dark as possible while still making the figures visible. I was also especially fond of his "Autopsy (Preparation for the Funeral)" (1869) and "The Abduction" (1867).

They don't allow photography anywhere inside the building, and a trip to the gift shop made me feel much better about that. Even the professional-quality reprints they have to offer completely fail to capture a good painting well. The colors aren't quite right, the depth and the texture are completely missing. The little gift kiosk for the Cezanne exhibit focuses not surprisingly on his later works, the pretty ones, the landscapes mostly. And these are lovely as well, but I would have loved a postcard of "The Murder." The thumbnails I'm providing really don't serve as anything more than the most basic of illustration.

I could have probably spent a couple of days in the Gallery, but instead focused mostly on the impressionist and modern works they had on offer. Again, no photograph or reprint seems to be able to recreate the visceral thrill I got rounding a corner and seeing a luminous Monet taking up a third of the wall. Or "Van Gogh's Chair" up close, where you can see the layers and the brushstrokes. There was a breathtaking water study called "Lake Keitele" by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, of whom I had never heard (I freely admit I don't know a whole lot about paintings or painters).

I next headed to the National Portrait Gallery, which focuses (obviously, I suppose) on portraits of famous and infamous Britons throughout time, set up more or less chronologically. I made my way through the Tudors pretty quickly (their fame isn't drawn from their looks or the skill of their artisans). I sat and wrote a while on a spacious green leather sofa under a painting of George Washington in a section called "The Struggle for America." This wasn't so much out of patriotism as there not being a lot of other seats on hand.

They had a special Beatles exhibit I hadn't known would be there which featured some pretty cool shots, mostly candids, of the Fab Four from throughout the 60s. One of the things they had in the "rare" section was the album cover from Introducing the Beatles, which came out in America in 1963 on Chicago's own VeeJay records and flopped terribly. It has a slightly altered version of the track list from Please Please Me. I bought a copy at a garage sale in 8th grade and, not knowing its significance, proceeded to play it into oblivion. In the shape in which I originally found it, it could easily be worth thousands of dollars today. I console myself with the idea that preserving and selling is not really what records are for. They also had outtakes from the Abbey Road cover and the psychedelic Avedon prints you see even today in poster shops.

Obviously, there was a lot more: paintings, sculptures, a bust of Alexander Pope which made me think of my brother. But this post is rather long already, and I figure an overview is enough.

Some people I've seen in London

My first morning here I kept walking past a policeman who looked exactly like Johnny Lee Miller (Sick Boy from Trainspotting, pretty much nothing else). I didn't think much of it, filed it in my head as what would likely be the closest I came to a celebrity encounter. He was on my street, just a couple of blocks north, so I've walked past the place several times since. I started to notice that there was always a policeman standing there, a different one each day. Curious, I looked at the buildings by where the cop was always posted. And that's how I found out where the Iraqi embassy in London is located.

*********

On Abbey Road on Saturday, I saw an elderly woman walking up the street while I waited for my bus. I asked her if she'd lived in the area long.

"All my life." She puffed up a little. This may have been some sort of accomplishment I didn't understand.

"So were you living here when the Beatles recorded here?"

"Maaaahhh," she said, making a sign to ward off evil, and then moving away from me.

*********

A woman in the coffehouse I frequent asked a man (an American, as it happens) for a sheet of paper. He said he didn't have any.

Thirty seconds later he reached into his bag and pulled out a sheet of paper without any rooting around. He knew exactly where it was. He gave it to the woman.

She thanked him twice immediately. The second time contained all sorts of extra words meant to convey the depth of her gratitude and her humility for having bothered such an obviously august personage with such a trifling request.

I got the impression that this was exactly the response he wanted. That perhaps he always said no before saying yes in order to produce a disproportionate amount of thanks for even the smallest of basic, common-courtesy gestures.

Which would be a weird, although perhaps gratifying, way to go through life.

*********

Grabbing lunch in the same coffeehouse, I took a comfortable seat in the same little chair cluster as a woman whose unhappiness was so palpable as to fill the two seats between us and brush uncomfortably against me.

Her mouth turned down at the ends in two vertical lines which seemed permanent. Even just looking out the window her expression was of utter disappointment or perhaps disgust. She threw a couple of baleful stares at me when I sat, even though she had no drink or food in front her and arguably, therefore, far less claim on the table. It wasn't clear if she was even a customer or just someone who came in out of the rain.

She dropped her umbrella and, before picking it up, she grabbed what might have been a small sliver of nut, a shell from a seed, or perhaps a fingernail from where it lay on the floor in a footprint next to a cigarette butt. She put it in her mouth.

I started to think maybe she was homeless. Her hair was clean, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Her clothes were plain but not dirty. Homeless remained my best guess until she pulled out a cell phone and sent a text message. Then I didn't know what to think.

She grew tired from all her angry staring, curled up in her chair and went to sleep.

Later she awoke in time to dart like a squirrel across the room and snatch some sunflower seeds off an empty table which hadn't yet been bussed. Eating them, she placed a phone call. When she spoke, it was in a surprising high-pitched baby-doll voice with a heavy French accent.

I don't know what was said by either party, but the call appeared to have changed her life for the better. Before I left (during a jazz arrangement of Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines") I actually saw her smile.

*********

A guy outside the National Gallery took off his shirt to eat his lunch. Somebody must have said something or just been staring because, as I walked by him, he screamed "Well, if you don't like it you can bugger off!" at a seven-year-old girl.

*********

A woman with a ridiculously deep fake tan and vertigo-inducing cleavage runs the coffeehouse on my way to the Baker St. Tube stop.

My first time there was on my dawn walk my first morning in London. I stopped there largely because they were the first open coffeehouse I had seen. I had some trouble figuring out the coins I was paying with, and she patiently waited while I checked the backs and counted it out for her.

The last time I was there, a middle-aged woman with Elvis Costello glasses revealed herself to also be an American. She was having the same difficulty with the money as I had had.

After about a second, the woman who worked there barked, "They're labelled, yeah? Right on the back. Work it out!" And then walked away without taking her money. The other counter girl had to fill in until she returned.

From some similar observations I have concluded that she is nice only to male customers and people she knows. Which seems like another weird way to go through life.

I am having an affair

I love Chicago. Of course I do.

I had met her only on social occasions before 1994, when I moved within her borders and we began wooing one another. I moved to Colorado but couldn't stay away. I loved her energy, her restaurants. Her theater critics were almost always kind to me, her bars and clubs receptive of my band.

I suppose we got married in 1999. We had a trial separation in 2002, but I thought of her constantly and in 2004 returned to her arms for good.

But now I am seeing someone else on the side. I suppose this happens sometimes in marriages. You lose sight of what was so special about your partner in the first place, and then meet an exotic stranger who makes you feel vital again. And perhaps you stray.

London is a great mistress. Sure, she's older, but she has character and experience. She's a bit more even-tempered, and she doesn't care about baseball. She calls soccer "football," and has cute little names for all sorts of things. I try not to correct her. She has a fantastic passion for the arts. While her trains are much the same as Chicago's, her buses run frequently and on time. She is full of pleasant surprises.

I have whispered to her that I might leave my wife for a life with her. And I have meant it.

Soon enough, though, I shall return home. She'll take me to the airport and we'll have our goodbye. And Chicago will welcome me back. She always has.

And when I get home, I shall wander the streets, as I have done here. I shall see if I can find the things that made me fall in love in the first place.

If I can't, I'm going to end up moving to London, to see how long it will take before I start to take her for granted.

Black and White

I'll do a full post later with more, but this one is just to say that there are 46 (!) new pictures on the Flickr site.





I'm pretty happy with today's batch, which covers Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Big Ben (and the Parliament House), the Thames and a bunch of random stuff.

The shots seemed to feel like black and whites to me, so I put them all up in that form. Except for one that was of foliage.

There's a statue of George Washington which has a funny backstory. He had vowed never again to set foot on British soil, so when they decided to put in this statue, they shipped a patch of American soil over, and put the statue on that.

John Lennon's Birthday / Tourism

Took a walk to the British Library. After walking for a bit, I saw signs which read "Turning the Pages," which I thought might be something I had read about: an interactive exhibit with things like Leonardo daVinci's journals and stuff that you could flip through on a computer.

I walked in. There was a small woman behind a large reception desk.

"Is this the place for the exhibit?" I asked, motioning toward a large display I could see set into a kiosk.

"Only for registered guests," she said, looking at me disapprovingly. The pair of jeans I was wearing had ripped at the knee after I got here, and I was suddenly afraid that the library had a dress code.

"Great," I said. "How do I register?"

"Sir, you are aware that this is a medical library?"

I looked around again. The signs just said "Welcome Library."

"Oh, I...isn't this..."

"No, sir."

"Well, where is...?"

"The British Library is a bit further, past the firehouse."

So I went a bit further, and past the firehouse. I must admit I had been thinking it was a little weird that the library seemed to have such a small part of the building, and that there wasn't more fanfare.

The actual library, of course, has both size and fanfare. It was redone in 1998, and has lots of modern ideas in the architecture. There is an emormous statue of Paolozzi on the grounds, and a very modern feel to the building itself. Every book published in the UK is required by law to send at least one copy to this building.

I had arrived a bit late for the paid exhibits, but was told I could still see much of what I had come for in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, subtitled "Treasures of the British Library."

It turned out, once I found it, to house pretty much all of what I was looking for. Photography is prohibited, but I got a few shots off before I realized this (check the Flickr page). But I saw so much more than the (fairly crappy) pictures suggest. They had among many other things various incarnations of the Magna Carta (including an original); a Gutenburg Bible; early published versions of Shakespeare (including a Richard III from 1597 and the First Folio); handwritten pages from books by Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Lewis Carroll; and even originals of Beatles songs, sketched out by John on the back of an Airmail envelope, or, in the case of "A Hard Day's Night," on what seemed to be a greeting card.

So I stood there a moment, thinking that perhaps even the cynical Mr. Lennon would be proud to have his scribblings here. At least so near to the Lewis Carroll stuff.

It would have been his birthday Monday, and he would have been a doddering old poop of 66. Would he have softened by now, or would he be spitting out venom at President Bush the way he used to at Nixon? I have no answer to that question.

I have been to the Dakota building in New York, where he lived out the last years of his life, where he was shot and killed. I have now been to Abbey Road studios, where an engineer once draped a microphone in plastic and submerged it in water to achieve a vocal effect he wanted. I have looked at lyrics he wrote out by hand and seen how it might have taken shape with big scratches obliterating entire verses before he wrote out the one now on record.

I have read the books, watched the interviews, seen the documentaries.

But all of that is nothing more than tourism. I don't claim to understand him at all, because tourism isn't about understanding. Just proximity.

You stand next to something, see something, maybe touch something. Snap a picture, maybe think for a minute and then you go on to the next thing.

Someone else great did something right over there. And, if you hurry, you can stand there, too.

Oh, Blimey!

I have decided that I am done with the "Full English Breakfast," as least so far as my hotel is concerned. Sure, I like free as much as anybody, but it just isn't good eating. They don't know how to cook eggs or take your order in my hotel, so I recognize that all English breakfasts aren't necessarily like this, but still: it's important to me that I enjoy the food I am eating, or at least the atmosphere in which it is served.

So with that thought in mind, I slept in a little on Saturday. I lazed my way back to the Caffe Nero on Edgeware Road, and had a "brunch pot" (pretty much just yogurt with granola) in addition to a croissant and some mocha. The kicker was that I got to eat this outside on a lovely morning after two days of rain.

It was also on my way to Saturday's big tourist excursion: Abbey Road.

So after I ate, I started on my way. I had looked at a map before I left, and had at least a vague idea where I was going, so I strolled confidently for a while. Soon, however, it was obvious that I was lost.

I had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and compounded it several times by making additional turns based on instinct rather than evidence. I was somewhere in Paddington, or near Paddington, and then I was nowhere at all for a while, before finally getting an idea I might be heading in the right direction when I hit Harrow Road. I walked along it for a while, growing less and less confident I was traveling in the right direction. I stopped to ask a cop for directions, and he guided be back the way I had come, plus another mile or so, to what turned out to be Edgeware Road. Where the coffee-house was at the start of my journey.

From there I only had to walk the original two miles and I'd be at Abbey Road.

Now I should point out that while getting lost was an accident, staying lost was something of a choice. There were several points in my journey at which I could have boarded a bus or train and been sure of my position again soon enough. There's no reason in the world why someone who speaks the language and remains reasonably lucid should remain lost in a large city for very long, except by choice.

And in my wandering around, I came upon a few things I wouldn't have otherwise. There was a sudden, small body of water with a little dock and boats, a cool spider web, and a few other things.

And I learned that they have excellent maps posted at many of the bus stops, which is how I ultimately made a left on Circus Road, which took me to Abbey Road. I had been walking for four hours when I got there.

The street itself is largely a quiet, residential one. It had a fair amount of traffic on Saturday afternoon. I actually walked right past the studio, catching it only out of the corner of my eye afterwards, and quickly turning around (I certainly didn't need another unnecessary five mile hike).

It's nothing much from the outside, this legendary studio. You can walk right into the driveway and up the front steps, which I did. You can't go in, though. Apparently they opened it to the public only once, in 1983, and whatever may have ensued, they decided never to do it again.

'Revolver was recorded here' was my primary thought, although of course almost all of the Beatles' catalog was. And Imperial Bedroom. And a host of other great music and comedy: Peter Sellers recorded here (with George Martin at the helm, too) when he was in the Goon Squad. Nerds (by which I mostly mean my brother Larry) may be excited to learn that music for the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings series was recorded here as well.

I noticed when I pulled the pictures off of my camera that, much like Buckingham Palace, I never took a picture of the building itself. I had a shot of the logo above the door, and some appropriately labelled but otherwise unrelated street signs, but nothing at all of the building itself. Other buildings, sure. So while you can see all of that stuff on the Flickr page, you'll have to troll the Web yourselves if you want to see the studio building itself.

I never did find the famed zebra crossing from Abbey Road. By that point I had walked something like 8 miles, and their last studio album was never my favorite Beatles record anyway. It's just the one where you can take a picture. I tried once to have my picture taken inside a Klaus Voorman drawing, a la Revolver, and the results were unsettling.

Should I change my mind, though, there is a bus which stops a half a block from my hotel that can return me to the site in about 15 minutes.

It isn't a total loss, though. I still got my picture taken in a Beatles album, as you can plainly see below. Too bad I didn't bring a turtleneck.

In which I spend all of Friday away from castles and statues

I pretty much stayed in the area around the hotel on Friday. Walked around, looked at stuff. I keep finding some little place (a cafe maybe, or a shop) which holds a little island of delight, and which makes me feel as though I could spend the whole vacation within a few blocks and never be bored.

I stumbled into an Italian Cafe at lunchtime. They had large pasta bowls on top of a glass counter filled with little cookies. I looked around and saw prices for only the cookies and drinks.

"Do you have a price list?" I asked.

"No, no. You have to go next door." He pointed in the direction I've come to think of as north, but which is actually more northwest.

Puzzled, I complied. I figured there was some sort of adjunct to the cafe in the next storefront. But instead there was a different restaurant entirely.

I retraced my steps and tried again, this time phrasing my query in the "how much" family, pointing at the huge bowl of pasta.

Turns out he thought I had wanted breakfast. It also turns out that he was actually from Italy, and spoke English with a strange mix of Italian and British accents I had never heard before. And that the bowl at which I was pointing contained probably the best Arrabiata I have yet tasted. That's a spicy marinara for those of you who've never had the pleasure. They also made an espresso good enough that I later called Craig in America to tell him about it.

I followed the street until it ended near a Caffe Nero, which seems at first blush to be like Starbucks might be if they gave a shit about coffee. It's a chain, but with very good espresso drinks, and no aisles of merchandise. You can buy their beans, and I think mugs, but not an album of songs Sheryl Crow thinks you should hear, or Akeelah and the Bee on DVD.

So I listened to my iPod, drank my mocha, and once again watched London as it finished work for the day, and bustled home.

The Moon Topples London Challenge

I have only a few things that I figure are essential to do while here in London. Abbey Road, the Cezanne exhibit, the Tower of London, a Waterloo Station sunset, Camden Markets, hitting Covent Garden. Plus littler things like having a pint with fish and chips in a pub, and that sort of, well...crap.

So I thought I'd open things up a bit.

If any of you can find something interesting for me to do in London, post it here or email it to me (if you're one of the lucky, lucky few who knows me in real life) and I will do my best to add it to my itinerary. It has to be legal, and it can't cost a fortune, but otherwise I'm up for pretty much anything. I'm hoping for the kind of things my guidebook didn't cover because it's below the radar. A National Pudding Museum or a store which only carries toothpicks and spoons. That sort of thing.

So hop online and find some weird shop, museum, statue, or anything else you think might be interesting, and send it in.

And if I use one of your suggestions, I'll try to get you a souvenir from there (again, this applies only if I know you in real life). That's the best I can do as far as prizes. Well, that and mad props. And the enduring thanks of a grateful blogger. And who doesn't loves props and thanks?

As a side note: no, I did not make the freaky collage. But I did invert it and add the question mark. Ugly, ain't it?

Thursday Tourist Highlight

Buckingham Palace

I made my way south from the hotel to see Buckingham Palace. Kept to the little streets as much as possible, because they're not crowded and also prettier.

At one point I saw a construction worker struggling to hoist some bricks up a rope on a pulley. A woman in business attire, walking by, stopped to help him. They pulled and pulled, and she never put down her enormous purse. When the bricks reached the top, a man came along to grab them. When he saw the woman who had helped, he shouted something down and all three laughed. See, Londoners are nice.

But not always. I got shoved into the street several times walking along Oxford on Wednesday. There are people here and there (I can spot them now) who are simply not going to alter their course. Feeling a little fed up, I body-checked one of them and haven't had any problems since. I guess word got around.

The palace itself was interesting, I suppose. I sure took lots of pictures of it, at any rate. There were quite a lot of people gathered around the gates. They do the Changing of the Guard every other day at 11:30, and although it was 11:15 when I got there, it wasn't a day where they did the ceremony.

There weren't any redcoated soldiers with enormous Q-tip hats. Just a guy with a machine gun. I decided not to see if he was allowed to respond to any antics I might want to try.

It's mostly on the Flickr page. Gates, statues, flowers, fountains and the crowd itself. So there isn't much to add.

Apparently, 30% of London is parks and greenery, so I made my way slowly back through Green Park, which is the third or fourth huge-ass park I've stumbled into since arriving. It's very big, and very pretty. Lots of clover and big knotty trees. They also have deck chairs you can sit in (£2 for four hours) but benches, while rarer, are free.

Stopped for an hour or so at a cafe on Piccadilly and watched London scuttle around. Pigeons swooped down every time someone left a table with any food on it. The staff kept trying to shoo them away, but weren't equal to the task. A cluster of four of them ate for several minutes off of the table next to mine, and then looked like they might fight me for my roll. But I emerged victorious.

On the way back, I walked along Saville Row (rhymes with "gravel," not "DeVille") where the Beatles used to have suits made. And a lot of other people. I arrived on the street just as "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came up on my iPod, which was kind of cute. They still have tailors along here, and lots of little boutiques where a scarf costs roughly $200, and the staff knew immediately that I wasn't going to buy anything. One guy was nice enough to open a £69 umbrella for me, so I could see how wide it was when opened. I clucked something encouraging and left the store. It was nice enough, but I already bought a £2 umbrella, with which I'm quite satisfied.

Wednesday Tourist Highlight

Regents Park at sunrise

I knew my hotel wasn't far from Regents Park, so when I awoke Wednesday morning to discover it was still dark outside, I checked out the time of the sunrise and decided I'd wander on up there to catch it.

Some pictures from this walk are on the Flickr page (link in the sidebar).

Part of the walk was up Baker Street. I was looking at the shops I passed, humming the Gerry Rafferty song, and thinking of Sherlock Holmes, when I noticed I was standing in front of a store called "Beatles London Store." They didn't display any merchandise through the window, and it looked very low end, but I figured the Beatles spent a lot of time here, so why not.

And then I noticed that the shop right next to it was called "Elvisly Yours," and seemed to have the same owner. And a couple of doors north was 221b, famous home of Sherlock Holmes. Which is now, of course, a low-end museum. The guidebooks don't recommend it. They apparently don't keep the fictional aspect of Mr. Holmes in perspective in there, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not mentioned.

I entered the park. Lots of birds and water and greenery. Pleasant morning noises from the birds, and an occasional jogger on the paths. I saw an ornate gazebo and snapped a picture before going up to read its little plaque. It was built for and dedicated to a group of men who died on that spot in the park in 1982, in some sort of terrorist attack.

I thought a bit about terrorism, and how much America has been obsessed with it these last five years. Britain has of course been the target of bombings and other attacks for a lot longer. They've had more time to adjust to this new element of life. They seem to react as most of us would when an attack happens: shock, outrage, unity. The big difference is how they act when there's not an attack. They act like normal people. They don't spend all their time obsessing about what might happen next. They take precautions, and try to stay safe, but the average Londoner doesn't think about it often.

We were unfortunate in America to have had a leader with so little interest in healing when the biggest attacks came. Someone a bit more concerned with the welfare of the citizenry could have helped us through this time, guided us through it with wisdom, maybe. Or compassion. Or even just genuine leadership.

And still been re-elected.

So, standing there by the gazebo, I became angry at myself for swallowing any of the "post-911" bullshit they've been offering. The somewhat random fear-mongering and the whittling of civil liberties. I haven't been one of those who ever thought any of it was a good idea, but a little of the fear and uneasiness got through anyway.

And then I let it all go: the anger and fear and all the rest of it, and just enjoyed the park until I felt like having some breakfast.

Because it was really quite pretty. And the birds were singing.