The Monumental

A couple of days ago, MathWhiz (who's visiting) and I wandered past the British Museum late at night: the gates still stood open so we wandered in and were invited to wander further since the Great Court apparently stays open all night. I can't even begin to describe what it's like to walk into the Museum courtyard at night when there aren't crowds of people all around.... and then to walk around the cool marble floors on the Great Court and look up at the reading room... again, all in silence, with no chattering masses around you, no din from zillions of school-kids on tours and parents bringing with reluctant children attached to their feet. It is something else to see this place when it is not in its normal state of chaos.

I've always had a special spot for the Reading Room here: given its storied history of Marx and Lenin, Gandhi and Kipling, it's hard not to feel that it is space steeped in the history of the 20th century. But the British Museum itself is one of those institutions that I can only ever be ambivalent about; like the Victoria & Albert -- perhaps even more so -- it can only ever have been a product of an empire and that it was so manifestly the product of an empire that I have a familial connection to makes it so much harder to single-mindedly appreciate. It is without doubt one of the world's great institutions, it has a collection without peer and yet it is somehow -- in my mind, anyway -- horribly flawed by its (metaphorical) foundations. And seeing it in this light -- cold, silent, empty -- where its sheer monumentality can't possibly be missed.

moreish

This is the word I'm going to import into my vocabulary from this trip. It means exactly what it sounds like it means - it's a descriptor for something (generally food but not always) so good that you want more of it. So: this past weekend, I discovered that hot Indian food you can pick up on the go at supermarket chains such as Sainbury's can actually be moreish (and trust me, no one is more surprised by this than I am!). I got caught in a cold December rain and was tempted by the Vegetable Makhani Masala with Pulao Rice: it was steaming hot and the thought of going home and having to cook dinner was not appealing. It was moreish - and it was surprisingly spicy, for something that is sold at a mainline supermarket.

It made me think that I should have gone to see the Dandy Warhols play at the Astoria (which has to be one of most written about music venues ever). I was minding my own business, clutching the books I'd bought on Charing Cross Road when I was accosted by a guy who was desperate to sell me a ticket 'to see the Dandies for the last time....' That caught my attention but it turned out to be the last time 'for this year, yah' so I decided to take my chances in the years to come and went home instead. But hey, if I enjoyed a plastic ready-meal in London, maybe I'd have enjoyed the Dandies too. Ah well, I'll never know. Speaking of music, the only conversation I've had on the tube comes to mind: there was a lot of confusion this weekend because a number of the Underground lines were shut down for maintainence. So after being completely unable to figure out how I was supposed to get to where I was supposed to go, I finally asked a guy who was standing next to me studying the large-scale map of the underground on the wall at Leicester Square if he was from London. He was, and after assuring himself that I wasn't a maniac ('cos of course only maniacs talk to strangers on the Tube in London), he helped me figure how to get to Liverpool Street without using the Circle line. Anyway, in the process we established that I was from Canada. 'Oright, Canada. Nickelback.' It turns out that Nickelback has a new album out - or maybe it's just out here now... whatever... and there is a massive amount of advertising for this album all over London's Underground. Not moreish, I'm afraid.

Sunday, I went on a Harry Potter walk, or, to be precise, a 'The London that Inspired Harry Potter' walk organized by London Walks. I know, I know, not the kind of thing you'd go to without some trepidation but it turned out to be moreish. For a cold Sunday evening in December, there were a lot of people there and that they were all adults too made me feel less ridiculous. But we were led down the tiniest of alleyways in the heart of London, places that I'd never have guessed existed - and it must be said, places that remind you of Knockturn Alley and of Diagon Alley; we got to see the red telephone box that will let you into the Ministry of Magic but only if you know the right number to dial, and sadly, none of us did... and so on. All good fun and a nice way to spend a couple of hours in London.

Experiment in 19th century design!

I don't actually dislike the V&A, despite my comments below! There are things about it that I do really like - here's an example. This is a typical of the 19th century 'design' that I created on one of their little hands-on machines. I have to admit that I'm quite taken with the pattern! But again, it kinda makes my point about the lack of adequate historicization offered by many of the exhibits. In the South Asia rooms, for instance, there are a number of dresses made up in various parts of Europe that use cotton or silk materials with designs like this one that came from India and which were one widely imported ito Europe. But you'd have to know about why and how this appears in the South Asia rooms yourself - there's no explanation offered alongside the exhibit. While I was there, there was a school group in there, mostly made up of girls who looked like they were 9 or 10. And I swear I overheard one brown - ie, presumably British-Asian - kid say to another, 'Lookit the dresses people in India used to wear.' I don't know that she realized that the only people in India who wore dresses like the ones displayed in the cases were the British....

So, what would an 19th century lady have made of my little design for Indian cotton?

The Victoria & Albert Museum

Somehome calling this the V&A makes it sounds mildly lewd and while there are many things you could say about this particular museum, mildly lewd is not one of them! One of my fave musuem pieces in the world is here - Tipoo's Tiger - as they call it. There's a whole history to this mechanized tiger and to Tipu Sultan and you can read it all here so I won't repeat it all. Suffice it to say that every time I go to Mysore, I get myself to Srirangapatnam - what the British called Ser-ringa-patam - and visit Tipu's summer palace, the 'Daria Daulat.' As far as I know that translated into the 'riches from the sea' which is an odd name for a place that is landlocked but whatever. It's a low building with a wrap-around verandah, full of carved archways and the most intricate paintings all over it. The paintings are mostly of Tipu and his court but the most famous ones are of his victory over the British in the late 18th century. The tiger, I imagine, comes from the same time period and telegraphs his feelings about the British quite clearly! And yet... and yet... the intriguing thing about the Tiger is that it is an automata, such as were hugely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and France. There's an irony in Tipu's Redcoat-eating tiger being a creature that could only have come about in the interaction between colonial margin and imperial centre; an irony that sadly isn't explored in the rather poorly curated exhibit in which it now lives.

Ahem, right, back to the Victoria & Albert. I went in particular to see a small display on 40 years of the Booker prize they have up but got distracted by all the colonial bric-a-brac that fills up that space. Truly, I wonder what the British would exhibit in it if it weren't for their colonial history! The rooms just off the lobby - usually reserved for the most popular exhibits - have been the Islamic art, South Asia and East Asia collections for as I've been coming here. And it doesn't end there: wander upstairs to their 'Europe' collections and you can't help but be struck by how much of it is influenced - if not directly brought 'home' from - British expeditions to distinctly non-European parts of the world. Take the stunning silver collection - two of the most interesting pieces in there are a solid silver South Indian temple (vaguely reminiscient of the famous Madurai Meenakshi temple, with its carved and layered pagoda-style top) and a massive table decoration of an Arab tribesman on his camel under desert palms - made respectively in Madras and Cairo and 'presented' to colonial officers by various collectives of 'natives.' Collectibles like this abound here: don't even get me started on the jewellery collection! And I have to say, the curating is disappointing in that it doesn't seem to draw attention to this deep colonial history. This museum really exists because the Victorian era was the great age of empire; its exhibits are vital momentos of the (sometimes forcible) globalization of British culture that really started in that age though it may only have culminated in the post-war period.

Even the Booker exhibit should have excavated Britain's colonial history: for one thing, there is a reason that the Booker prize goes to the best British or Commonwealth novel every year; more immediately, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things are prominently displayed. The best bit of the exhibit were the four or five books that are shown with their 'bespoke' bindings. I didn't know this but apparently books shortlisted for the Booker are handbound by selected master bookbinder from the Designer Bookbinder association for presentation to the authors. The result is a set of unique - and fascinating - bindings that try to reflect the form and content of the books. Check out the bookbindings from 2005 to 2008 here. Aren't they gorgeous? Looking at these bindings makes me want to run and read the books - which I suppose is the intent. But it's interesting that the bookbinders - for both Midnight's Children and The God of Small Things - chose to include the colonial connection in their concepts. Perhaps the V&A at large could learn something about the concept of acknowledging the hybridity at the heart of empire from this tiny - but oh-so-interesting - little exhibit.

Bookhunt!

Today I decided to wander with a real purpose: look for books that I couldn't find in Toronto. So started my day with a quick tramp through storied Brick Lane (yes, I saw the church that is now a mosque) and Spitalfields Markets - these London markets are quite unlike anything I've seen in other places, mostly because they mash so much crap next to so many cool things I couldn't afford (in this case, the offerings on Brick Lane, other than the fruit & veg were the crap and the hand-made organic products in the new but christened 'Old Spitalfields' market were of the too-cool-for-school and way beyond my means variety). Still, it was a fun place to begin - and the fact that most people seemed to be walking through Brick Lane market to get to Spitalfields again suggested that quality of forced live-togetherness that cities foist upon their citizens.

In keeping with the looking in markets theme, my next stop was the Riverside Book market. South of the river, literally underneath the rising sweeps of London Bridge is a small - and truth be told, a generic -- lot of long tables upon which books are displayed and sold every weekend. It's the location that makes it special, not the books themselves or the prices. And as with any set of used books, you have to have the patience to dig if you want to find something worth the effort! My haul from there today included Eric Newby's On the Shores of the Mediterranean and Anthony Capella's The Food of Love. Having accidentally picked up Newby's biography, A Traveller's Life, a few weeks ago in Toronto, I'm now a fan. But I only bought the Capella book because the Hagrid-lite man who was looking after the table where I found the Newby recommended it so highly: he asked if I was looking for travel books on the Med in particular since he had one that he'd loved... and one thing led to another until I found myself saying, 'Go on then, I'll give you two quid for it.' Done, he said, and so I'm now the owner of a books whose blurbs include one from Hugh Laurie that goes like this: 'a splendid linen suit, panama hat, distant lawn-mower kind of a book; guaranteed to whisk you far fro this drizzly island, soothe you, warm you and return you home again without losing any of your luggage.' How could I resist? I'll report back.

Fortified with hot chocolate - 'special Christmas recipe with rum and cinnamon,' - I wandered through the heart of tourist London -- across Waterloo Bridge, up Charing Cross to Trafalgar Sqaure, past the National Gallery, along Oxford Street, up Marylebone Lane - until I hit my last serious bookstop for the day: the Oxfam Book and Music store and Daunt's on Marylebone High Street. I found the Oxfam last year one wet summery day when I dashed into it to escape for a rainshower and left two hours and many pounds later. It's truly a tiny little gem of a bookshop - and it's very close to Daunt's, which is quite possibly my favourite bookshop in all of London. My practice now is to go to the Oxfam store first and go through the little travel writing section they have there before heading to Daunt's and spending too much money on books that - strictly speaking - I don't need.

Today's haul from Oxfam include:
Mary Taylor Simeti's On Persephone's Island
Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons
Clive James' Falling Toward England
and Michael Sanders' From here, you can't see Paris

And last but not least, from Daunt's, I emerged with Adam Clapham's Beware Falling Coconuts (you've got to see where this link takes you!) and Robyn Davidson's Tracks. Not a bad haul, and (other than at Daunt's) all bought from used bookshops so I still have a few quid left for food and cider!

Yes, there is a clearly a theme to my book purchases: it's December and cold here and I'm heading back to Toronto where it will only be colder. So travel narratives about far-away places, mostly warm ones, seem to be calling out to me. So I'll leave y'all with a thought from St. Augustine (I know, I know!) : 'The world is a book and those who do not travel, they read but a page.'

On the Other Side of Town

I wandered around Chelsea yesterday, a deliberate attempt to see another London. And I couldn't help but think of Tourism, a novel by a 'British Asian' man called Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal. I'd never heard of it but saw it on one of the bulging bookcases in the room I'm occupying and couldn't resist it. Have I ever mentioned the first requirement for house-sitting? Packed bookshelves! Preferably packed with books you want to read! Part of the reason I'm loving my stay in London so much are the bookshelves here.... my cool-Britannia cousins (and I don't mean that in a snarky way -- they embody the best things about Brits of a certain generation) have these wonderfully laden bookshelves that I get to come home to everyday! Ahem... Tourism then caught my eye: I'm not sure I like the novel but it's acutely observed. And it prompted me to visit Chelsea and Sloane Square and the King's Road, all such popular haunts of 'posh birds' that they are mocked in British novel after British novel... to quote almost at random, from the last novel I read: 'That night he became enamoured of the upper classes. ...heading back toward the studio on King's Road her father had impulsively bought for her one weekend, he fell in love with Chelsea's solemn Georgian terraces and resposeful, well-fed squares. Here, Doug could see, life was lived on the grand scale.' (This is from The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe but that's almost irrelevant). But this mocking is particularly charged in Tourism which at least takes a stab at racism in the upper echelons of British society, even the supposedly post-everything millenial one.

You'd be amazed by the number of dessicated old ladies wandering into stores along the King's Road and Knightsbridge. Or perhaps not. I mean, that's where one expects the rich to shop in London, isn't it? But to have that expectation so very obviously met means that it can't be mocked all that easily. All that is left to say is that there are clearly very rich people living (or at least shopping) in London; that the vast majority of them are white and that I truly did feel like a tourist in that neighbourhood, in a way that I haven't felt in any other part of London that I've wandered around in. I saw a couple of Filipino women, obviously nannies pushing kids along in prams, some cabs being driven by Asian men (but not many since this is not the land of cheap mini-cabs: this is where customers are chauffered in style or have Black Cabs hailed for them by doormen) and there were a black construction workers working on the endless repairs being made to 'London's Victorian Water Mains'; other than that, there was yours truly wandering along. It's an odd feeling to be so consciousness of my browness; I suppose it's a necessary reminder that not all of London is as approachable as the places I've been hanging around in.

Tomorrow, I'm checking out a couple of the markets here in the East End! Something tells me that will be less... segregated.

In the East End... (part the first)

One of the things that I've found most amusing about this sojourn in somewhere in the middle of Bethnal Green & Bow, Mile End and Hackney is that its residents constantly surprise you. There are rows and rows of two, three and for storey brick row houses, all with names such as Twig Folly Close, Digby Knottisford, Oystercatcher Close and Gawber Street. For your amusement, I should mention that I've also seen street signs for Sugar Loaf Walk, Dug on Street (though my A to Z tells me that should be Duggon), Poultry, Gerund Rd, Railway Children Walk, Old Jewry, Garlick Hill, and Ribbon Dance Main. (I've been keeping a list!). Oh, and have I mentioned that I'm staying in Gunmaker's Lane, off of Gun Wharf?

Just for fun, I thought it would be interesting to see how far the colonial connection goes: I wasn't surprised to find Madras Place or even Bombay St -- it's near Canada Water, for those of you who know this city; there's also a Bangalore St in Richmond, a Hyderabad Way in West Ham, and even a Mysore Road, near Clapham Junction. If I can manage it, I want to go and take a picture of the street sign for Mysore Rd. But seriously, I think it would be very interesting to see just how many colonial villages, towns and cities have lent their names in this way -- we're so familiar with the metropole-to-outpost flow of names, especially in North America with its plethora of 'New something' names but this other routing is just as interesting I think.

Staying in this part of London though is also teaching me about immigration here and the ways in which it is different from immigration into North America. One of the things that struck me almost immediately is how South Asian -- specifically Bangladeshi -- this neighbourhood is and how that identity is obvious in the clothes people wear and the ethnic enclave within which much of their lives seem to be lived in. I'm two kms away from the infamous Brick Lane (and I can't recommend the books Brick Lane (Monica Ali's novel) and Tarquin Hall's lived ethnography Salaam Brick Lane enough!) and it is obvious in between Brick Lane and here that there is a large and unintegrated community here. I don't know that this is either good or bad but even Mississauga and Brampton haven't prepared me for the large numbers of women in salwar-kameezes, hijabs, and burkas and men in a combination of long thobe, wolly socks and sneakers who walk around doing their shopping in little shops that wouldn't look out of place in working-class Bombay or Karachi or Lahore. (I will admit too that nothing prepares you to have them open their mouths and sound as though they've walked off the set of Eastenders but that's another story...).

The disturbing thing about this phenomenon -- or perhaps I should say the potentially disturbing thing -- is that I don't know that this isolation is by choice. I take the No 8 bus on my trips into Central London and could wax lyrical about how wonderful it is: it goes all the way from here past Brick Lane and Liverpool Street and the City to Oxford Circus and then onto Victoria. But while it is full of people from the Bangladeshi community when I get on and for a little while after, by the time the bus gets to Liverpool Street, it's mostly white folks heading off for work and shopping.... and I'm not sure that that's because they choose not to leave the East End or because they can't....

The City

So I've spent the last week or so thinking about cities... the attacks on Bombay and being here in London and reading the New York Times online somehow made me think of The City as an entity much greater than the sum of its parts. I've thought of myself as a Torontonian for quite a while now -- perhaps more so after the disasterous year in Halifax than before! -- but watching and reading the attacks on Bombay in real time, as it were, I've realized again how much we owe to the idea of a city. There was all the usual stuff about how the city responded to the crisis as no other city had -- promptly debunked by the NYT comparing it to 9/11 (and the Guardian here comparing it to the attacks on London transit in July 2007; known here as 7/7). The thing is though that there is both greater impact (and tragedy) because this happend in a city and such a city and greater redemption.

I love cities: the noise of traffic, the crowds, the sense of never being alone because you can just choose to be anonymous in the crowd, the public transit, the sense that you are part of a community, will you or nill you, that is always moving, always growing, always embracing differences that you can't even imagine -- these are the things that cities have going for them. And there is something about how they are always space-conscious even as they are ever-growing that makes it impossible for any scar(e) to be permanent. The Twin Towers came down but New York will build something in that space because it has to; so also here in London, those Tube stations that were bombed are up and running again and in Bombay, too, Leopold's Cafe is already open and crowded where four days ago people lay bleeding. It's not that cities can't stand still and mourn, it's that they don't memorialize a space. We could concieve of leaving behind a blighted village and just building anew over the hill, but who can imagine a great city doing that. Where would the great cities go, anyway?

I'm living in the East End of London for this month and it's an area of this city that I've never really explored before. So I'm reading about it now as I'm walking its streets trying to orient myself: it is the part of the city that I like to think I'd live in if I had the choice because it is the raw pumping heart of London, with a history of radical politics, it has seen waves of immigration (think Kensignton Market spread over a vast area), and has been through numerous incarnations. This is the only riding that has sent a Communist to the British Parliament, right after the Second World War, when it was pulverized during the Blitz. Bethnal Green and Bow is now one of the poorest and most heterogenous ridings in the country and yet it nestles up to Westminister Palace and central London.

A place of contradiction, of despair and of hope -- kinda like the east end of Toronto, of so many slums in Bombay and of Queens in NYC. I suppose when you live in a city you have to live in close proximity to other lives and that in itself is a hopeful process.