1 May: “We’re Not Giving Any of It Back”
It happened. This morning while I was sitting at the dressing table trying to convince myself I was awake, I tsktsked over the proliferation of split ends in my hair. “How long has it been since I did my ends?” Answer: can’t remember. So I pulled out my nail clippers and took fifteen minutes to deal with this essential piece of grooming. That’s when you know you’re on sabbatical – when you can finally spend some quality time with your ends.
At breakfast, forgot that bacon was going to be Canadian bacon – felt myself to be in a foreign country then, and got self-conscious about where to put my elbows and how to repose my napkin. Also concerned about my lung function, which despite being bevied up by tons of steroids and antihistamines, was poor. I thought I knew a thing or two about damp, living in the inner Sunset, but MAN!
(Later) Definitely feeling better – the restorative powers of a cup of hot tea and a gooey pastry. Life is good. It’s between 5:30 and 6:00 – people outside in the street are heading home from work. Me, I’m ensconced in the front corner table at Caffe Nero with all the time in the world. Well, to be precise, about an hour before I have to dress for Shockheaded Peter, but still.
The main problem with London for me, since my lungs decided they would continue to work, is the fact that I never have any idea which way traffic is going to come at me as I cross the street – though the City of London, mindful of foreign morons like me, kindly writes directions on the pavement in front of the crosswalk, “Look left!” I am not able to trust them and must look the other way as well. There’s that marvelous sense of places-to-go-and-people-to-see big-city swiftness and purpose in the streets.
This morning, I walked over to Doughty Street and the Dickens Museum. Primary (unintended) message is about the general value of fame – I could just imagine, as I creaked through the dimly lit house, some future curator carefully appending a 3x5 card to an exhibit, “Here is the fondue fork that Carol James used to remove jammed photocopy paper (circa 1995)” Every item that Dickens ever touched has become a holy relic – it was just ridiculous what value was put on every teaspoon.
(…Though the Jacob Marley doorknocker in the gift shop was pretty cool).
A short jaunt to the British Museum from there. The first gallery I ventured into, I practically knocked over the Rosetta Stone. That’s the cool thing about the BM – they’re so damn casual about possessing so much of the world’s cultural patrimony. “Illuminating world cultures,” sez the gift store bag, which I take to mean, “We ain’t giving any of it back.”
Well, you couldn’t want a better segue to the Elgin marbles…. Surely I’m not the first person to notice how sexy-and-violent it all is? Lathians (I keep wanting to write “Latvians”) wrestling centaurs who are trying to steal their women at a drunken wedding reception. Do I see Jean Claude van Damme expertly cracking a centaur’s cervical vertebrae? And the Nereids are pure wet-chitin contest. Of course I had a lengthy, lustful gawk at the horse heads. Even the anonymous limner of the descriptive captions lost his/her cool and waxed rhapsodic – “Selene’s horse is exhausted by the nightmare ride. His eyes are rolling, and his foam-flecked lips show tension. We realize that some of this may be speculation.”
Other highlights: in the Americas room, top honors go to a pre-Columbian Chihuahua lamp, with runners up being the giant stone steles depicting Bird Jaguar and Lady Xoe’s bloodletting ceremony – Bird Jaguar looking particularly gloomy as he contemplates his penis perforator. A delicious onyx Sekmet in the Egyptian galleries, but my favorite item had to be the black pumice coffin for Queen Fenafexadine (okay, I forgot to write her name down)… It was so gorgeous and glamorous that a priest had it dug up, threw Queen Fen out, and had himself buried in it – after having Queen Fen’s name scratched out and his own substituted in the lengthy list of the beloved departed’s beauties and virtues written across the lid.
The Saxon and Celtic stuff were completely magical. There were items from Sutton Hoo, torqs and torqs and torqs – you might say, a veritable torq-a-mada (don’t hurt me!). A lot of them coming from fairly recent excavations – apparently, there are a lot of farmers out there with metal detectors instead of ploughs, hoping to hit archaeological pay dirt.
And then, in a dark corner was Lindow Man. LINDOW MAN, fergawdsakes, not a reproduction – his leathery, squashed skull still sporting baby-fine blond hairs. I swooned. After that boggy epiphany, I was too exhausted to take in anymore and wended my way back to St. Margaret’s for a siesta. Managed to struggle back awake and get to the local “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” electronics shop to buy a digital camera. Probably got rooked on the price, but at least I have it now. Then I went in search of tea, finding it at the aforementioned Caffe Nero, my new hangout. The servers aren’t too cool to be friendly, and the cup of tea, you could go swimming in.
I had heard something out of the corner of my ears about a demonstration in the West End – May Day celebrations described as “not as violent as last year” (a phrase you could file in the dictionary under the definition of “damning by faint praise”). I put on the telly news to garner further information, since I had theatre plans that night – I didn’t much fancy the vision of me in my little black dress and Easy Spirit pumps sprinting away from the tear gas canisters on my way to see Shockheaded Peter. I asked for advice at the reception desk – would I be silly to worry? Would I be silly not to worry? The desk lady seemed to think it would be fine. “You could walk it,” she gently advised. In literature, this is known as “foreshadowing.”
Gathering rain seemed likely to turn those hotheaded socialists homeward, so I headed out to the Albery Theatre in St. Martin’s Lane with some confidence, anticipating quite a treat. It started out so – I had literally the best seat in the house, the middle first row of the dress circle, and no neighbors on either side of me. I felt like quite a personage.
But then it turned out to be…not the Tigerlilies. I was so disappointed. The singer looked like Meatloaf (hey, stranger things have happened), and the other musicians looked as if they had been told ten minutes ago that they were going to have to find their own costumes. They just were not as good. And the actors didn’t seem to be putting so much into it. The narrator/emcee guy was good, but not as good as when I’d seen him at ACT in San Francisco – all the theatricality was there, but none of the barely suppressed rage and contempt, no specter of imminent disintegration. In this performance, he was a buffoon – in the ACT performance, he was walking a tightrope over a tarry abyss. When he came out to do “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he was wearing a big cape with a hump in it, so anybody could tell he was going to do Richard III. Bah humbug.
At the end of the performance, I got on the tube to head back to Russell Square – only three stops, eminently walkable but I was being a sissypants after my long day’s trudge in the BM and then there is my genius at getting lost – when we heard that Holborn, the station right before Russell Square, had a fire and all service on the line was suspended. Shit, shit, shit.
Because of the May Day demonstrations, all traffic was blocked out of the West End, so I knew there was no way in God’s green earth I was going to get a cab. I had an insane idea about “going round the Horn” and ending up coming into Russell Square from the opposite direction, actually getting to Embankment station before rejecting the plan as the counsel of desperation it was. Consulting my faithful London A-Z (worth its weight in gold), I decided I could take the parallel Northern line to Goodge Street and walk it from there.
What with going from line to line and changing directions and whatnot (I didn’t get out in time for Goodge Street and ended up being whisked along another stop), it was well after eleven by the time I got out of the Tube. I still didn’t know if or where clashes between protestors and bobbies could be going on. I got directions from the Tube guard before stepping out, but I didn’t stick with them long enough and ended up going round Bedford Square twice before finding the way through to Russell Square and home sweet home.
What was so hideously annoying was that everything was a Bedford something, but no Bedford Place. There was Bedford Square, Bedford Avenue, Bedford Street, but no Bedford Place! Adding to the festivity of the occasion was my awareness of being a woman alone, obviously a tourist, walking around and around dark unknown bodies of parkland. All the time I’m thinking, “If I’m killed, and it wasn’t even the Tigerlilies, I am going to be sooooo pissed…”