Sunday, May 5, 1996

Greetings, dearest Joy!

I am writing to you from the Crypt at the Church of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields, where there is a café and a brass rubbing centre (note the British spelling).

On the first day I slept. On the second day I created Heaven and Earth. Just kidding. On the second day I got exhausted because I tried to do everything.

First I took the tube (the subway) to somewhere downtown and got on one of those red double-decker bus tours. I sat up on the top in the open air, in the rather brisk wind, wishing I had worn my new REI long underwear, and gasping down generous lungfulls of diesel exhaust.

I also discovered after a bit that the genteel-sounding tour guide was actually a recording. When we’d get delayed in traffic he would at times get cut-off mid-word, or suddenly grind to a halt. Other times he’d be telling us about stuff we hadn’t even got to yet. He also gave lots of repulsively cheery pitches for local businesses or tourist attractions. I almost forgot my backpack on the bus, but luckily remembered it in time and ran back and pounded on the bus door before the driver had quite pulled back out into traffic. I hope I won’t be such an idiot again!

I went to the National Art Gallery, and tried to see everything, but was physically and mentally incapable of doing so. Well, at least I saw everything in the Medieval Wing, and all the Impressionist stuff. After that I tried to see the Tower of London, but it was such a phenomenal mob scene that I only got to see the "boring" things (no jewels, no armor). I may go back on a weekday and see if I can get in.

After that I went to Covent Gardens, and Shopped. I bought two gorgeous huge chiffon scarves (almost veil size) at a shop called, imaginatively, "Accessorize." One is various shades of lavenderish-mauve and the other is a brilliant mix of flame orange and flame fuchsia. In fact I am wearing it now.

Then I wandered into this street market area, with various street musicians and people selling lots of intriguing-looking items. I bought yet another scarf, made of various types of dark maroon velvet, from a woman who makes them all herself. Then I walked barely three steps and was confronted by a sweater which I simply couldn’t live without. Again, it was the glorious colors that undid me. Plus it’s hand-knit and 100% Shetland wool. And guess what! I’m wearing that today, too! But wait, the tale of woe is not yet over. Oh—but if I’m going to tell this chronologically I guess the rest of the shopping details will have to wait.

Anyway, after the sweater I wandered around some more until I saw a café sign reading "Seattle Coffee Company." Drawn like a magnet, I jaywalked directly to it. On the sandwich board in front it said "Kurt Cobain would have gone for a frangelico latte." Who am I to resist advertising like that? Eager for the Seattle experience, I went in.

Actually, the espresso was quite good—After the coffee I had at my B&B, a pleasant surprise indeed. (The coffee at my B&B tastes like burnt tea with mysterious brown floating things in it.)

I sat at the counter and read my book, and eventually the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation (my tourist book was in sight) and we had a nice long talk. He was in his late 30’s or early 40’s I would guess, named Joseph, and after a while he gave me the 20 -minute tour of Soho, Leicester Square, etc, then went off to catch a bus home after he was satisfied I’d found a restaurant to my liking.

I dined on Mediterranean appetizers, in a place where they couldn’t wait to get rid of me once they realized that was all I intended to order, and then went to a sort of AM-PM Minimarket sort of shop, except with liquor and porno mags in plain view, and bought some orange juice, chocolate, and newspapers.

Anyway, I’m sure these details are thrilling you, so I’ll just summarize the rest by saying that after I took the subway back and got lost and then finally figured out where I was and got back to the B&B it was 10:30 PM.

Today I slept in late, then took a leisurely bath and washed my hair, arrayed myself in my gorgeous new duds, and walked to the Camden Town subway station. I got off at Charing Cross and walked to the Church of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields, where lo-and-behold, a street market was in progress behind the church. I bought two fabulously gorgeous 3-tiered velvet skirts. One is patches of all sorts of dark, rich, & varied colors, and the other is dyed all purply, bluey, reddy, greeny shades, and has mirrors sewn into it with embroidery. I don’t know if this is really all that interesting to read about or not—and anyway I have finally reached the end of my litany of The Things I have Bought And All About Them, so I can wrap this up at last.

London is interesting but not what I expected. I only hear people speaking English about 5% of the time. I have never been in such an international, cosmopolitan, multicultural city before. Everybody looks pretty ordinary—if they weren’t talking one could imagine that they were all American—but in the one and a half days I have been out-and -about here so far, I have heard more languages and more accents than I could ever hear in six months at home.

Everyone is less gallant here, too. I’ve never seen such shoving and rushing. You really have to forge ahead not to have people cutting you off. I guess I probably wouldn’t like Italy much—I have heard it is a lot worse in that regard.

Anyway, I hope you are doing well!

xox,

Jenny

The view out the bedroom window of the B&B where I slept my first night in London

The tower where Bishop Ridley and Sir Walter Raleigh were imprisoned

I am most struck by the morbidity of the middle ages. The paintings in the medieval wing of the National Gallery are all religious, depicting saints posing with the torture implements with which they were murdered (I mean "martyred"), or Christ with his bleeding wounds, or being nailed to the cross, or the various Marys mourning.

And just now I walked through Westminster Abbey, which turned out to be a gigantic graveyard in a building. It is full of historical dead people, and has an air of clutter similar to what you’d find in an antique shop or an attic, only everything is huger, more solemn, and more ancient. Memorials seemed almost stacked on top of other memorials, and in the paving of the cathedral floor gravestones are laid right next to other gravestones. It was a creepy feeling to think of so many dead people being all around me.

The statues were pretty amazing, too: Some showed kneeling relatives, dressed in the clothes of the period, praying beside the bier. One, my favorite, showed Death clambering up from under the tomb to cast a spear at the cowering man and woman on top. It was carved in the 1700s, and I was amazed at the detail, realism, and evocativeness. Plus, it was really creepy.

In general, though, I thought a lot of the memorial statues on the tombs were pretty tacky in spite of their antiquity and white-marble Grecianness. Most of the statues seemed to be of grieving angels or other women, usually with at least one breast conveniently slipping free of its stone draperies. One large memorial depicted what appeared to be a mourning African slave kneeling beside his dying master’s bedside. How self-important! Did the dying men specify before their deaths what sort of overly-grand memorial statues they required? One would think they’d be embarrassed to be so obviously self-aggrandizing, but apparently not. Maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their bereaved offspring did it.

But what about those religious paintings in the medieval wing of the National Gallery; the ones in which wealthy patrons had images of themselves painted into the scene right along with the Madonna and saints and the baby Jesus?? Unbelievable. I even saw triptychs, intended to be mounted behind the altar of the church, that contained the images of wealthy patrons standing alongside the saints. It made me feel a bit ill. It’s nearly as tasteless as if Donald Trump financed a church and then required that his likeness be carved into the supports of the arches or worked into the big stained glass window behind the pulpit. "Is nothing sacred," I exclaim, throwing up my hands in disgust, "not even religion??"

While we’re on the subject of ancient tackiness, I also saw the hats of the Knights of the Order of Bath or whatever it is. These ancient hats and stoles were hung up above chairs, the backs of which were carved with coats of arms, and they were obviously much revered and all that, but to me they looked like an array of ludicrous antique party-hats. One had what appeared to be a rooster or a chicken mounted on the top, and another had an arm holding a sword attached so that it would look as if it were sticking out of the top of the wearer’s head. I tried visualizing the various staid and dignified members of the order of the Knights of Bath actually wearing these hats during some sort of very solemn and important meeting, and it was enough to make me laugh.

In spite of my musings on the occasional tackiness and self-importance of our ancestors, Westminster Abbey was in general an awe-inspiring experience. It was amazing to stand next to the tombs of King Edward I and his Queen Eleanor, whom I have read about, and who lived more than 700 years ago. It was also an incredible experience to see the Coronation Chair, which contains the Stone of Destiny that was taken from Scone in Scotland during the reign of Edward I. That stone, if it really is the true Stone of Scone, was used in the coronations of Scottish kings for hundreds of years before William the Conqueror ever even set foot in England. It was amazing to actually see it and think about how old it is and how much history it has seen.

I also went again to the Tower of London today, and had one of the Warders point out to me the tower from which Gryffudd ap Lewellyn fell to his death. He also showed me the tower in which our ancestor Bishop Ridley was imprisoned prior to being burned to death for heresy in 1555. He was kept in the Bloody Tower, where Sir Walter Raleigh would later spend many years of his life.

I also saw the incredible display of ostentatious wealth in the Jewel rooms, and some of the instruments of torture in the White Tower. Today everywhere I go I notice the incredibly ornate buildings and think about the people who were living in abject poverty when those buildings were being built, or when that enormous solid-gold punch bowl was being used at palace parties. Or how about those giant gold things, shaped like immense Baroque clubs, mostly attributed to "William and Mary?" I mean, how many solid-gold Baroque clubs does any one couple really need? It amazes me that the populace didn’t rise up a long time ago and demand some rights or some share in the wealth of the nation. I guess those torture implements deterred them.

I wonder if those treasures I saw today are really the real thing. I wouldn’t put MY solid-gold scepters or punch bowls or anointing spoons out for all the hoi-palloi to see. I’d put my real Hope Diamond or Star of India or whatever it is in some quadruple-locked underground vault, not out in plain view. Maybe they were all clever fakes. They were pretty eye-boggling anyway, though. I went back three or four times to ride past them again on the moving walkway. A lot of French high school kids were craning their necks, too.

I wonder what the course of English history and the development of Western civilization would have been like if it hadn’t been for Christianity. I can’t help but think that things might have been more humane and less morbid without it. Religion has a lot to answer for.

I have sucked down so much carbon monoxide and cigarette fumes that I fear my pretty pink respiratory tissues will never be the same. Maybe all the poisons coursing through my system is what’s making me so crabby. Thank God this is my last day in London! I sure hope the rest of the country is different.

Today I went to Kensington Market and bought yet more stuff—a really cool velvet shirt in various shades of vivid orangey-gold, and a really cool velvet bodice in various shades of green. And I met a seemingly really cool guy named Alex, who asked me out, but we couldn’t get our schedules to work. Regardless, he seemed sweet and was a veritable babe, so this was quite an ego-booster for me.

At Kensington Market I saw many impressive punked-out pompadours in various poison-candy shades. There are a lot more punks and punkettes here than in Seattle. Back home that scene has pretty much died out and been replaced by the grungewear and/or enormously-baggy gangsta-wear and/or repulsive neo-70s look. Here there’s a lot more vinyl, usually either neon colored, black, or metallic. For example, yesterday I saw someone wearing skin-tight silver vinyl pants. And I also saw a strange creature of indeterminate sex who had the most incredibly skinny thighs I have ever seen. They were almost skeletal. He/she/it was wearing a bellbottomed black vinyl outfit with a matching flared vinyl jacket.

This city has so much variety. I have never been anywhere that seemed so international, so busy, so eclectic, so varied. It has old men and women, ladies wearing wrinkled flesh-tone stockings, neo-60s babettes in red-knit mini suits, the black & neon punks, people from every country, speaking every language, with every accent—African women with facial scars, Indian women in saris, Asian men in dapper dark-colored suits, people speaking French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Thai—The world seems smaller and more compressed over here. I think I hear English spoken only about 5 or 10% of the time.

It’s interesting to have so much newness and youth angst or whatever superimposed over so much ancient British history, the abbeys and towers right next to the trendy night spots. Weird man. It’s also strange to see the incredible eclecticism in the very heart of the snooty pure-blooded British Empire. Joseph, the guy I was talking to at the Seattle Coffee Company café, says there’s a lot more non-English people living in London than there are actual native British.

A weird thought just occurred to me. I wonder if all the projects I do are similar in purpose to the carvings and messages that the prisoners left behind in the walls of the Tower of London? Something "productive" to do, to pass the time and occupy the hands, to leave a mark, and to keep from going insane. Why can’t I just exist?

Everyone told me "you’ll LOVE it. You’ll have a GREAT time." It’s neat-o, definitely, but I’m not sure if I’m really loving it, exactly. I almost feel more like I’m having an improving experience. Maybe if I could stop feeling alternately guilty and impatient I’d enjoy it more. It really does bug me to be away from work for so long! I think I’m having a harder time with that than with the separation from my friends. I never would have guessed it, but there it is. I think work validates my existence, helps me feel useful and purposeful, and helps me feel slightly less guilty about all the money I spend. Well, I’m sure when I’m back at the grindstone I’ll remember this and groan, wondering why I didn’t appreciate these moments of "freedom" more... Alas, one is only free to the extent one feels free. I guess that's my deep thought for today.

The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey... it contains the captured Stone of Scone in its base, which was used for the coronations of Scots kings from 843 to 1296 AD.

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