under dreaming spires

Shop signs along the 38 bus route #1: Mummy’s Love Business Centre --- African movies to buy or rent --- internet --- international phone cards

The first day in London I just walked. Everything new to the eye, such a sharp pleasure—the narrow, scribbled streets out in Hackney, where I’m staying, shop signs small and high up on their facades to be read from the top deck of a red bus—the buildings getting taller and grander towards the hub of things. And then a day of walking through the burroughs around the West End with my mouth hanging open.

The architecture feels both organic and sublime—it looms like canyons and mountains loom, to make you catch your breath. And in every line of it is the human mind. Somebody made all of this, for our pleasure and purposes. I guess Europeans must necessarily have a different view of the importance of human culture, because they live their lives under these domes and spires and other metaphors for transcendence. At least, that describes the large public buildings. The scrappy, slangy architecture of the pubs and cafs and townhouses also feels full of humanity. Ornament! Centuries of it, piled together in an archaeology of taste—chimney pots and finials and odd-shaped tiles. Damn, pardon my lyricism, I’m absorbing all these gargoyle curliques and extruding it in my prose. But listen: I don’t know how I feel about the grand public buildings yet. They’re wonderful, wonderful candy for my brain, but then they have nothing to do with me really. What do they mean to Londoners? Do they inspire the highest human endeavour, or are they self-congratulatory folly? People commonly get paid £5 an hour here, and a McDonalds lunch costs £3. What’s Christopher Wren to them? Alright, alright, Marx researched Das Kapital in London, I suspect someone’s covered this ground before.

For me, the reveling tourist, it’s all exciting. I’m sheepish about not having been interested in London before I came. I thought it wouldn’t be exotic or challenging enough—but how colonialist of me, to assume the green and pleasant land would feel too homey to be interesting. In fact, it doesn’t feel like home at all. All I want to do is rove around and take in the strangeness of it. The freedom I have merely to walk and stare feels like decadence. I keep expecting somebody to tell me to stop it. I’m extending the rebel-rebel feeling by being as Scroogey as possible in this grossly expensive city—hurrah for 75p soup and roll. It would be asceticism if I wasn’t gorging myself on art all day. And if I wasn’t seriously wanting to buy every single thing in this shop.

I haven’t done anything particularly touristy yet, except for looking above head level in the streets and carrying an umbrella (smug me, with my vinyl canopy while locals turn their collars up to better channel the rain down the backs of their necks). I did browse through the Transport Museum at Covent Garden. The gift shop was selling g-strings printed with a map of the Underground. For anyone still looking for the clitoris, it’s at St Paul’s. And I walked through Soho playing my best Britpop and Swinging London mental soundtrack, but it didn’t make all the Gap stores go away. No, Soho is fun, and a marvel of compactness—I keep walking in and trying to explore it, only to find that I’ve popped out the other side again, like those fist fights under blankets they used to do in vaudeville shows.

What else? I’m being totally looked after, with my sister in town to hang out and with a cosy bed at my friend Lily’s house. She lives in an area known as Murder Mile—apparently they’re all drug gang slayings, and if it was good enough for the Hacienda, it’s good enough for Hackney. It’s the cuddliest ghetto I’ve ever seen. Everyone has a little garden with a falling-down fence and a garden shed. There are squirrels and daffodils and twittering birds, and the locals pass each other in the street and say orright dawlin? Lily feeds me and hugs me and plies me with brochures. She lives in a household of lovely lady nerds—one’s an Industrial Arts teacher and blues enthusiast, one’s an aeronautical engineer (she researches metals for aeroplane bits, with a focus on which ones are less likely to corrode or fall out mid-air—she got on the internet the other day to google the elasticity of iron, which I find disturbing) and I’m not sure what Den does, but when she got sick of waiting to find out what happened in the end of Fingersmith she asked “the spirits”—-so somebody on the Other Side is reading lesbian historical fiction, or maybe just watching the BBC series.

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