with the feet of its myriad bipeds

I've been trying to watch Zero de conduite all morning, and I keep pointing the remote at the telly and pressing buttons, but it remains unmoved. Apparently the electricals here go on the fritz from time to time. The internet's working, however, and so is the coffee grinder. I'm going to keep writing until I feel like doing something else, so you may want to read this in shifts.

So what shall I tell you about? I've found I haven't absorbed all the contents of my big fat Europe: a history by osmosis, so I am gathering scraps of information as I go. At the Victoria and Albert museum, I saw some lovely frocks from the wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway. Whether she was assisted by some major undergarment engineering works or not, I don't know, but she stayed teeny and hourglass shaped until well into menopause, so she got to wear gowns like these. And I got to go and look at them, and make cooing noises, and then go and eat slabs of brie and chevre at Gordon's Wine Bar, and say a prayer of thanks to the feminist movement.

I also saw, in the Jacobean gallery, a portrait of an aristocratic lady, and next to it, the actual jacket she wears in the portrait. Can you believe that? The painting had recorded it perfectly accurately. The museums here are beautifully presented. I guess they have an embarrassment of riches--straying into the British Museum on my delirious first day here, I found room after room of Assyrian and ancient Egyptian bas reliefs and sculptures. I don't want to stop being amazed by the wealth of beautiful things here. I'm rationing my museum and gallery time to that purpose. It's worth sparing a thought for how all this stuff got here--I hadn't really considered the way great monuments and objets d'art get shipped around the world in dizzying quantities, mostly the result of war, political maneouvering and plain pilfering. I've concluded the best way to keep a treasure where you left it is to take it to your grave, although that didn't do a lot of good for the pharaohs.


leos out of their element

Which brings me to Highgate Cemetery. One of Lily's friends, Yoav, invited me on a tour there--it's the only way to get in, as you can't go in to the old section on your own. The highest ground in the cemetery is occupied by the grave of Julius Beer, a self-made German Jew who responded to snubs from London Society by converting to Anglicanism and constructing the most magnificent mausoleum in the place. The guide, who was a nice old man in tweed, said the statues inside were sought after by every museum in Europe. I wonder how long they'll last. My favourite grave was of George Wombwell, London's first menagerist--he began his travelling zoo with a pair of boa constrictors. He took them to pubs in a box and charged anyone who wanted to see them a penny. A statue of his pet lion sits on top of his grave.

The newer section of the cemetery, not being exclusively Anglican, had a greater variety of names, obviously including many Jewish ones. Yoav translated the Hebrew on one grave. In English, it only gives the deceased's name and the date of her death. The Hebrew records that her parents died in the holocaust. Yoav said, "She probably wanted their names on her grave because they didn't get one of their own." These reminders of profound cruelty all around are another thing I hope I never, ever to get used to.

That day I also went to Hampstead Heath, a wilder, less tulip-studded place than the other parks in the city. The views from the top of the hill were beautiful, perhaps nicer than those from the London Eye, which I went on a few days before with Jenn, against Den's advice to "jist blarg yer way up the top of a tall building instead."

I want to tell you everywhere I've been, but it's sort of inescapably banal, this listing. Collecting. I took a bus tour to Stonehenge and Bath--don't hate me, I thought it would be my only chance to see them. Which is probably true of Stonehenge, not having access to a car, but it did warn me of the dangers of tour travel. We had fifty minutes to walk a circle around the stones, with an audio tour on a phone-style handset. It was a strange sight, a stream of people silently walking their anti-clockwise route, holding black objects to their ears. Afterwards at the kiosk you could buy a sandwich and a "megalithic rock cake" for £5.50. It was still impressive to see, but I took a couple of photographs despite myself, and it was amazing how they drained the reality out of it. But then afterwards I was glad I had them.

Recording experience splits it--it's something I discovered with my diaries. When you are in an experience, you are mentally recording it, and you thin it a little by doing so--but the energy you've stolen from the lived moment gets poured into the record of it, and I'm happy to have it then. I suppose it is best to be discerning in how you record things, to be sure it was worth splitting reality in half that way. I bought sketching paper to take to galleries and museums. A photograph merely collects an object, and somehow neutralises its force, but drawing something actually brings out its beauty more sharply to the eye. Anyway, here's the offending article. It's quite nice, isn't it?



I don't like climbing back into a soporifically heated bus after I've seen things, either. Everything gets blended together into a lazy dream. The only way to put the life back into things, after you've drained them by ogling and photographing, is to walk and walk. There was a walk through a field of ancient burial mounds half a mile from the stones, but we weren't given time to do it. I must try and make friends with thoughtful people who own cars.

I've been lavished with chances to meet thoughtful people, actually. Lillian has made a great life here. Her friends are just the people I'd hoped to meet in Europe, and I'm grateful for the human connection. I find myself being charming, the way a snake charmer charms a python, so that I can keep looking at these people, drinking them in, as long as possible. Not that I always do a great job. I'm blunter than most English people, and sometimes I don't know where I've offended until it's too late. I do my best, from outside the weave of local society. I'm a traveller now. The English say "What are you like?" I'm like a train window, the world flows in as I move. I am here to receive impressions. I was afraid of this emptiness before I left. I couldn't bear the thought of being merely receptive--I told myself I'd analyse and form connections to suit my own mental projects and make it mine. I'm sure there's an element of that, but I have to be receptive anyway--travel leaves me no choice. I don't remember why I was so wary of it.


Lily and tulips

You know how I wrote earlier about how monolithically impressive all this architecture is when you are walking around beneath it? Well, from up high--and for £12.50 I got about as high up as you can get--entrepreneurism and democracy once again go hand in hand--it looked sort of scruffy. These buildings weren't designed to be seen from above, they were meant to tower over. And I think about the people who would have looked down, not up, before the London Eye was constructed, and the decisions that have been made from rooms high above the streets, and I think about power.

Engels puts it nicely:
"This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hudnred-fold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there. This great population has made London the economic capital of the world...

It is only later that the traveller appreciates the human suffering which has made all this possible. He can only realise the price that has been paid for all this magnificence after he ahs tramped the pavements of the main streets of London for some days and has tired himself out by jostling his way through the crowds... It is only when he has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of civilisation with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused, in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them." [The conditions of the working class in England 1844.]

He is right about walking in the streets, and you feel it when you want to get somewhere quickly--everyone is out on their own business, seemingly ignoring you, but in some subtle way, they're all also ready to start a fight, if you want to give them cause. I brush past a man and he drops his mobile, and it flies into pieces dramatically as dropped mobiles do. "I'm sorry." "You knocked it out my hand. It wasn't me, it was you." He's very tall. He has friends. I find myself squaring my shoulders, and I say again, "I'm sorry, man", but this time it means, "Back off."

But to be fair, many people come to London because the size of it means that opportunites cluster here, and from what I can see, many people have made great things out of the struggle of daily life here. Anyway I'm not sure life is so very bucolic in sedate little towns where the line between looking out for your neighbour and policing them can be a fine one.

And, while I'm quoting, I have to include Henry James, because when I read this, I felt, not as if he were reading my mind, but that London really does have its own will and character, and it's acting on me in an uncannily similar way as it did on him. Maybe it's an element of travel in general. I'm not sure yet.

"London is on the whole the most possible form of a life. [That sentence!] I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life...

Have now been in London some ten days and actually feel very much at home here--feel domesticated and naturalised in fact, to quite a disgusting extent. I feel that in proportion as I cease to be perpetually thrilled surprised and delighted, I am being cheated out of my fun. I really feel as I had lived--I don't say a lifetime--but a year in this murky metropolis ... up to this time I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London--its inconceivable immensity--in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details. This is gradually subsiding; but what does it leave behind it? An extraordinary intellectual depression, as I may say, and an indefineable flatness of mind. The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bypeds and quadrupeds. In fine, it is anything but a cheerful or a charming city. Yet it is a very splendid one." [Selected Letters]

Two days ago I was thinking of taking a job here, because I couldn't bear to leave before I'd seen so many more things, but I've felt that brooding and stamping. London's there in my head, saying, "If you're a tourist, your time is nearly up--and if you're staying, you've got one hell of a thing coming to you." Okay, okay, I'm going. In a few days. There's still some stuff I want to do.


Dim sum at Spitalfields