Snow Drift

A visit to the old Spitelfield market, Brick Lane and all the little markets around there was the order of the day. There were food stalls from all over the world, lots of guys selling CDs of funk music (apparently there is a revival), second hand clothes stall and heaps of I-made-it-myself stalls of interesting clothes made out of carpet or doilies or felt. I liked the doilies best.

I found a Hugo Boss overcoat of black cashmere but it was two sizes too big for me. Luckily, the Polish guy next to me found a navy blue knee length wool coat that was two sizes too small for him. We swapped, complimented each other and sautered off having parted with £10 each. The buses got the better of me and I ended up having a scenic tour of London trying to get back to Marble Arch then return to Oxford. I will return for a rematch.

This morning I spoke to Tony and told him how mild the weather had been before I opened the curtains. I got excited and almost raced in to wake up Sandy and Benny when I realised that they had probably seen snow before. It is drifting down and the path from the back door to the garden shed is white. It is picture perfect. So much so that I am glad we are off to Portugal today where it is 16 degrees.

Slow Day

Having mastered the Underground and even given myself the title 'Lord of the Underground' on the basis that I have given advice to not only American tourists, but real live English people on how to get from Point A to Point B, I now have emerged to conquer the buses. So far, the 254 and 253 have been dealt with, and pretty soon I will be able to travel above ground without anyone noticing who I really am. And, just so long as nobody holds a mirror up to my face and realises I have no reflection, they will never know.

Christine and I bussed and wandered down to Highgate Cemetry to visit Karl Marx. Surrounding him are those who have chosen to buried in good company. British communists and leftists, many of who lived in exile from their homeland (South Africa, Iran etc) and ended up seeing out their days in London. Also surrounding the grave were live communists and leftists from around the world who make their way to hold up the left fist in front for the monument and have a photograph taken.

Christine and Ganelle have no family in the UK and find it hard to get baby-sitters. They are out at the movies holding hands. So tonight I am bunkering down with their son Raphael, a spicy chicken from the Halal Algerian shop and some bagels. The bagels and the chicken seem to be getting on just fine, so are Rapheal and I. So that just goes to show you.

Thinking about it.

The British Museum is apparently the most visited tourist attraction in London; and lots of visitors come at Christmas time. That must be why the tour guides for the museum take that time off work: it is holiday season. Christine told me a story about a cafe in Poland where she went for lunch but the cafe was closed because all the waiters were having lunch. It makes sense when you think about it.

In The British Museum you can get a 'Free trade' coffee, or a 'Free trade' snack. It is great really because it sustains you as you look at all of the plunder of the world, not just the British colonies, but the whole world. They pinched everything from tiny jewels from the eyes to minature statues of Egypt, to whole buildings that they fancied in Mycaenae. Good on them. The won the wars, they stole the stuff fair and square. You can't revise history. I know Greece want their marble sculptures and columns back, but really if the Brits started giving stuff back to its rightful owner then what would be left in the British Museum? So it is really good that they try to balance things up in the modern world by offering 'Free trade' stuff for sale in the cafeteria. It makes sense, sort of, when you think about it.

I went the church. Big, fat, Anglican church; Westminster Abby no less. I wanted to see the inside, I wanted to pretend that I was Lady Diana becoming Princess Diana, and I wanted to hear some big church choral singing. But, being a total cheapskate, I did not want to pay. So I went to something called Evensong. It is a service that is mainly sung and while they make tourists pay £9 to get in, those who come to worship get in for free. So I went in to worship. We confessed and were absolved, prayed for the queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles and all the other unnamed members of the royal family. We also prayed for the members of The Order of the Bath, but I don't even know who they are. The tomb to the unknown soldier on the other hand was quite moving and it made me pull up my socks. All was good until the very end when the organist came into his/her stride. They were really passionate and it sounded like a third rate horror movie. I managed to get away without anyone noticing that I was trying to repress a laugh as I imagined Bela Lugisi or one of those horror movie actor guys creeping around. It makes sense, I suppose, if you think about it.

In the evening, I met up with Georgina and we went to see August: Osage County, at the National Theatre. It had been reviewed as the play of the year. We both like it, but preferred the biting political commentary of Gesthemene, the play we had seen a couple of days earlier. I had seen All My Sons by Arthur Miller in Melbourne the year before and August: Osage Country seemed like a poor cousin. It made sense and you didn't even have to think about it.

What a friend we have in cheeses

The Borough Market is the place where Georgina and I thought we had died and gone to heaven. For Georgie it was not The Houses of Parliament or The Globe or The Rosetta Stone that is the marvel of London; it is the cheeses at The Borough Market. And, as Annie Lennox said: who am I to disagree. At one stall, I asked to try something unpasturerised: that would be all the cheese they had; something not available in Australia: again all the cheese they had, something really unusual... well, you get the picture. We tried to repress that wierd cross between panic and excitement that we were experiencing but only barely managed it.

Just as we thought we had found some sort of capacity to digest all that we had seen and all that we had tasted, we spied Neale's, a stand alone shop just across from the main market. I recognised the names of one or two cheeses: stilton, gorgonzola, but the rest were new to me. Dribbling, oozing, bleeding rounds of creamy delight. What is a girl to do? We tasted more and more until we become an embarrassment, and then we only thought about stopping. In the end, I bought oat biscuits, raspberry jam, apple relish, balsamic vinegar, fig infused balsamic syrup and cheese. I don't even know the name of the cheese I took home, but that did not seem to matter to him at all. He sat quietly in my handbag all the way home waiting to meet his doom. Georgina left the market with almond croissants and fudge packed in her bag, just in case we needed something to tide us over on the 500 metre walk along The Thames to our next engagement.

The only fitting follow up to the market was The Sainson Poetry Library in London's Festival Hall where we briefly snuck into the members' lounge. I looked up some Yestevshenko and literary criticism on Philip Larkin. The Poetry Library was inhabited by two librarians and two parties of guests. One man sat with his two sons reading and drawing, and Georgina and I grazed through the stacks and compactors. It is a great spot for a quiet retreat and we spied a party of homeless people picnicing on their meagre rations in one of the quiet rooms in Festival Hall. It summed up something about London that those who live a truely wretched life in England's winter, take refuge inside these lovely living monuments to the best the western culture has delivered. We had seen first hand the night before what happens after dark. After our play, we walked down the underpass to the station where people were laying out their sleeping bags in one corner and pissing in another as they prepared to bed down for the night. And a winter's night in London is truely bitter. I don't think they were singing "What a friend we have in Jesus" or singing the praises of the cheeses they had tasted in The Borough Market for that matter. This is England.

Top floor, top theatre, top day

Georgina and I are now in a pattern. We go to a gallery or museum, say the Tate Modern or The National Portrait Gallery. We go to the cafe on the top floor, get a seat against the window and have a hot drink, very, very slowly. We look out over London: St Paul's, Nelson's Column, Westminster, Trafalgar whatever Monopoly acquisition was the favourite- inspecting carefully the gargoyles, statutes or oranmental florishes that decorate the rooves of the buildings many of which were completed well before Australia was even discovered. We watch the London Eye as it turns imperceptibly, then eventually gather up the energy to view the artworks. It is a winner of a plan.

We had followed the advice of one who knows (thanks Grant Exon) and bought £10 tickets to whatever play at The National Theatre has leftover tickets for that night. It turned out to be Gethsemane. We knew very little about it but thought that standing room for 2 1/2hours for £10 might work, anyway we could always leave half way through, we thought. It turned out to be a brilliant play about the last days of the Blair government. It starred the woman from Black Books and a whole assortment of the great English actors whose names I can not remember but who can act and then some. I had my prejudice against Australian plays ie Murray-Smith and Raison confirmed, as we forgot that we watched a play standing up and wallowed in the whole thing.

Tate oh so modern

This relief was in the medieval section of the Science Museum.



Georgina and I are staying in a lovely flat in Notting Hill, or Notting Hill Gate, or somewhere related to Hugh Grant. This means that we get to trawl around London ticking things off the must see list. I went to the Science Museum and the ancient medicine section seemed really ghoulish til I remembered that I had just watched back to back episodes of House at Sandy and Benny's. I really liked an installation that randomly selected chat rooms and set the words to music and visual display.

Today was The Globe: so off we toddle, only to find that because it is an open air theatre and they do not stage anything in the colder months (read half the year). What a stupid idea a theatre with only a partially enclosed thatched roof was. I thought history had already proved that, but it seems the Brits needed to prove it again.

So we went next door to the next thing on the list where we were overwhelmed by modern art. Georgina was taken captive by a fantastic thing made of broken crockery and I was happy to see some Kandinsky paintings. We looked at London Bridge and climbed to the top of St Paul's where we looked back at The Globe and The Tate Modern. We tried to finish off with some West End action, but I draw the line at The Sound of Music, no matter how half price the tickets are. Instead we went to the movies and saw The Reader.

Oxford and the Cotswolds

In College
Here is a partial list of names: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Charles Darwin, WH Auden, Charles Dodgson, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, William Golding. It is hard to go anywhere without tripping over these guys. They all came here and lolled about with the gargoyles, sundials, giant quads and the dining hall at Christ Church College that was used as the dining hall at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Benny tells me that it is possible to walk from Oxford to Cambridge without ever leaving college grounds. There are over 30 colleges and less than 20,000 undergraduates. To look at the colleges you would estimate that they house tens of thousands instead of just hundreds. One college (All Souls) only admits 4 undergraduates per year and the entrance test is a quiz on table manners involving difficult questions about what to do with cherry pips, another college does not have any students at all.

Poaching
One of the colleges owns a herd of deer, but Benny and Sandy tell me that I am not allowed to go poaching. I really like Danny the Champion of the World have been given a talking to about my plans to reenact it. I am also not allowed to herd, claim or kill a swan because they belong to the queen, yes, every last swan in the UK. I don't know what she does with them, but every year she sends out an army of people to count them, so she will know if I have been messing around with them.

Rambling in the Cotswolds
On Boxing Day we drove off to the Cotswolds (a series of towns that looked at Oxford and decided to be ever cuter). Famous people live in these tiny towns, Kate Moss, Coldplay etc but we didn't see them. We did exert our rambler's rights over hill and dale. There is no such thing as bush walking, because there is no real bush, but it is the tradition to wander about along fence lines and rivers across the paddocks and fields of tweed wrapped farmers. One such farmer explained the details of how a hedgerow is made and the importance of instilling these traditional skills in the youth of today. Apparently hedgerow making will ward off the tendency of the English youth to join nasty gangs and commit unseemly crimes against the unsuspecting folk who live on council estates.

For rambling you need: boots, gaters, a scarf, a map, a hat and most of all a walking stick. People set out like they are going off into the wilderness and I refrained from telling them that they were never more than 5 miles from a pub. (We only had wellies and beenies, not real high tech spring loaded sticks, so did not get a proper welcome at the pub.)