hello from charing cross road!

my ‘perk’ week in london turned out to be a ballbuster, office all day, conference calls until 10pm, rain every night. except for two generous co-worker lunches, one at the national museum and one fish & chips date that ended with a tour through leicester square and chinatown, i wouldn’t have seen much of the city at all.

so i started walking at 6:30 this morning, and only got lost 3 times between covent garden and buckingham palace, which i wasn’t even sure WAS the palace until i found a sign that told when the next changing of the guards would be. (which sign i of course immediately photographed and would share with you right now if the camera battery had not died a few moments ago, driving me into this internet cafe which is the only game in town on charing cross at 9am).

you are in constant danger of death by car in london. forget that the traffic flows in the direction i would call backward, it isn’t even consistently backward, and since the ‘look right / look left’ signs are all on top of one another on the asphalt, and since i (like most) can easily read upside down, i’m never sure which direction i’m supposed to look and whichever i choose is always the wrong one and then the horns come blaring and i run — hopefully not into the arms of the next ad-wrapped taxi. that’s one kind of advertising london seems to beat new york at — the wrapped car.

i try to imagine a version of buckingham palace in nyc. blocks away the neon pointers and palace tchotcke vendors and price of admission and hours of operation signs would begin. or, conversely, if the public were not allowed onsite, the hurricane fences and cops in riot gear and no-doubt-barbed wire and barricades and warnings and threats would assault you blocks in advance. but in london, i’m at the frigging palace and still not sure whether or not i’ve arrived because apart from a modest blue sign with an arrow at the entrance to Green Park i haven’t gotten a single indication that i’m on hallowed ground.

not that the palace itself is much to look at. i found the gates more interesting than the building and the fountain more interesting than the gates, while most interesting of all was the brilliantly designed canadian world war memorial: a big gleaming low black hunk of polished stone, perhaps obsidian, starting at grass level and about thigh-high at its tallest, split perfectly in half with a separation just wide enough for a not-grossly-obese person to walk through. on the lower side of both polished halves, a random scattering of maple leaf shapes is etched into the stone, the leaves shrinking and fading as the monument grows
taller. it’s gorgeous and moving — i barely realized that canada even fought in the two world wars and still found myself tearing up a bit as i stood there. this may be a symptom of aging, such random, misplaced
(and perhaps unpatriotic) sentimentalism. but still.

there must be an american war memorial somewhere, and i shudder to think what it might look like. nothing as delicate or elegant as leaves for us, i bet. luckily, i didn’t stumble across that one.

the most wonderful thing about the park was its near-emptiness at (by then) 7:30 in the morning. it’s a long time since i’ve walked through a park without having to skirt an assortment of jury-rigged homeless shelters, and while i don’t begrudge the homeless their paltry temp housing it was nice for once not to have to navigate their construction nor step into their puddles nor contemplate how their lives twisted up to land
them sleeping under the bushes. for a while, i was equally delighted by the absence of joggers — i suppose they would annoy me less if i participated in that masochistic “sport” but i don’t and they do and if that makes me a crotchety old bitch then so be it. all those flushed cheeks, all that lollipop-colored spandex, all those high-tech sneakers: yes, i’m far enough away from new york right now that i think it’s safe to say that joggers annoy the SHIT out of me. and there i was, widening my aperture and manually focusing my lens and rejoicing in the fact that londoners don’t exercise when a young ponytailed woman JOGGED right into my frame. at least she wasn’t wearing spandex. just tight black shorts and a matching Queen (band, not monarch) hoodie.

a while later, as i tried to figure out the impossible spaghetti of streets that hang off picadilly circus, the camera battery died, driving me toward charing cross and The Bookstores — one thing i am determined not to miss on this trip. but london simply doesn’t wake up as early as new york does, maybe because they don’t all go out jogging at the hairy crack of dawn. halfway down a sidestreet, where i’d been despatched to avoid some huge construction project (the construction workers were up all right, digging and heaving away) was a little alley of music shops. in one window i saw a 1959 Gibson mandolin and for a moment wished i had the kind of money where i could throw away £4300 without a second thought, because my brother is an expert mandoliner who was born in 1959. the instrument might sound like shit, of course (i know gibson’s reputation for guitars, this was the first i heard that they make, or made, mandolins). but still. what a birthday present it would be. (the shop, naturally, was closed.)

same way the laundrymat was closed last night, which finally drove me to hand-wash
my undies and socks in the sink, before remembering that there’s no shower curtain, and therefore no shower curtain rod, around the tub. is this usual? nothing but a half-width, three-quarter height swinging plastic panel to keep the water off the floor? i haven’t been in anyone’s home, so i can’t tell whether this is standard brit practice or some strange idea of the radisson. (almost as strange as the practice of putting steps - steps! - directly outside the elevator door. the personal-injury lawyers, if there are such things over here, must adore the lunatic who dreamed up that little decorating touch.) anyway, about the sopping danties: i rigged a clotheslines in the closet but couldn’t leave the door open since it triggers a light that
can’t be turned off. this morning everything was just as wet as ever, so i cleverly found a way to prop the window open and lined everything up along the sill.

i must have forgotten what city i was in when i pulled that little maneuver because, once again, it’s getting ready to rain…