St James Park and 'Here's to Acting Like Tourists'

I should think, that without Michael, there is no way I would've survived London, let alone been successful in all my searchings.  It would have been a fool's errand without company, and even the most enjoyable sights would have been disappointing.

Even as I tore through street after street, cutting through lane after lane, and turning around at dead end after dead end.  Michael was there, keeping pace patiently, and never hated me too much, even when the things I'd planned to see were closed, or empty, or illegal.





I'm no good at being a tourist.  I like to try and keep my feet.  More often for not that meant, walking with purpose, ignoring beautiful things on my way to something else.  But Michael, he would always stop to look, and photograph those things that despite the crowds around them, really were majestic and beautiful, charming and historic, even if I couldn't appreciate them at the time.

I know why I did the things I did in London.  I'm incredibly vain, and full of pride.  I wanted to be different, but that gets in the way of so much on a good holiday.

So it was Michael who had to pressure me into taking a bicycle on a peaceful ride through St James Park, to enjoy the sounds and sights of it (on our way to find an 19th century graveyard for the pets of the city's rich and famous that we would never actually find).  And yet it was that hour of cycling that will stay with me for longer than most things I saw, I should think.  Going across a small bridge, I glimpsed for a moment the view of a miniature beach by the shores of the lake.  We heard the rustling trees, we felt the wind in our hair, and we enjoyed that part of the day for what it was, rather than for some sort of subtext or hidden meaning.





It was Michael who made sure we went to places that people acutally recognised.  It was also Michael who bothered to try to get to know our dorm-mates from Portland, he booked tickets to David Mitchell's live Q&A about his book, it was Michael who made things fun.



At the end of our week, we found our way to Abbey Road, but this time, the desire of the tourist was mine.  I've always wanted to go, and it was on the way to where we needed to be with our luggage.  Sort of.*

At the crossing, whilst waiting for a Korean family to attempt in futility to recreate the Abbey Road cover with three people.  I met a man from Australia, from Queensland to be precise.  We chatted about football, and the weather and the things that seemed appropriate for people so far from home.  Michael was getting the camera ready at the nearby monument when the man asked me if my friend liked the Beatles too.





I didn't have an answer.  I mean, I presume he does. Everybody likes the Beatles right?  But it struck me that I'd never actually asked if Abbey Road held that much interest to him, but regardless, he was there, ready with the camera.  On the other side of the planet, watching by way of the 24 hour video feed that captures the crossing day and night, a multitude of friends and family tuned in to watch us prance about.  But Michael was actually there, and he had been the whole time.  I'd never forgotten him of course, he was a part of it all, but it was here that I realised just how much he'd committed to my mad expeditions, and how much his wisdom, calm and enthusiasm had improved my mood, time after time.

I've still not asked him whether he likes the Beatles, I will one day maybe.  But I think the most important thing I know, is that even if he absolutely hates them, he was still happy to come with me. I'm still vain, I'm still full of misplaced pride.  But Michael isn't, and that is something I am very thankful for.

*  As in not at all. We went two hours out of our way with heavy bags. 

Herb Garret and Operating Theatre

Not far from Kings Cross Station, in the shadow of the Shard of Glass, lies a small museum of sorts that was hidden from the passage of time for many generations.  Part of my enjoyment of this city has been finding such places, things that lie outside the public consciousness to some degree, places of history and meaning that have fallen through the cracks or by the wayside only to be discovered again by chance.  Many places, no doubt, still lie hidden and their secrets might be kept in some pub basement  or musty attic until well after I am dead.  I find that an intriging prospect.

Undiscovered for nearly a century in the roof of St Thomas's Church, Southwark, an intrepid researcher, Raymond Russel worked his way into the crawlspace in 1957, revealing a near perfectly 19th century operating theatre.

The church's garret, built in 1703, was originially an apocethary store, designed to dry and store medicinal herbs, in the process of restoration the remains of dessicated remains poppies were found in amongst the rafters.  In 1822 the garret was repurposed into the operating theatre we saw, primarily for the female patients of the adjacent Dorcas Ward.  Thirty-seven years later, St Thomas's would become home to the famous nursing school of none other than Florence Nightingale.  That's right Flo-No herself, the one and only.

The Apothecary's Act of 1815, which required apprentice medical practitioners to attend public hospitals and surgeries, meant that the operating theatres galleries, in their time, would have been filled by the youth of the age, eager to learn more about the medical advances of the time.  They came slowly, with blood and pain, and without aenesthetic.*  The cutting marks still visible on the table in the rooms centre attest to the ghoulish reality of 19th century medical practice.





But interestingly, all patients that would have come through St Thomas's surgery, had something in common.  They were women, and whilst poor for the most part, they nevertheless received medical assistance that is not altogether so removed from the modern age.  Amputations and Lithotomys, using practices that are not so different from what might be delivered in a 21st century hospital.**

The heat in the room on this day was stifling, and the collusion of stale air with the scent of herbs, brought with them a palpable sense of the pressures that both doctors and patients would have labored under not so long ago that it should stray from our collective memory.

The world in which we live today, with the advance of medicine and treatment for the panoply of illness and injury that plagues mankind, is in no small way due in part the sacrifices and pain borne by the women who went through this place.  That infection, shattered limbs, disease and cancers are no longer a sentence of guaranteed death under the weight of pain and suffering, is the gift of the poor who in many ways were left with little choice but to accept the terrors of early surgery.

Eating Ice-Cream under the shade of the old archway of the church (now the entry to a school of design)  I looked up at the London Shard.  Michael and I were both blissfully unaware that it was at that very moment being scaled by feminist activists in response to the inequality of gender that we still coexist with in western society as a whole.  Although we learned this in hindsight, it is still striking in its appropriateness.

There are still changes to be made, orders to be defied, and dangers to be overcome to face the new dawn.  But in the eaves of that ancient theatre, once stained with blood, I was reminded silently, that it should not be so daunting for us to make further progress today.

*Ether and chloroform becoming available until at least 1846, and even then not adopted fully until 1865.

**With the added perk of unconsciousness, of course.

Maggs Bros

Maggs Bros

This entry concerns my love of books.  Warning is hereby given.  If you're not a fan of literature then I'd say you'll want to skip ahead.  Alternatively, I hear that YouTube is fun, lots of videos.  Some of them have Monster Trucks!  Yeah Bro!  I know right.  Yeah those rims are. Tricked. Out.  Nah, it's all  good, I'll join you when I've finished bettering myself as a human being.

That paragrapgh does read as rude and dismissive, but I'm about to start being a massive fanboy, so its hardly an arrogance thing.  Anyway, for everyone else still here.  This place... I cannot even describe the wonder of this place.

Stepping away from the Berkely Square Gardens in Mayfair I made my way into Maggs Bros, a fine example of a mid-eighteenth century town house, and once upon a time the home of Britain's shortest-serving Prime Minister.  It was mid afternoon, and by means of an intercom system, I was welcomed by a young lady called Fuchsia into into my own vision of paradise.

I asked politely if I was able to look around and take some photographs, not expecting much in the way of hospitality.  Instead of being removed immediately, Fuchsia asked if there was anything in the catalogue that I'd like a closer look at while I waited for somebody to become free enough from doing a job that I would happily die fighting grizzly bears to have a chance of doing.  I attempted to peruse the catalogue she gave me calmly.  I would have stood a better chance with the bears.

Hundreds of manuscripts and novels, poetry and plays, in first edition, dedicated, signed and monographed by the very minds that brought them into being.  The most significant literary figures of the age, bound paper and ink, each with the touch of history upon them.

I have held the very same collection of atoms that Hemmingway once handled, if only for a moment.  I have seen the cursive signature of Miller.  I decided then and there that if I ever become a man of means, I would live the most frugal of lives, in the basest of homes, surrounded by the inventory of this place.

Fuschia, growing more radiant by the second, introduced me to George*, who was no less handsome and far more dashing (only considering that it's a gendered word nowadays), who took me upstairs to show me around more of the stores secrets.  The room was beautiful, and so were the manuscripts and gilded covers that it contained.  Much of the second floor's inventory was also presumably, double, triple or septuple the price.  He gestured to a set of large covers on a table next to the window,  and we discussed its contents as I took a close angle shot of the cover.

We were about to move on before my guide, after pausing thoughtfully for a moment, politely asked me to delete that particular shot.  The item in question was for a private buyer.  No mention was made of any monetary value of the set in question.  But we both knew what he meant by it.

Maggs Bros has an undeniably charming presence, but to think for a moment that it is a simply quaint bookstore would be to do it an injustice.  In 1932, they made history, purchasing a rare Gutenburg Bible and the famous Codex Sinaiticus (an utterly beautiful ancient handwritten copy of the Greek Bible) from the Soviet government, the latter for the highest price ever paid for a book at the time, 100,000 pounds.  In 1997 they aquired a copy of the first book ever published in England; The Canterbury Tales as imprinted by William Caxton for the substantially higher price of 4.2 million.

They also bought Napoleon's penis (yes, really), in 1916, and sold it on in 1924.  Which I find hilarious, it must have been a weird eight years.  Maybe I too should be watching Monster Truck Madness.

I do not believe that I have ever been happier in a given place.  It is entirely possible that due to the half hour I spent at Maggs Bros. the joy I may one day feel at the birth of my first-born will be notably diminished by comparison.  In conclusion, I would like to pay my sincerest thanks to all the members of staff who helped me along my way.  

And also to the bishop who exorcised the No. 50 of its ghost population in years past.  Yes, to add to everything else, this was once upon a time the most haunted house in London.

I can see why, I'd never want to leave either.

* I think it was George, but to be honest, I was too busy hyperventilating to take a lot in at this stage.

The British Museum

The British Museum

You have my word that there are indeed still obscurities for me to talk about.  They're coming.  When I boasted about the road less travelled I did mean it, but one has to make concessions.  It's all well and good to deny yourself the parts of a journey overseas that you feel might not, in all, be that life-changing but it's another to tell the friend your travelling with to follow suit.  Good exploring should be a matter of give and take.

So Michael and I went to a museum.

Well no, actually, we went to 'The' museum.  I feel like it deserves the title.  What's that America?  I cant hear you over the sound of the bloody Rosetta Stone!  I'm sorry? The Smithsonian? Aha ha, how quaint.  Come back when your economic imperialism has netted you some of the most significant archaeological finds in the history of that discipline.  Nice planes by the way though, did you make them yourself?  ...wooooow.

In actual fact the Elgin Marbles were a lot more entertaining than anyone could have led me to believe.  No wonder the British don't want to give them back to their rightful owners, who wouldn't want to hold into that age old story, sculpted scene by beautiful scene, of a man-

Wait. What?

It's a muscled stranger jumping out of nowhere to bring the pain to a completely unsuspecting centaur?* Nice.

There's to much in the British museum to catalogue appropriately.  To be honest, it would definitely have cheapened the experience to be stopping constantly to frame up shots, that didn't didn't stop people around us from trying though.  Nor did the weight and significance of the collected history of mankind stop a gang of Albanian teenagers from shouting at each other constantly about the latest rap video or funny shoes or something.  Perhaps we're all still centaurs and affronted Greeks in our own small way.

It was a fantastic experience though.  In all honesty once you work your way through the sarcophagi and ceremonial armours there are some fantastic sights to see.

An exhibition of 20th century Japanese art was completely astounding and their examination of global economic history yielded some fantastic sights.

It would be a holiday in and of itself, but we had bookshops to go to baby!  Plus there were crowds and our legs were sore.

*Traditionally centaurs have been associated with rape, abduction and generally being that (horse)guy at parties, so he probably deserved it, right?

St Pauls

This is a true tourist destination, it also doubles as a tomb for Britain's fallen heroes, and a lookout.  I begin with this notation, droll as it is, because I believe that places of worship need to be judged by their utility in regards to faith.  We didn't attend a service, and so, we were tourists.

Sydney has a cathedral, St Mary's, and if there was a truth to St Paul's to be found, at least part of it must be that Catholicism really has figured out the flying buttress.

The stain glass windows, the ornate golden filigree adorning scenes of the passion and holy saints are indeed masterfully done.  I do not seek to diminish them, They are without any doubt things of beauty, but they are far from unique.  Instead, I would like to not some of the things that are.

The tomb of Wellington in the undercrypt is the first of these.  Interned in 1852, Wellington's final resting place is a strange sight.  Being so close to a figure who I had read so much about in my teenage years was humbling, what was strange was how little I was moved though.

Perhaps it was the circumstance, a tour was in full swing as Michael and I wandered past.  I suppose that's the true measure of greatness, having your own spot on a guided tour.  When he had been laid to rest the great ceremony had filled every corner of the city.  His heroic officers bore his casket to the site.  The congregation was thirteen-thousand strong, including both houses of parliament, and they recited the Lord's prayer in unison 'like the roar of many waters'.



But now, it was a handful of Americans, and two slightly bemused Australians who forgot to take a photograph of the plaque.  Perhaps all this is an undignified thing for me to say, perhaps it is telling of the human condition.  Who knows?

Working our way upwards to the Whispering Gallery high above the Cathedral's floor, I experienced one of the most peculiar auditory sensations of my life.  Relegated to silent worship above the masses, the priests of the church would communicate around the base of the dome through an ingenious and precise alingment of stone.  A whisper, breathed so softly it couldnt be heard more than a metre away can travel the full circumfrence and be heard perfectly well.



It is such a strange sensation that i cannot readily explain it.  Something akin to, telepathy, or parseltongue or the voice of God speaking to Elijah at Horeb after fire and storms.  You hear it, but don't at the same time.  It really feels as though it occurs in your mind before it reaches your ears. I took a moment to wonder what words must have travelled along that wall, news of great fires, of wars and rumors of wars.  Michael and I couldn't really say anything to do the setting justice, so we settled on hello.

And then we climbed to the summit.  Without a doubt, it is a tall construction.  Depsite this, the view isn't entirely astounding.  I've climbed many heights in my time and for all its grandeur, St Pauls stands now amoungst a city of skyscrapers which dwarf it with plastic and steel.  In a way, St Pauls has been humbled by that, but in that humility it is here to stay.  It probably wasn't what its architects had envisaged, but it is well with my soul.

Horse Guards

After crossing Westminster Bridge and stopping under Big Ben for holiday snaps like the annoying tourists that we are.  Michael and I tramped past Westminster, Whitehall and 10 Downing St before stopping in the Horse Guards Parade to wait for the daily show.

It's one of those decidedly archaic traditions that I'd always really wanted to witness in London.  Once upon a time, nothing stirred my heart to more joy than the thought of soldiers in polished armor, atop well groomed warhorses, sustaining a century's worth of tradition to provide yet another thing that tourists can photograph to show uncle Biff and cousin Sally back in Arkansas what a good time they're having before knocking off to McDonald's before midday.

Evidently, my sense of wonder has diminished somewhat over the intervening years from when I first read Ford Maddox Ford to the present, but I felt like trying to recapture some of the glory from a youth spent with its identity trapped in classical literature, and our dorm-mates from Portland had been the day before.  So why not?



And as the guards filtered out into the daylight, armored cuirasses glinting under the sun's height, the flanks of their steeds shiny and smooth, even I had to admit that the choreography was flawless, the production values were nothing to sniff at either.

The men and beasts stoicly payed no heed to the ring of babbling sight seers.  Perfectly still in the sight of a hundred years of grand military tradition, they defied their status as a tourist attraction with an excercise in martial pride laced with an almost noble contempt of the audience all around.  Ten minutes of shouted orders passed, and then, with the words having been said, one rank filed off across the grounds on their patrol of the St James Parklands.

In 1982, in the midst of the IRA's terrorist actions in the UK, the Blues & Royals were the victims of a bombing, an attack that killed four men and seven horses.  Many members of the group have also given their lives in battle and died as heroes on the field of war.  There is something noble in those things, something that should be remembered and honored.  Indeed, when you look at the Guards, you are looking at members of an operational military force who still serve their country.  I can respect soldiers, I do respect soldiers, but I don't know if I will ever understand them.



London, like Sydney, is dotted from side to side with memorials to the fallen of the First World War.  I fully understand those.  They are monuments, and by very definition they are not celebratory, rather, they are sites of morning.  In the modern world of state sponsored war memorials its easy enough to associate them with nationalistic ideals, but such sites seldom were, they were more often than not built by the same hands that had gripped the stocks of rifles in the Somme or Ypres.  They were built by men who had experienced the futility and horrors of war first hand.  Our cities are marked by dire warnings for the future, warnings we continue to ignore as a species.

More harrowing, to my mind, is the additional knowledge that there are precious few memorials in London noting the results of Britain's long traditions of Imperialism.  In my homeland, as in countless other places throughout the world, the British Empire's legacy is not one of military honour, but of destabilisation, discrimination and genocide.  What ageless cultures, what eons of habitation, what millions perished under the heel of what one watches celebrated here?



The men of the Blues & Royals are not to be blamed for Britian's colonial history, of course.  Neither are the tourists here for their photographs, standing wrapt in fascination and awe.  But in the dark leather of those stirrups and in the feathered plumes adorning golden helms there was, for me, a feeling of unease.  And. as the mounted guard departed the square I did not feel any shared cultural pride.  Instead, their was only the hot dust thrown up from a sea of white gravel and echoes of ancestral terror, under a sun that never sets, left in their wake.

No more than a few minutes walk up the guard's daily route we passed the Ugandan High Commission, tucked away behind the Admiralty Arch.  It was closed for the renovations.

James Smith & Sons

You can buy pretty much everything in London, with the exception of maybe a decently priced meal worth its value in poundage.  And it is that commercial prestige that becomes concentrated in the extreme when culture and necessity combine.

Somewhere in the 18th century, a man called Jonas Hanway walked London's streets with a hitherto unseen item, he was reputedly the first man in London with an umbrella.  As the story goes, London coachmen would greet him with the phrase "Frenchman, Frenchman! Why don't you call a coach?"  to which, in my imagination anyway, Hanway probably responded with "Allo, mon pote, je marche ici!"*

Anyway, all this is building up to James Smith & Sons.  They sell umbrellas and walking sticks.  All of them.  This is the cornucopia of both items, the sacred heart of things with handles.  It doesn't get any more card-carrying cliche than this as far as I'm concerned, but in typical English style they take their business very seriously indeed. 

Its the sort of store that seems to employ only Oxbridge graduates. For all I know, that's probably not a strategy they can be faulted for in the world of walking stick sales.  All of this is just an excessively verbose way of saying that they know their product and they know their market.  Looking around, its pretty clear that they've reached the pinnacle, their aren't any commercial strategies they need to implement, they don't need to promote synergy; if businesses were string instruments, this one is a Stradivarius. 

They were the first to put the new invention of Fox steel umbrella frames into use in 1848.  So basically, if you have one of those (i.e. everyone), drop by and say thanks sometime.

The range is astounding, I've always been a little fascinated by walking sticks in particular.  I still sort of wish that I'd been born with some sort of withering or disfigurement that would give me cause to use one without pretension, societal embarrassment or the need to invest in a purple suit and matching bling.  I'm a little like a jealous hipster with 20-20 vision, my life is a mess in this regard.

And so, I was curious to see what they had on offer, perhaps in lieu of a birth defect I might one day be blessed with a wayward lorry at a zebra crossing and it pays to be prepared.

Well, there was quite a collection.  In the same way that their is quite a collection of krill in the ocean, or particles of dust in the known universe.  Essentially, if you were wondering if James Smith & Sons has that one thing that you want on a walking stick their answer would be yes, very much yes, unequivocally yes, because we've pretty much covered every option in existence.  

The elusive Canadian Musk-Oxen? They're between the dogs and French Ponies. A giraffe? Easily done sir.  A marble cast of Napoleon's thumb? But of course, a fine choice sir.  A bambo inlay of David Bowie and Winston Churchill winning the annual Northumberland Polo championships against the Eurythmics.  Yes. Everything. Yes.

Essentially this place is like a mix between the Tardis and the Garden of Eden, so obscure are some of the items that the building seems to be extra-dimensional.  It wouldn't suprise me, witnessing an infinity of umbrella's does that to a man.  Michael bought a lovely green hand umbrella as a gift for his mother because, unlike me, he knows what you are supposed to do in shops.

* Poor translation: Hey buddy!  I'm walking here!

Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

We chose an incredibly hot day to take the train out of central London to the North West and the Borough of Brent.  It was a strangely less grand sight than the crowded metropolitan streets that Michael and I had become used to, waiting at a bus stop scarcely a few blocks away from Stonebridge Station under the defeated façade of a commercial building long since past its prime, all broken windows and cardboard remains, I wondered what we would find.  This was no longer a place of high culture, this seemed more like the sprawling west of Sydney, all discarded hopes and cheap real estate, only without the transversal of the natural world that exists in country Australia.

The bus dropped us off next to the sort of highway overpass that people get stabbed to death beneath, or else are thrown off by hoodie-clad youths looking for trouble and, despite being no stranger to that particular subculture, I think we were both relieved that we had chosen to make this particular jaunt in the height of the day, despite the sweat and dust thrown up from the highway.

Wandering up the suburban streets, it was some time before we could see what we had come for.  Coming along a gradual bend in the road and saw what we were looking for on the horizon.

The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, is a Hindu Temple, sometimes noted as Britain's first, but in truth it is the first of its type in the whole of Europe and indeed, the largest Hindu temple laying outside India itself.  We would, of course, only come to learn these things once inside, but its grandeur was not lessened as we passed the seemingly benign neighbourhood of Neasen before it.

After depositing all sensitive belongings in nearby storage, most notably our mobile phones and camera meaning that all photographs here were taken, with permission kindly granted, from the outside of the temple.  We passed from the roiling heat, through the ornate doors of the learning centre into the cool annex to the main temple and removed our shoes in respect of traditions that neither Michael nor I fully understood.

We were, however, about to be educated.   To preface what I will say about the Mandir's interesting 'Understanding of Hinduism' exhibit.  The construction of such a remarkable and authentic place of worship, is in itself a holy thing.  Carved from 2,828 tons of Bulgarian Limestone and 2,000 tons of Carrara Italian Marble, in India by 1,500 craftsmen and masons in the ancient tradition, before being placed atop the largest concrete pour in the United Kingdom, the structure itself is flawless, and a thing of inestimable beauty.  The care paid to the precise detail of religious iconography and architectural brilliance honestly made almost every building in we would encounter in England only mildly noteworthy by comparison.

That said, the exhibition, whilst comprehensive, was strange to me.  This of course reflects more upon my state of mind, than on the genuine desire to convey an honest truth about the beliefs of the community that built this place of worship as a force of economic and artistic will.  It was funded by the Hindu community, faithful men and women (and children who as more than a few stories tell collected and recycled aluminium cans to do their part)   In that space though, surrounded by such subtle but deeply spiritual meaning, I wanted nothing more than to speak to the things that I had read, section by section by somebody who held them as words to live by.  The fault is all mine of course, there would have been many willing to lend their perspectives had I asked.

"A mandir is a centre for realising God.
  A mandir is where the mind becomes Still.
  A mandir is a place of paramount Peace.
  A mandir inspires a higher way of Life.
  A mandir teaches us to respect one another"

So writes Pujya Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the spiritual leader who prophesied and led the construction of this site.  We walked out from the main temple, onto the balcony overlooking the tired roads that we had traversed.  A world of the lower-middle class, inhabited by those who, whether by choice or necessity had shunned the grandeur of one of the most notable capitols in the world and found a place of their own, no less human, no less holy. A hot wind savaged its way across suburbia, but upon passing the threshold of the temple proper was immediately lessened, becoming cooler even as it mingled with the flowering scent from the garden below. Almost as if it too, had found some measure of peace.