Last Night in London

Tomorrow* we leave London. Our last efforts at enjoying the city include a ride yesterday on the London Eye and a bit of a shopping spree in Covent Garden. The crowds were huge and the weather was hot. Indeed, while riding the Underground I spotted a newspaper headline which claimed 19 April 2018 was the hottest ever recorded in London since 1841.

Needless to say, we are feeling a bit of weather whiplash, what with the record cold winter in the Low Countries and now the record hot spring in England.

Weather challenges aside, this morning we headed out on foot toward the Charles Dickens Museum. Unfortunately before we arrived at 48 Doughty Street, we were witness to an elderly pedestrian who was struck by a car on Grays Inn Road. Happily the man was able to walk afterwards, which is about the best one can hope for under the circumstances.

After that sad adventure we finally made it to the museum. It was delightful.

According to a volunteer guide with whom we spoke, Dickens lived in this rented house on Doughty Street from 1837 - 1840. He also lived in two other London houses, both of which have since been torn down. Luckily this one was preserved by the neighbors in the 1920s when there was talk of demolishing all the houses on this street.

Some of the highlights of Dickens' life in this house include the birth of two of his sons, and he wrote three of his early works in this house.

The museum has done a nice job of collecting objects which were owned by Dickens, including a mahogany side board in the dining room and his writing desk in the study, along with letters and lithographs, and the author's dress suit from his meeting with the royal family.

Gad's Hill Scroll
Charles Dickens Museum, London

In the entrance hall of the museum, a framed image known as the Gad's Hill Scroll rests obsequiously against the wall. Apparently Dickens had it specially made and hung with pride in his home at Gad's Hill. There is a back story to the scroll which includes a reference both to Shakespeare and to Chaucer. In a nutshell, Dickens' home at Gad's Hill was the location of a scene from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, one of the bard's more elaborate history plays.

In Henry IV, Falstaff is at Gad's Hill when he robs some of the pilgrims heading for Chaucer's Canterbury. This reference by Shakespeare about Dickens' home was a source of pride for Dickens. Indeed, he counted Shakespeare as one of the greatest sources of inspiration in his own storytelling, hence the scroll.

Of course, if you have been reading any of my recent posts, you will know that Chaucer has made some recurring appearances in my own journey, hence this interest in the scroll.

Today, Dickens' home at Gad's Hill is a school. A plaque graces one of its walls, commemorating the famous author who overcame life circumstances to live there. I think next time I'm in England, I'll have to make a visit.

* I began this blog post while still in London but only just now finished it in Dublin, Ireland. 

Books and Canals

Of late, I have been walking.

Word on the Water
Regent's Canal, London

To the British Museum. To Hyde Park. To Covent Garden. Today my walk included a visit to Word on the Water, a book barge on Regent's Canal.

Basically it's a book shop in a 100 year old Dutch boat. On sunny afternoons like today, the owners invite local musicians to play live music on the roof.


Moved by the moment, I picked up a copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. After being on the road for nearly four months now, I really identified with the down and out part of Orwell's title. It's a nice little book, partly fiction but mostly memoir, capturing key ideas about his experiences with self-imposed poverty in the 1920s.

And the book commenced with a line from Chaucer -- relevant enough given a previous blog post -- so I splurged nine quid before heading on my way.

"O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!" Chaucer said. Time, and a few pages of reading, will tell whether my condition of poverty -- of the mind or the pocketbook -- has been increased or diminished by this purchase.

London Canal Museum from Regent's Canal

Next stop was the London Canal Museum, a three-story brick building which was a former ice warehouse adjacent to the canal.

The museum chronicles the history of barges and the canals they plied, ice and the horses who pulled it.

The ice was shipped from the south coast of Norway and then stored in warehouses along the canals in London. The horses, massive and dignified under their laboring burdens, pulled the ice-filled canal boats across the English countryside.

Tiverton Canal
photo courtesy of Eclipse Breaks

The earliest canals date to the mid 16th century; by the mid 20th century the practice of hauling ice had been eclipsed by refrigerators and motor vehicles.

Great Crested Newt
photo courtesy of Danni Thompson

Now a new generation of hipsters have begun using the barges for housing, work studios and, as is the case with Word on the Water, floating book shops.

There are also community groups interested in the preservation of the canals, hosting events as varied as Great Crested Newt surveys, art shows featuring canal-themed exhibitions, and towpath task forces to keep the canal banks free of pollution and debris.

The area around Regent's Canal is changing rapidly. My little walk about caught just a small taste of it.

Remembrance: Mortality and The Self

Even as a young girl and still today, I have been interested in the relationship between memory, mortality and The Self. Somewhat akin to Keats' musings about the song of the nightingale, this rhetorical pondering has fueled a lifetime of inquiry: What does it mean to live if one dies unremembered?

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Child
c 1972

Perhaps this is an existential calling -- the soul yearning to be known in a world of nearly eight billion. Or maybe it is the artist's pledge, to produce a work in such a way that its creator will be remembered by others, for the betterment of all. To leave this world a better place after one is gone: that is the memento mori of existence.

It is not personal but spiritual, a universal quest to rise above anonymity, to have strode upon the earth and be remembered.

After all, we know Geoffrey Chaucer for the tales he wrote, not for his work as Clerk of the King or as the Customs House Controller. Those latter were Chaucer's means to a living but the Canterbury Tales is a story for all time.

It is a bawdy 14th century story of pilgrims in search of a free meal, or a spiritual blessing. Those two could be synonymous but we won't know for sure until after dinner.

Chaucer as a pilgrim
Ellesmere Manuscript, c 1450
Huntington Library, San Marino, California

I have had a digital copy of Canterbury Tales open on my computer for several weeks now, the hard copy on a shelf in Canada, too ponderous to lug in my already over-stuffed suitcase. Like the pilgrims Chaucer writes about, this electronic copy of the Tales has been traveling far and wide on this, my 2018 adventure. Like Chaucer's narrator, I am a writer and a pilgrim in search of a story to tell. Now, I'm no Chaucer but surely I can aspire to spin a yarn like him.

"Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury" ... or the adventures of Monday in London, whichever suits the reader better.

Thus my morning's walk commenced with reminders. The first: that the wars which tore Europe apart during the 20th century -- wars which caused the deaths of more than 100 million humans -- are never very far away from memory. These reminders of war are everywhere in The Netherlands and Belgium: in parks, on the sides of buildings, at church. Thus it is not surprising that their ubiquity surround the mindful here in London too, a city which endured the German onslaught twice in the last one hundred years.

This idea -- of remembering and mortality-- was brought home to me as I walked past the Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street in the heart of King's Cross this morning.

Holy Cross Church
Cromer Street
World War I memorial
photo courtesy of London Remembers

There, upon a high wall, appears the crucifixion surrounded by two columns containing thirty seven names each. They are the names of sons and husbands, fathers and brothers, those who died between 1914 and 1918 in that great and terrible war everyone thought would end all others.

The men, with good English names like Walter Barnes, John Ford, Percy King, Arthur Weekes, all died for England, for the world. To remember their sacrifice is to honor their lives. The world is the way it is -- better -- partly because of these men.

This is what I mean about memory and The Self. What would it mean for Percy King to have lived if he were to have died, indeed served and died, unremembered?

And so, in true genealogical fashion, I researched him.

Percy King was born in Marlyebone, a neighborhood in London just steps away from the memorial that honors him. He joined the 13th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, probably in 1914. This regiment was known as the Pioneers because their service involved building and repairing trenches in the forward areas of Flanders. It was a new kind of warfare which required pioneering strategies on the battlefield. The men dug tramways, constructed huts, cleaned battlefields and went on wiring expeditions. Percy King's battalion was one of the workhorses of the war.

Gloucestershire Field Report
Battles of the Somme
March 1918

In March 1918 -- just over one hundred years ago today -- the Gloucestershire regiment was crushed when the Germans mounted a massive offensive near Templeux-le-Fosse, a small village in the Somme department of northern France where the men were preparing fortifications. 

Percy King died on 27 March 1918, along with 300 other Pioneers during the infamous Battles of the Somme. The field report for that day notes the men were "heavily attacked"and "practically surrounded." In the military database, Percy King's casualty is simply listed as "died" in Flanders.

The Germans might have won that battle but they definitely lost the war. Hence the memorial and our collective remembering.

Like a soldier, I pushed on through the London rain. Chaucer had it right when he wrote "When in April the sweet showers fall." I have been in London a week and it has rained every day but one. 

But the British Library -- that amazing repository of knowledge which includes 12th century illuminated manuscripts, 8th century Chinese star charts and documents chronicling the 19th century suffragette activism of Sophia Duleep Singh -- is worth it.

Hulking across from St. Pancras train station, the BL's brutalist architecture appears daunting. Yet it holds the reminders to remember. It possesses the memento mori, documents of human life that remind us that though we will die, yet we do live.

marginalia likeness of Chaucer
in Thomas Hoccleve's
Regement of Princes
c 1411
British Library

There, in the gloomy light of the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, is Chaucer pointing the way. His appearance graces a page of Thomas Hoccleve's manuscript entitled Regement of Princes, a text chronicling the House of Lancaster in the early 15th century.

Hoccleve may have known Chaucer -- there is some speculation about that among scholars. Regardless, Hoccleve inserted Chaucer's likeness into this text next to lines which, translated out of the Middle English from which they were written, read "to put other men into remembrance of his persona." Hoccleve uses Chaucer to point the way toward remembering.

A recorded reading of Hoccleve's Middle English reveals the rhythmic quality even as it shows six hundred years of linguistic evolution.

Thus concludes a day of remembering -- of a scholar and a poet, a soldier and a girl who used to ride but now who writes.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. 

An American in Paradise

Yesterday Hope and I took taxis and trains, trains and taxis before finally arriving in London. This is a city that I love, and love returning to again and again. Samuel Johnson said it best when in 1777 he purportedly exclaimed "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Happily, I am neither tired of life, nor tired of London. 

We are staying in an airbnb in Kentish Town, close to shops and restaurants but not so very touristy.

Last night Hope and I wandered into a little restaurant called Nandos-- a chain, actually, because I remember eating at Nandos in Salisbury back in 2015 -- where we had some really great food, including sweet potato burger and quinoa salad. I make this point because, while I really loved Belgium, I really disliked the food. So this was the first meal I enjoyed in several weeks.

At another little shop, we also got a new sim card for Hope's iPhone and some fresh pencil lead and note cards. We felt productive.

This morning I located a laundry to drop my clothes. This was necessary because we have been hand washing things for about a month now and we were ripe for a real machine wash. The man at the laundry was gracious and kind. He was also quick, as he had our things washed and dried within two hours. This alone made today a major score.

John Constable
Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, 1836
oil on canvas
20 x 30 inches
Tate Britain

After dropping off the clothes I headed up the hill to Hampstead Heath. Two hundred years ago it was a rural area outside the city of London.

To give you an idea, here's an image of it by John Constable from 1836. Constable is one of my favorite English painters, with his mastery of light and shadow to produce sublime atmospheric effects. Here the rainbow slices across the storm clouds, which are not unlike the clouds outside our window right now. While the neighborhood might have changed, clearly the weather has not.

Today Hampstead Heath is a fashionable neighborhood north of Hyde Park. There I found a very good little bakehouse called Karma Bread which served up a large bowl of sweet potato soup and big chunks of bread with a cup of cappuccino to wash it down.

I also found the Keats House, what was formerly known as Wentworth House and which now acts as a museum containing books and other objects about the life of John Keats. The grounds and the house were the location where Keats lived when he wrote some of his most famous poems, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn". It's also the location where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and where he learned he was dying of tuberculosis.

Joseph Severn
John Keats, 1819
oil on ivory miniature
105 x 79 mm
National Portrait Gallery

When I arrived at the museum a group of volunteers were gardening around the grounds.

Apparently they call themselves the Heath Hands, working to maintain the garden with plants Keats encountered while he lived there. Small placards explain to visitors the names of plants and the ways in which those plants might have been used two hundred years ago.

It's a sweet and peaceful place. Unfortunately I have no photos because I left the camera at home. You'll just have to make a trip there yourself some time.

After he became ill but before he died in 1821, at the very young age of 25, Keats traveled to Italy upon the advice of his doctors. It was believed at the time that consumption -- the 19th century term for tuberculosis -- was curable in warmer climates.

Sadly, this remedy did not work for Keats and he passed away in Rome with only his friend Joseph Severn by his side. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. I think I'd like to go there, too, for Keats is one of my favorite poets.

Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"

Before he died, Keats worried that his poetry would be forgotten. Life circumstances and a romantic spirit laid the idea of mortality heavy on his mind. He hastily wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" as a rumination on these themes while sitting in the garden one afternoon.

It was only after he died that Keats' friend Charles Brown discovered the notes stuffed into the back of a book that this masterful poem got published.

In the paradox, it is poetry and his early demise that leads to his immortality, as suggested in this rich poem, written in May 1819 while he was still at Wentworth House:



"Ode to a Nightingale"

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5

But being too happy in thine happiness,

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night, 35

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod. 60

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that ofttimes hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80