London II

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It's been two weeks since my last blog. I'm far away from England by now. I should have told you more by now. 

The Globe Today

And I'll tell you now just a little about Shakespeare's famous Globe Theatre. The place it used to stand is indicated by a plaque now. There's a little courtyard with a circular edge to it, but it's cut off part way by apartment buildings. Luckily, an American chap who came to London one day decided that it wasn't right that the only monument to The Bard was a coppery plaque tinged with green, and he went about the process of organising its rebuilding along the edges of the Thames, just a few blocks from where it originally stood. The government was unwilling to give him the money, and so he gathered together donations. The ground around the new Globe is scattered with the names of the donators etched into the pavement. Two of the Pythons made their contributions, but John Clease paid double the amount to ensure that Michael Palin's name would be misspelled "Pallin."

The new Globe, along the Thames

The new Globe has been recreated as much as possible with the ingredients that detective work and imagination dictate would have been used in the 15-1600s for such a building. It certainly looks convincing enough, precisely the building I constructed in my mind from two hundred high school Drama classes and several more English ones. A round building with cream panels between the broad wooden beams of the frame, a thatched roof (the only in London, with added sprinklers for Health and Safety reasons), a hollowed interior with a thrust stage and discovery space and trapdoor in the stage, with galleries and space for the groundlings and the Heavens. They even have live performances. While evening ones may not be traditional, given that in the old days electric lighting wasn't so readily available, it's much more convenient in general, and it does give an opportunity to see the moon rising above.



I saw The Tempest. It was amazing. The set was minimal, little more than some reddened stones around one post and partially over the trapdoor where Caliban emerged. The acting was superb. It was hilarious, bawdy in all the right places, with its serious undertones at moments giving just the right edge of discomfort, and the closing speech - that slightly nostalgic reflexive closing speech - was delivered perfectly. At the ceremony for Miranda and Ferdinand, tiny shreds of tissue paper like petals were dropped. They caught in the air and twisted softly, floating and rising on the current. Some were still falling by the close of the play, when the theater emptied and left only rubbish and the moon.

To pursue my love of the literary, I took a bus out to Hampstead Heath and walked through it in the rain - a peel of thunder struck just as I passed a pond of geese - to the little white house John Keats lived in before he left for Italy as a last bid to throw of the tuberculosis that had taken his mother and his brother. The warmer climate didn't help. He died and was buried in Rome desiring only the words "Here lies One whose Name was Writ in Water" to mark his stone, convinced of his failure in life. He was 25, the same age as I am now.

It was nice to see a place that Keats had lived, and the place where he wrote a lot of his most celebrated poems. Changes have been made since his time. The wall dividing the building into two has been taken down. There's an additional room on the end of the house. The heath has been pushed back, and the houses have crowded in. But the parlour he and Charles Brown shared is still there, with the chairs arranged as in a portrait of Keats, and the smaller room that was most likely Keats is upstairs with a bed and a copy of his death mask in a glass case. There are original objects from the time there, mostly donated - some pictures, a painting by Brown, a grandfather clock that Brown took when he emigrated to New Plymouth in the 'Naki and has probably spent equal portions of its life in New Zealand and England. The clock was broken on the way over, though, and was restored with native New Zealand wood, although the top is still the original.

The following day I left London on a train to Oxford. Oxford is beautiful. I thought London was beautiful, but it was nothing to Oxford. It's small, with old buildings that stand both free and in collusion with its neighbours, a mixture of streets with cobbles and modern surfacing, green trees, a straight canal with boats taking shelter from the rain along its edges. There's a castle, with a large green mound beside the road. The University is in old buildings around the town.

It was necessary to visit the Bodleian Library, which is an incredible building. The only way to see it now as a tourist is to take a tour, where you are shown through a few of the lower rooms before you are led up to the library itself. There is often a small exhibition of some of the Bodleian books, and this I visited before my tour. It was called 'Magical Books,' and was the perfect exhibition for me. There were old magical scripts, a collection of Arthurian works, manuscripts and notes from Tolkien and Lewis and Garner and Pullman, a book from centuries ago that helped to predict the future by means of a wooden cog mechanism in the cover, pictures that Tolkien had sketched, a map of Lyra's Oxford, books of old legends and tales, something like a bestiary with a bright and strange coloured creature with feathers and a mammal's form.

The roof in the first room - they don't let you take
photographs of the most beautiful part

The library itself where the oldest books are kept, beyond the room with the decorated ceiling, and the stern Jacobean room, was incredible. There were books from the beginning of the time of books on shelves, not even behind glass, lining the walls up to the ceiling. Beyond the guard at the desk were medieval beams and decorated ceiling panels, the lighting dim but the room somehow filled with a sense of colour. I wished that I could go beyond the barricade and walk past all those shelves, big heavy things in old wood. Lyra Silvertongue went on to study there, after the conclusion of her trilogy, in a world where the Reformation never happened.

Canoes

Shrunken heads

There are many museums in Oxford. I looked at a couple, briefly, but the best by far was the Pitt Rivers Museum. It is a dim interior with glass cases filled of things and objects, arranged not by time or culture, but by things and objects. Pitt Rivers wanted to demonstrate the evolution of man through what they used, and so all are displayed side by side - a case of bagpipes, of flutes, a collection of nets and ropes, articles of religious worship, figures of the human body, an assortment of the heads of the dead, all carefully gathered from around the world or given in donation and organised as Pitt Rivers had intended. I prefer it to the conventional museum. There seems more imagination and magic lurking at the sides, to be seized and make your mouth hang open in wonder. There are few defined stories. It shows pieces of humanity beside each other, as a whole thing, and you see not only the differences but the similarities that we all have, regardless of the ground we were born on.

I ended my trip to Oxford at the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings - Tolkien and Lewis the famous ones of the group - used to meet. I had a chicken pie and a glass of cider and sat in a corner, beside a small map of Narnia, listening to the rest of the patrons in the room realise they were all from America or married to an American. Outside, it was raining.

Jessie joined me for the weekend. There was a music festival call Field Day (which makes me think of Hamilton's rural event of the year every time I hear it) that was featuring a few of her prized musicians that we had tickets for - and to my delight, my other friend decided to join us. Somehow a hostel had not been booked for Jessie and I for the weekend, and London, with a bank holiday and the very same music festival we were going to, was booked out. Luckily, we were able to stay just out of the centre of London with my friend. It was then, as she picked us up from the train and drove us back sometime near midnight, that I saw what can only have been a fox run across the road.

The festival was enjoyable, except for the fact that the English don't seem to be able to not smoke or to read signs telling them not to smoke in the enclosed tents where other people are trying to get oxygen to their lungs. Nevertheless, there was some good music and some delicious churros and free samples of Koppaberg cider. It is the first music festival I've been to. I suppose it's nice that it was in London. We managed to leave and catch the last train just in time from the pretend-24-hour city.

Bat for Lashes playing at Feild Day in Victoria Park

In the morning Jessie and I went back in and wandered around Spitalfeilds. At the recommendation of a friend, we located a little-publicised and rather odd tourist attraction at 18 Folgate Street, Dennis Severs' House. It is a museum of sorts, but again an alternative sort. You knock at the front door, and a rather earnest man emerges and tells you that he will come back for you. He lets you in eventually, laying out briefly some rules and informing you that you will not see the family, but you will hear them, and the rest is yours. You pay, and then you wander through rooms left as though someone who lives there has just stepped out for a moment. There is flour on the bench in the kitchen, eggs just cracked, scones buttered and bitten. There are hairs on the hairbrush in the bedroom; an orange filled with cloves scenting a room; fires gently heating the room; shoes left on the floor with the socks crumpled beside; cobwebs in the top floor and a collapsing ceiling above the bed; bedsheets flung back; Victorian cutouts of children standing on the long stairs up; a cat sitting on the windowsill shying away from your touch and then jumping down and wandering away. Every now and then you can hear conversations in other rooms, a carriage passing on the cobbles in the street below, someone walking on the floor above. It's a series of impressions and moments. It's strange. It doesn't have little cards telling you where things came from or what they are. It's the best house museum I've been to.

And then we sat in the park in the sunshine, which had decided to come out, and then caught the necessary tubes from Liverpool to Kings Cross, and waited to go back to York.