This blog begins, like all great stories, in medias res, at the British Library. Well, just post-library, since what on earth would I be doing at the sanctum sanctorum blogging?! Yes, yes, you’re asking yourself, but is this really going to be a great story? To which I reply: that is hardly my responsibility. It’s the record of what I’m up to right now, and if you choose to read it and it bores you to tears, you have only yourself to blame. Also my infernal pride for daring to post to begin with, but that’s another story.
Meanwhile, I am totally CONSUMED with book-lust. For people like me, who are not only bibliophiles of the “it was bound and has pages and therefore deserves to be loved and protected even if it is the STUPIDEST BOOK EVER” kind, but who also adore things simply because they are old, the BL is probably the most dangerous place on earth. Good thing they have high security, or I’d really be in trouble. Heh. Anyway, now not only do I want my very own illuminated manuscript (Any takers? My birthday’s coming up) because I have just been reminded how truly lovely they can be, but the BL book store is luring me with its siren songs of fresh crisp books of various stripes. Books I often already own, but with prettier, more pretentious covers. Notebooks with covers from the Lindisfarne Gospels. And oh, most of all, MAPS. Of LONDON. And the THAMES. Many of them. I WANT THEM ALL. (Coffee may cause ¾ of this post to be in caps. Just to warn you). So far, the fact that the money wired to my brand new UK bank account hasn’t come through yet is keeping me honest, but it’s only a matter of time… And the maps are necessary to my research, right???
And naturally, when I’m not lusting after the books in the store or coveting BL Treasures in their permanent exhibition, I’ve been happy as an obsessive clam, poring over every depiction/map etc that I can find of London or the Thames. This is just a jumping off point, but it occurs to me that nothing could orient me to early London better or give me a clearer sense of possible jurisdictional battles over the river (since those who map, usually seek to delineate boundaries and assign ownership, no?) than its early maps. Plus, I love pouring over pictorial layouts of things exhaustively. Always have.
I put this down to the fact that
A) As already mentioned above, I’m totally obsessive (which fortunately for me, works wonderfully when it comes to research. Most of the time). Used to drive my Mum absolutely INSANE by refusing to allow her to turn the page on whatever picture book she was reading me until I had absorbed and traced over with my finger Every. Single. Detail of the picture.
B) I have no sense of direction whatsoever. Therefore maps fascinate me. This may seem counterintuitive, but I think I have the vague sense that if I can absorb a map of something into my very pores, I will FINALLY know which direction I’m going in. It’s not really that I don’t have a sense of direction, it’s more that I have a completely wrong sense of direction. For example, wherever I am, intuitively, north is directly ahead. I have no idea why. Cuz it’s usually at the top of maps? Because that would be really, really convenient for me? Because I am the centre of the universe? Who knows?
If you don’t believe me, I have early proof of both my total lack of spatial organization, AND my fascination with maps of the world. Granted, I think I was about seven when I made this, but observe below.
I have no idea what the connecting lines are for. Latitudes? Suspected affinities my seven-year-old self traced between nations and… err… “the prairies”? Anyway, I rest my case. In a side note, in case you’re wondering at the somewhat eclectic appearance of world nations, cities, etc, my Mum read me a lot of Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology, which is why "Rom, Gres and Ejipd" appear directly around the Northpol, the Most Important Place On Earth. Clearly.
But I digress. Which is all I will do for this ENTIRE BLOG. Welcome to my strange stream of consciousness monologue. Mind you, if you know me already, (and if you don’t, why the HELL are you reading this?), you already know that. Back to England.
I’ve been here for just over a week now, and it pains me to say it was only this week that I finally made it in to the BL. Apparently moving across the world and setting up an apartment, bank account, mobile and internet take a little longer than the three days I optimistically assigned them.
The first day I arrived I was a little bewildered by the time difference and the Total Lack of Sleep I had on my Budget flight over (not quite true, probably managed 2 hours. Because I have magical powers and can sleep ANYWHERE). See, once aboard, they announced sheepishly (this is Thomas Cook, AirTransat btw), that since not ALL the seats were able to recline, to make it fair for everyone, they’d fixed the seats so that NONE of them would recline. Personally, I can think of another solution to that conundrum, but I guess they did their best with the wits they had. There was a six-foot something guy crammed into the middle seat beside me, and I must say he put up with travelling like a folded up deck chair remarkably well. (And if he did take half my seat as well, he also let me borrow his phone when we arrived.) Also the in-flight entertainment didn’t work. Now to be perfectly honest, I totally expected my budget flight to be Hell, so really, I wasn’t surprised and would probably have been a little disappointed if it had been otherwise.
At customs, the lady seemed deeply suspicious of the fact that my university was funding my research trip to England (this seemed easier to explain then a national research grant), but eventually she let me through, after making sure I hadn’t forgotten about eating while I was here.
Agent: Yes, but who’s paying for your FOOD?
Me: Oh food. I FORGOT about that. Damn. Guess I’ll have to go back to Canada.
On the train into town I was adopted by a slightly odd but lovely woman who told me that the people in Camden Market would love my hat. Also, that heroine was what finally did Amy Winehouse in, so to avoid that. Noted. Speaking of which, I must say all the Brits I’ve encountered have been perfectly sweet to me so far. Either British people are much nicer that reports claim, or I have charmingly helpless down to an art. I prefer to believe the former, but fear the later may be more accurate.
D and her boyfriend collected me at Victoria station and spent the rest of the day shepherding me around and feeding me. Really, London put on its very best for my arrival. It was 29 degrees out, and crystal clear. From the street where I live, I can see the whole cityscape stretched along the river, and with Highgate cemetery one side, and Hampstead Heath on the other, I feel about the luckiest temporary resident of modest means ever.
The place I’m staying is super cute and has about as much character as one flat can safely have. There are many ways I could describe it, but let me leave it at this. Essentially, I am living in a set piece from La Boheme (well, an updated version). All hardwood floors and peeling paint, funny little nooks and latched windows. We have a hotplate, an electric wok, a bar fridge and a washing machine, and I feel like I’m finally getting a chance to live out the undergrad “first apartment” experience I never had. You may think I’m being sarcastic here, but I’m not. I never lived in Res, my first university was in the same town I grew up in, so I stayed at home. By the time I got a proper first apartment (omitting the ghastly “fully-furnished” rat-infested, pink-walled, muppet orange shag-carpeted-couch having one – remember M?), my roomie had means and a decidedly classy sense of taste, so I never did the threadbare, bargain basement routine. So I’ve actually been having a wonderful time visiting the Poundstretcher, finding and furnishing my place with the cheapest things I can find. A few scarves and prints from Camden Market and I’ll be set. D and A, my new roommates, are respectively a musician and an artist, below us lives a photographer, and across the street a girl arrives every morning with easel and palette to paint the prospect of London. So I’m basically living in an accidental artists colony. More and more La Boheme than ever. I don’t know what I bring to all this. I’ll have to start posting sonnets on trees or something to earn my keep.
Strictly speaking, if we stick to the script, I guess the roles I most closely inhabit are the roles of the philosopher and the poet. Honestly, it’s all so perfect I kinda keep expecting the landlord to show up and demand the rent so we can all have a blazing row, get him drunk, promise to pay him later, and then race out to profligately spend our meagre All at the local pub. Naturally, I will soon encounter a lovely but hapless (and consumptive) young tailor, who I will fall madly in love with, abandon, and then return to just in time to weep over his dying moments so that I can write a tragic and highly commercially successful story about his untimely demise. (If this is going to work, given my limited timeline, I should meet him about next week at the latest).
Anyway, D and A have taken me very firmly under their wings, and A especially has been a kind of magician at procuring deals for me every which way I look, from sales on mattresses to pay as you go mobile with endless internet deals. A really needs to write a book called How to Survive in London on £15 a Month or something.
Still, all of this has taken time, and the main hitch has been the bank. I think I’ve finally got that sorted, but last week, when I went in and began the process of setting up an account, they promptly went ahead and LOST all my information. Including a photocopy of my passport. Not thrilled about that, but hopefully it actually got shredded as they claim, and is not currently being sold across the internets.
Which speaking of, I FINALLY got on Monday, and was so incredibly euphoric about it that I may need to see a doctor about email addiction. Although in fairness to me, these days literally EVERYWHERE assumes you’re wired in, so it’s nearly impossible to get things done without it.
This post waxeth long, so I won’t go into detail about my more frivolous pastimes till next time, but I HAVE been having fun, in addition to being industrious.
Finally, and then I promise to shut up, for those of my friends who are naturally wondering WHY I feel the need to blog about this, three words: I AM LAZY.
I love you all and I desperately want to keep in touch, but I’m also a total recluse and tend to get overwhelmed when surrounded by new experiences, so I have to balance my desire to stay in touch with you all and keep you filled in, with my inability to write a whole bunch of newsy emails individually every week (I’ll still try for short ones), and my absolute need to sometimes sit quietly in my bedroom with a cup of tea staring at the wall.
Thus, the evil necessity of the BLOG arose. Normally, I am against blogs on principle. This is for several reasons. One, everyone else is already doing it, and I have always been the kind that, if everyone else was doing it, I wanted to do the opposite. Seriously. I was super into environmentalism when I was little until Fern Gully came out and it became THE THING for Socially Conscious grad six girls to emote about. Then I decided to hate it on principle, and may have even been head advocating clearcut logging (something that utterly bewildered my forester father, since I had scowled my through the entire impromptu clearcut field trip he took me on the year before).
Second, I’m a luddite. I hate, fear and suspect new technology of every kind and anything occurring on a computer falls under that bracket (my love of email notwithstanding). If writing your memoirs on papyrus or stone tablets had suddenly become a thing, I would probably have been the first on board, unable to resist the lure of Old Things despite the regrettable fad-ishness, but blogs?? Bleh.
However, this really IS the most expedient way, AND I get to have a wholly captive and imaginary audience, which suits my vanity JUST fine. Plus, I get to assign it a ridiculous and misleading title (although I can’t take credit for it. Thanks V for the suggestion).
You see, although I am just as poverty-ridden and raffish as the next travelling scholar, by pure accident I have wound up living in one of the poshest parts of London. When googling the area, I discovered that nearly every celebrity (British or otherwise) has a place in the area, including, as Wikipedia likes to particularly note, George Michael. And thus, George Michael Watch 2011 was born.
I have absolutely NO celebrity spotting-radar, so all this celebritydom is probably wasted on me (It should be you, M. I swear, with your magical abilities you could spot Jude Law in Antwerp or Antarctica. Cuz if you were there, somehow, he would be). But, I will do my best. And if I spot him, I will let you know, dear reader.
George Michael sightings as of this moment: 0
Note to self: Must remember to remind myself what he looks like these days.
xo
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