Days 53 - 65 (or M-m-m-megapost)

Day 53: So on Friday, we got up, grabbed our respective packs and bags, and trooped outside to board the bus to the West Country. Our bus driver (thank God) was not Robert, the annoyingly extroverted one from our trip to Stonehenge and Salisbury. I never actually caught his name, but he was very businesslike while he was driving and very friendly when he wasn’t. I sat at the front beside Dr. King, and the driver eased us out of the swirling mobs of London and out into the countryside.

The drive to Bath was long, so I passed the time chatting with Dr. King and reading Riddley Walker for Politics in British Literature. At one point Dr. King and I looked back and we were the only passengers awake on the bus; college students’ sleep schedules are amazing. Anyway, as we passed Aylesbury, the National Transportation Authority pulled us over. We had to get off the bus, as the chassis was riding too low over the front axle, which nearly put Dr. King into an apoplectic fit, since we were due in Bath at a particular time for our tour. Luckily my phone is capable of making calls while outside London, so Dr. King was able to co-opt it and call the mayor’s office of Bath. He now owes me a beer. Which is wasted, since I don’t drink, but whatever.

Anyway, the poor bus driver had to pay sixty pounds, and we had to get back on the bus, then get off the bus and pull our baggage out, then all get on the bus and move to the back while they weighed it, and then were finally able to disperse back to our regular seats and get back on the move. So we arrived in Bath, parked by Bath Cathedral, and immediately had to sprint around the cathedral to get to where the tours were meeting.

Whereupon they told us we were too many to go on the tour.

Dr. King took one of the people from the mayor’s office behind a pillar and said what I assume must have been incredibly strong words, for she came out and announced that yes, the tour would go forward as planned. When it comes to frightening people into doing your bidding, Dr. King is my idol.

The tour was okay; our guide did share some interesting stories about the architecture and history of Bath. For example, most Georgian townhomes had a bathroom added on to the upper stories made out of wood, so that it resembled a wooden cubicle, supported by wooden struts, floating in air. In what is not quite a surprise, many people died in an Elvis-like fashion when the rotting struts gave well and propelled them to a gravitational and quite fecal death. Also, one of the Queens of England whose name I’ve forgotten came to Bath to bathe, in the hopes that the waters would beget her a child. Lo and behold, it did, and nine months later she had a healthy baby.

No one mentioned that the king was not with her in Bath.

Anyway, the tour was fine, and we were released after a while to tour the actual point of the city: the Roman baths. They were magnificent; the water hissed beneath the Plexiglass floors as we wound our way through the Museums, staring agog at the golden head of Athena, patron of the Baths, and giggled at the lead tablets on which curses were written. I’ve always enjoyed Roman curses and graffiti for their historical commonality. Here’s a sample:

They range from the sweet:

We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus.

If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girl friend.

To the gross:

Defecator, may everything turn out okay so that you can leave this place.

Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they ever have before!

We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot.

To ‘why would anyone commemorate this?’:

On April 19^th, I made bread.

Anyway, the baths were amazing; the water was green with minerals and sundry bacteria, but it was warm and steaming, and I was hard-pressed to stop from leaping in. Not really, of course, because there were guards standing around, as well as one man dressed as a Roman legionary who looked absolutely nothing like a Roman, but then again olive skin is a bit hard to find here in the frigid north. After goggling at the intricate system of pumps, central heating, and the hypocaust and frigidarium, we left through the gift shop and assembled for the trek to our hotel.

It was a Holiday Inn, and sterile and serviceable and utterly boring in the way of all such places. So we flung our bags down wherever and went to find food. Dinner was, again, serviceable, seeing as how we got it at a chain restaurant that’s something like a Chili’s would be in the U.S. We then retired to the Holiday Inn and went to bed.

Day 54: I got up in the morning, ate a nearly inedible breakfast compliments of Holiday Inn, and joined the group in our expedition to Dartmoor. The weather was strange that day: we encountered alternate bands of sunlight and storm, which was advantageous since it allowed us to see the moor in both conditions. Dartmoor is the largest contiguous remaining wilderness in Britain at around 368 square miles. It is treeless due to the shallowness of the soil, which itself is caused by Dartmoor being on top of a massive swell of granite. This granite pokes through the soil at intervals in massive rocky protrusions called tors, which have been worn by wind and rain through the millennia into strange fantastic configurations. Vegetation consists of wild grasses and whatever mosses manage to cling to the rocks. It is windy, solitary, bleak, and absolutely, utterly beautiful.

We didn’t go onto the moors first thing, though. First we stopped in a small town, Okehampton, for lunch, where Erin, Claire, Dr. King, and I grabbed mediocre but cheap food in a little diner. We had no time to wander around in the town, though, so instead all of us piled back onto the bus and went towards the moor. The roads around Dartmoor, being ancient, are all one-lane; there are places along the road called lay-bys where you have to pull off to let people coming the opposite way through. We stopped in a small village right on the edge of the moor and scrambled off into the driving wind and rain and cold, surrounded by ancient houses and monolithic tors and handmade stone walls, and I had never been so happy my entire time here.

Dr. King led us on a trek down the paths of the village towards the river that ran beside the moor. On the way he told me about how hedgerows are formed. Medieval farmers and serfs plowing their fields would kick up rocks, and to get rid of them would pile them on the boundaries of their land. Over time, plants would grow on the rocks, followed by trees whose roots entwined with them, forming the ubiquitous hedgerows of England. He also told me about how when he was very young, he would see farmers reaping their wheat using horse-drawn combines, and how the lanes we were walking down reminded him of the country lanes of his childhood. Those scenes died out very quickly, though, in the inexorable march of progress.

We eventually came to a small brook, where absolutely clear water rushed over stones and downstream, carrying fallen leaves with it. The trees were dark and gleaming with rain, and beyond them lay the vast expanse of the moor. After taking pictures of the stream, we turned around and headed uphill to the bus. On the way, I encountered a semi-feral Dartmoor pony. These ponies have lived on the moor since time immemorial, although no longer are they truly wild; instead, they live on the moor most of the year, and are rounded up once or twice a year by the farmers who own them. This pony was calm, even friendly, and abided my devolution into a squealing six-year-old girl at getting to stroke his fuzzy muzzle and scratch his withers with a puzzled air. It only confirmed that I haven’t lost my love for horses.

Back in the bus, we retired to another small town on the edge of the Moor, Chagford, where I sat and had a Devon cream tea in a tea room. A Devon cream tea, for the uninitiated, is a very specific type of afternoon tea. There will be loose leaf afternoon tea, brewed in a teapot, with milk and sugar to taste, as well as one or two fresh scones. The scones are the rub; instead of butter, there must be clotted cream, and the jam must be strawberry. No other will do. You must split the scone in half, cover each half with clotted cream, and then heap jam on top of it. Done right: perfection.

Chagford was the quintessential British village, if such a thing exists: one restaurant, four pubs/hotels, a village post office, many small and quirky shops, and a myriad of old houses. I, being myself, found a real estate listing magazine to peruse while I had my tea. In all honesty, I don’t understand how anyone can afford to live in Britain, especially young people just starting out; a small two-or-three bedroom house in Chagford (a beautiful village by anyone’s standards, but not close to any big cities) ran well over four hundred thousand pounds, which at the current exchange rate is over half a million dollars. Even apartments are out; a one-bedroom flat on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury is over half a million pounds straight out.

After Chagford, we finally got onto the moor. The strange storm conditions had given rise to three separate rainbows, and all I could think was that Double Rainbow Guy would have had a freaking heart attack. There were also sheep, who were totally unfriendly and ran away every time one of us got close to them. We tramped around for a bit, then climbed Haytor, one of the highest tors in Dartmoor. I didn’t make it all the way to the top, as to get there you had to leap across a chasm splitting the two rocks of the tor. You didn’t have to get to the top to see the rolling green hills of Devon around you, though, glittering from the rain, and the blue wrinkled misty blanket of sea to the south, forty miles away. It was getting dark, though, so we had to descend Haytor and get onto the bus to Exeter, where our hotel was one of those decaying grandeur types of places so often seen in horror movies. Dinner was acquired at the hotel pub, where I and Mandi sat with Dr. King and the bus driver, and had a pleasant conversation about young adult literature and allegories, before we all retired to bed.

Day 55: We were on a time limit on this day, as it was the day of the National Theatre production of Hamlet we had tickets for. So we piled back into the bus, toting our bags, and went rattling across Cornwall, with its incredible headlands and rocky coasts that look as though God took a knife to the land, to Tintagel Castle, the birthplace of King Arthur in English myth. Which brings me, in a circuitous and round-about fashion that I promise will make sense, to the Sex Pistols.

When Johnny Rotten (memorably not supported by Sid Vicious, as Sid actually couldn’t play bass worth a damn and had his amp disconnected for most concerts), howled that there was no future, no future, no future for you, he was expressing the dissatisfaction of the urban youth of England, disaffected post-Imperial children of the council estates with no job prospects, no identity as British (because they had no Empire), and certainly no interest in the free love that characterized the decades before.

However, the aphorism of ‘no future’ can apply to England as a whole. England has no future; it has only its past. The British are obsessed with their past, with costume dramas, with analyzing it from every conceivable angle, with refashioning it to serve their national myth of the pure island nation in the silver seas, with genealogy and preserving ancient traditions, with the Glorious Dead and the Greatest Generation and Winston Churchill (whose final years, oddly, overlapped with the Rolling Stones’ beginnings). Tintagel is characteristic of this obsession; everything in the village is based around the Arthurian matter, this mythic archetypal past. Nothing in it is modern, nothing steel or brick. And while in one sense it is beautiful to see a nation so dedicated to the preservation of its past (although, it must be said, a sanitized and whitewashed version), it does leave me wondering if its children feel stifled, afraid to step forward. If progress is a dirty word to the English.

The remains of the castle are on a rocky headland, an island of sorts that’s connected to the mainland only by a very thin, narrow land bridge: the perfect defensive position. I took a bunch of pictures that will go up upon my return from Scotland (where I’m going tomorrow for the weekend). We wandered around for a few hours among the fallen walls of Saxon kings and Norman queens, watching kestrels dive from the cliff faces to snatch mice from their holes in the rocks. It wasn’t as bleak as Dartmoor, so not quite as close to my heart, but standing there on the edge of the headlands and gazing along the coast was still eminently satisfying.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long, and so went racing back over the downs to London for Hamlet. Hamlet is my favorite Shakespeare of all time, and so I’m a nasty critic when it comes to productions of it, but this was (and Jean, who’s seen enough Hamlets for a thousand people, agreed) a production that we were very lucky to see. Hamlet was also the sanest she’d ever seen him played. The question of Hamlet, the problem at its heart that still leaves critics arguing hundreds of years later, is whether or not Hamlet is insane. Is he sane and pretending to be mad? Is he actually mad? Is he a madman who thinks he’s a sane man pretending to be mad? If he’s mad, when does he fall? This Hamlet was totally sane, totally calculating, and totally ruthless, which befit the play’s setting in a modern totalitarian state, and Rory Kinnear played him wonderfully. Actually, all the actors were wonderful, with the exception of Laertes, who could’ve been played by a broomstick and expressed just as much emotion.

And that was the end of day 55.

Days 56, 57, 58, 59: Nothing of much interest happened on these days, with the exception of going on a lovely tour of Whitechapel with Susie. Whitechapel, for those in the know, is the area where Jack the Ripper, the world’s first serial killer, plied his grisly trade. Alan Moore wrote an incredible graphic novel called From Hell describing the Ripper murders, so for anyone interested in criminology, that’s a recommendation. Today, Whitechapel is a largely Indian and Bangladeshi area of town, as the Jews who once inhabited it have all moved out. It’s also the center of London’s anarchist movement.

We also went on a tour of the National Theatre, where I got to get inside one of the unused puppets for War Horse. Unfortunately the puppet had had its legs lopped off to serve as spare parts for Joey, the main horse in the show. I also found out that Sir Laurence Olivier suffered from a terrible case of stage fright at the end of his life and left acting entirely, devoting himself to directing instead, which is something of a shame.

Day 60: London is a city founded on secrets, and that day I visited one: the Old Operating Theatre. This is a Georgian operating theatre which was found in pristine condition in the garret of a church, surrounded by a room which had been an apothecary’s lab. The operating theatre was used in a time before anesthetic, and so the method of silencing patients were to either have them bite down on something or to have some burly men hold them down. The surgeons were quite good at their trade, however; they could perform a leg amputation in two minutes or less. In fact, it was vitally important that they do so, as two minutes was the amount of time someone would live after having their femoral artery severed. There were displays of several amputation kits which were quite gory, and descriptions of dissections and surgeries where patients died on the table.

There were also display cases containing antique medical equipment, all of which looked like torture devices, such as a stomach pump, a dilator, many bone saws, small golden boxes that, when pressed, sprang razor blades out of the bottom and drew them across the skin to bleed patients, and other medical errata. The museum was very small, but educational and entertaining, and you can’t really ask for more for five pounds.

After the Operating Theatre, I walked down Southwark towards the Globe and happened upon a farmer’s market, where you could buy cheeses I’d never heard of and a hundred grams of black truffle for over fifty pounds. There was a stand selling hot cider that smelled divine, but alas, all the cider was alcoholic, and thus not for me. Woe. But shortly afterwards, I happened upon a stall where I bought the best sandwich of my life: wild boar burger on salad greens, melted sharp cheese, cooked onions, all surmounted with cherry relish. So good, and I ate it sitting in the churchyard of London’s oldest cathedral, where Shakespeare’s brother John is buried.

All in all, a very satisfactory day.

Day 61: I visited Jack in Oxford, which was wonderful, and only heightened my already keen longing to see my Hendrix friends again. Getting to Oxford was a pain, as there are no direct trains from London to Oxford; instead, you have to take a train to Didcot Parkway, just outside of Oxford, and from there a bus to Oxford train station. It wasn’t that much of a big deal in retrospect, but was still quite annoying. We went to a huge bookstore called Blackwell’s to snicker over the German children’s books, walked around the history of science museum looking at old slide rules and telescopes, and went to Jack’s house to watch Whose Line is it Anyway. All in all, a pleasant and wonderful day, although both the trains back to London from Didcot Parkway were delayed, so I didn’t get back to the flat until very late. It was still worth it to see my friend, though.

Days 62 and 63: I didn’t do anything terribly interesting on these days, although I did finish reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia for British Life and Culture.

Day 64: After British Life and Culture, I had planned to go to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. However, the upcoming Tube strike that just ended an hour ago put a wrench of considerable size in my plans, as we were scheduled to see the National Theatre production of Blood and Gifts (about the British, American, and Pakistani intervention into Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion) that night. I got on the Tube, but noticed that it was filling up with harried-looking businesspeople all attempting to get out of London before the Tube closed, and so decided that it was better to err on the side of caution and got out at Covent Gardens. I passed a pleasant afternoon wandering through Covent Gardens and window-shopping before ducking into the cult entertainment store I’d been to once before for a bit, and then went back to the flat for dinner.

Blood and Gifts was a tremendous play, although the ending where the insurgents the American character befriended and gave Stinger missiles to refused to give them back, revealed that they had allied themselves with Islamic fundamentalists, and screamed Allahu akbar as the lights went down chilled my blood. It was even more effective because so much of the play was so funny: the younger insurgents were obsessed with American pop culture, and bargained vital information for Tina Turner records and information on the Eagles. The humor, in the end, only made it sadder.

Day 65: Today we had a workshop at the Globe, which was fantastic. Our leader was Colin, an actor at the Globe and professor of acting, who shared many facts about the history of the theatre and then led us in acting exercises. I got to play Polonius and follow Chase, playing Hamlet, around and chastise him for being mad, which was quite fun. It only made me realize how much I miss acting, although I was only ever serviceable at best, and then only in comedies. Tragedy was never my forte, even though I’d give my eyeteeth to play Hamlet. The historical facts were quite fun, too; for example, when the lease on the original theatre which became the Globe ran out, John Burbage and his actors snuck in under cover of darkness, disassembled the entire building, and moved it across the river. The evil landlord pitched a fit, but was silenced by the fine print in the contract; the land was his, but the building was the company’s.

After the workshop, we went with Barnaby to the Tate Modern, although class was curtailed by the Tube strike and the fact that Barnaby had to get across London to pick up his kids from school. I walked back to the flat, sat around a bit, then had a craving for sushi and walked to the nearest sushi place for dinner. And tomorrow, I leave for Scotland for three days!