Some reflections on London

Reflection in London.

I'm working in London now, and have sampled two rather nice areas of inner London as places to live. I do things like catch the tube in rush hour (although I think I'm going to get the bus, it's half the price and from where I have to go at the moment not actually too much longer) and buy lunch at Tesco's when I haven't got myself organised properly.

The population of London is about twice the population of New Zealand. Did you know that? That's, like, pretty significant. There are a lot of people in London. Some of them really smell bad.

Tower Bridge and the brown Thames.

I work near the Thames, and Tower Bridge (which I have not yet seen raise). The Thames is brown and flows surprisingly quickly. It ripples and eddies in bright grey and shiny scum-green. I've noticed that all the inland water in London, and those towns I've visited on excursions, is greeny-brown or browny-green. Canals and ponds and little lakes, all a murky green, all with a thin layer of slime. But still, somehow, it's pleasant to walk beside them and around them - and they reflect so well. London is a city of reflections. I do a bit of reflecting myself, sometimes.

Anyway, I thought I would share with you a few things I've discovered:

• Never shop on Oxford Street on the weekend. Your soul will be destroyed by 50,000

  

  What? Where are the # and @ at?!?!?!

  bustling women jostling co-shoppers onto the road in front of buses.
• Keys are in the wrong place on keyboards.
• There are so, so many old and beautiful books in London, and so many museums to house them.
• The majority of buskers make use of empty air - whether they are robed Yodas holding onto a staff or seated men in greatcoats with invisible heads but mysterious spectacles.
• Eating out is very expensive compared to home. Fruit and veg is expensive. Some groceries are cheaper - you can get cans of soup pretty cheap. And you can get four delicious rolls at Sainsburys for 1 quid. Go Sainsburys!
• A bald guy called James (27, tube-rider, large beard) is returning to education after 20 years, and he knows he'll fucking thrive. 



Oh, there they are!





• Hipsters gravitate to Shoreditch.
• There are lots of Russians in Kensington. They don't like it when people use the lift for one floor only (I tend to agree).
• Every second person smokes.
• Very few cyclists cycle with helmets on, despite the crazed traffic, and there are quite a few cyclists. Some cyclists (quite wisely) wear those mask things to help keep out the pollution, but the result is you feel like you'r being pursued by Hannibal Lector on a bicycle.
• Some parts of the pavement are so worn by trillions of billions of footsteps that the sun reflects in them.
• Law firms don't like sharing their building with charities.
• My boyfriend's extended family and very generous and kind. And good cooks.

The Serpentine. It may be greenish-brown, but it reflects nicely.

The animosity between humanoids and dolphins captured here in this statue in Trafalgar Square. Note the green water.

Reflection in a canal.

Bath

Bath is probably best known for its thermal baths, which are well documented to have quasi-mystical healing powers. They once healed a hipster, who now lives a relatively normal life in a nice country cottage in Yorkshire.

From beside the Avon, where we had dinner one fair eve.

The little town itself is a rather delightful spot, with the Avon River running through it, and a variety of quite stunning buildings. The abbey is gorgeous, the Royal Crescent is quite beautiful, and the botanical gardens are very pretty and were at this time of year marvelously full of green life and crows beating up grey squirrels. The Holbourne Museum features an impressive and eccentric collection of art and objects, from bald oil paintings of unimpressed men to vases from the Orient to tiny and delicate miniature scenes carved in ivory, no larger than a thumbnail. How on earth do people get so incredibly skilled as to produce things like that? 

The Roman baths - below street level, the main chamber, which
would have been roofed in Roman times to keep in the heat

Still, the baths are particularly interesting, and central to the town's founding. The water in them is green and opaque, and steams when the air is cool. It is very warm. And the minerals and other things from the earth that this particular spring are of renown powers and don't taste particularly nice - at the end of the walk through the baths, you are invited to fill a small triangular paper cup from a tap and taste some.

Hot water in the baths

Cold pool in the baths, full of
coin offerings to gods

Although the true time of discovery of the magical properties of the hot water spring that bubbled up from the earth is unknown, the Romans had found it by 50AD and began to build the baths, along with a temple dedicated to Minerva, the Roman goddess of healing, and Sul, a Celtic god. Aquae Sulis was a sanctuary  a place of relaxation and rest and all the other things Romans got up to in the public of their own baths

You can see the baths today, though of course they don't look exactly like they did in Roman times. The city has gone through movement of people and fashions in the last handful of thousand years (including various monastery sackings, which were all the rage for a while). The original baths were changed and altered several times, and the springs were rehoused in the famous 18th century buildings familiar in certain Jane Austen stories, and there is a Pump Room affixed.

What is a Pump Room? How did it get its name? I know it's for socialising and playing cards and gossiping and making witty, romantic exchanges whilst dancing in the midst of a well-executed cottilions. I also know it has its own set of rules (or at least, there was a display board of them in the Jane Austen house, where Austen once stayed and where I ate handfuls of some kind of tiny shortbread-esque biscuit when no one was looking). But does it have to do with pump shoes, or with water pumps, or pumping one's stomach when too much elder wine has been consumed, or fist pumps for a dance danced well? I do not know.

The Laws of Bath, in the Austen house

Today the baths themselves sit well below street level. The old ones have been restored inside their very English housing, and an attempt was made to re-Romanifiy them - now, above the main bath steaming softly in the early morning, statues of Roman figures look down and across at each other. Some of the old bath rooms have been excavated but are no longer full, though it's easy to imagine them writhing with Romans, or with fully-attired English roses all but fully submerged.


"Actually," Fabian said, (you'll recall I was talking to him) "the city of bath was founded when one of your human princes was banished from his own den because he had a terrible skin disease he caught from pigs and he didn't have good enough hunting or fighting skills to make up for it. So they kicked him out - which, I suppose, was a little rude, but really you can understand it... can't you?" He blinked. "So, rejected from his own species, he embraced the life of pigs, and wallowed with them in some hot mud they found in the middle of nowhere. And walking around covered in mud it was impossible to tell he had a skin disease, and so people thought he was cured and put it down to the hot water bubbling out of the ground. Then people moved into the area, put up some great buildings, and started chopping down all the forests and killing all the animals around."

"That's a nice legend."

"Legend!" He huffed."As a local, I think I know a little better than some... Antipodean." Foxes naturally struggle to pronounce that particular word, what with the vowel sounds and the way their snouts struggle with the slide of vowels to consonants in the very beginning and middle of the alphabet, but I was certain that he said it with a particularly snarkiness that was rather unbecoming and perhaps slightly racist.

"You're not a local!"

He lifted his snout and looked across it at me (my being higher, it was impossible for him to look down, but he achieved the same haughty effect). "I'm more local than you."

"You haven't even been to Bath! And by the smell of you I don't think you've ever had one." He made a face that made me suspicious I was losing any high ground I'd held. "I've been to Bath," I insisted. "And you can't even read."

"Oral legends. You know the power of oral legends, and oral traditions. You come from a country rife with them."

"How do you know anything about my country?"

He shrugged.

The inside of Bath Abbey, a working church

Buildings in Bath - quite beautiful, really

Dear Mr Tilney, sweet and a little bit patronising,
pumping Cathy in the Pump Rooms. Is it ok to use it as
a verb, or is that too dodge?

"We went to Stonehenge, too," I offered.

"Stonehenge!" He made an indeterminable noise.

"I can't quite figure out if you said that with scorn or reverence."

He just shook his head.

It was something worth seeing. The stones are large, and clearly quite heavy. How the devil did those people move them? Such effort must have gone in, and such a long time ago that that effort has fallen out of oral histories.

Today, you cannot walk up to the stones. There are so many archaeological secrets in the earth, and so many people who want to walk across them, it's simply not viable to have everyone walk up to them. Oddly enough, I am not compelled to say much about Stonehenge. Perhaps if I had gone on a misty morning, with the sun just beginning to light the world and colour the trees, with no one else around and the jackdaws that nest amongst the stones beginning to wake up and call.

The Fairfaxes of Oxford

On Thursday - between job hunting and essay finishing - we took ourselves a three day trip, stopping first at Bath then travelling on to Oxford. Oxford, as you will know dear reader of my many blogs and musings, I have been to and adore already; Bath I had not yet visited, but had an idea of from my only loved Austen Novel, Northanger Abbey.

I did not encounter Mr Tilney, nor see a notable trace of muslin anywhere. In Oxford, however, I did encounter a fox, and if you recall - as you surely will - I was anticipating with great anticipation seeing a fox, and have found that energy rewarded.

In this first portrait, I have attempted to capture Fabian's initial anxious hospitality. He kindly agreed to pose for me, and appeared rather (quietly) flattered.

On Saturday morning I took an early walk around the Christ Church Meadow. I was unable to sleep any longer - we had booked accommodation at the last moment and were stuck for choice, and ended up in rather dismal digs, uncleaned and full of sweaty young men having night terrors on the bottom bunk - and with the incredible amount of light at this time of year I could think of nothing more delightful to do. (Sidenote: Light has begun to dribble in at 4.30 in the morning, and at 9.30 it is only just sinking on most days. This is terribly absurd, and I can only expect more light as midsummer approaches. In Winter I expect we shall get 45 minutes of light only, and then at the most inconvenient of times.)

Looking back towards Christ Church and central Oxford.

The Christ Church meadow is a large area of pasture maintained by the Christ Church college of Oxford University. It is bordered by the River Cherwell, the Thames, and the Shire Lake Ditch that joins the two just before they join of their own volition. At the far end is Christ Church. The Meadow is surrounded by other small fields and parks, and the Botanical Gardens (where Will and Lyra promised to meet every midsummer day, to sit on either end of a seat in their alternative universes).

It always rains when I am in Oxford, and the morning was low and misty. It was warm though, and I did not need my raincoat. The streets were quiet and empty of people, with all the gorgeous buildings of the city resting uncrowded and dreaming of earlier centuries. 

You may, perchance, see the small doe in the middle of this meadow.

Gooses.

I find sometimes, when I walk, that the world slips aside. Time becomes incidental and things do not matter so much. I found the Broad Walk at last, and followed beside it, beneath the tall trees. A water rat ran across the edge of the bank and vanished, and crows called up above me. Ducks and geese had their half-grown children gathered beside them in the grass, just waking, and not quite suspicious if I didn't look towards them. A few deer watched me pass from the meadow, and the long horned cattle ignored me entirely.

I think sometimes about England and how green parts of it seem, how filled with pleasant spaces for rambling. But of course, all of this is cultivated life. It is a long time since England was wild. Everything was stripped away for more efficient human subsistence, and the English countryside is idyllic because it is domestic. That typecast English love of nature is built on mastering and controlling it, classifying and collecting, sculpting and shaping. It extends to the world. My beloved Pitt Rivers Museum is a perfect example of this - a thousand fascinating objects taken from their origins and labelled in meticulous, miniature inked script and set on velvet under glass.

(One of my favourite places) The
Pitt Rivers Museum: everything
labelled and arranged,

But this is really beside the point. I came to the end of the Ditch and turned up an avenue of old trees towards Christ Church.

And you may not believe me, but exactly then I was thinking of foxes and wondering if at this time of day there may be a chance I would see one, and at exactly that moment I heard a couple of crows screaming and cursing at something up ahead on the path. A slender figure bounded across the path, noting the calls but rather unconcerned, then suddenly stopped and looked down at me.

It was a fox. He was larger than I had imagined foxes to be, and I thought at first I was being hopeful and it was really a dog. But no, he had the long bushy tail and a look that belonged to no domestic canine. He was greyish along his back and he held himself perfectly still for a moment as he looked down the path at me.

"Sorry - do you mind?" Although it was mildly chastising in tone, there was also a strong hint of social anxiety, and a tone of genuine inquiry. He looked confused himself as soon as he'd said it, unsure perhaps of what he really meant or wanted. "That is, I mean to say," he said, "er, good morning."

"Good morning," I said. Really, it rather was. I must have been smiling very enthusiastically at him, as he broke for a moment into an unguarded grin of his own, then hesitated again with it stuck awkwardly on his face. I noticed he was carrying a tea service, and at the same time he noticed me notice it. "Er," he said. "Well." And he noticed it had begun to rain a little more heavily, and that wearing my coat would surely make things uncomfortable for me, given the warmth of the morning. "I suppose, if you want to, you might like to come for tea?"

The crows, who had landed on the nearby trees to observe this encounter, now recommenced their shouting of abuse, demanding to know why I was worthy of his hospitality and they were not. He replied to them in terms of such colour I am physically incapable of reproducing them here (foxes and crows alike have different numbers of rods and cones in their eyes, and are able to see a different variety and quality of colour than humans).

And so it was that I was invited to tea not in a badger's den as I had intended ("Don't hope on that one," Fabian told me, for thus I discovered to be his name), but in a fox's den beneath not too far from the cattle race in the Christ Church Meadows of Oxford.

A golden scroll at the Bodleian's marvellous
Genuis exhibition, which I believe may
tell the story of the Fairfax Fox's history

Fabian's den was fashioned around the roots of a tree, a sound architectural decision. He had lined the walls neatly plastered with the same clay that made climbing up to the city's medieval motte-and-bailey castle in the rain quite a bother, and a heat pump quietly keeping things to the appropriate temperature. He had hung remains of previous meals up on the walls to form a kind of jerky and, in true bachelor style, clumps of fur and feathers attached to skin were scattered around. There was a distinctly musty and murky odour lurking - I had to reassure him multiple times that all was well and that his abode was, indeed, quite nice.

"At this time of year," he told me, looking around the enclosed space, "I prefer to live outdoors. Out in the meadow, underneath the trees. This is just for when I get a girlfriend, really." I wouldn't say he looked at me hopefully. He knew I was another species.

Fabian served me cream tea - a description that I, somehow, had never heard before. It was simply and magnificently loose leaf earl grey tea (in the most delightful silver pot) with scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam that his mother, who lived a little north in the Port Meadow, had made for him - it was this jam that had attracted the crows, who have a particular mad fondness for the condiments his mother makes. She had access to the finest raspberries at the Cripley allotments and to the memories of her ancestor Ceate the Great, who had once entered the local Oxfordshire Pie contest and won. (This involved a very elaborate and clever disguise, which in itself deserved some manner of award.)

Fabian himself was just on a year old (by our calendar; they rather measure time by the lifecycle of the harribot cricket, with a lifespan that usefully responds to the seasons more exactly than even a fox's sharp instincts can measure). He hoped to get at least two more in, and knew that if he maintained a healthy diet and lifestyle and avoided traffic could live perhaps a handful more still. But that would be quite an old age for a fox in England, let alone an urban fox.

And soon as I let that phrase slip from my mouth - for it was I that used the term "urban", not he - he leaned back, wincing and scowling simultaneously. He appeared to be deciding whether or not to ask me to leave and how best to do it without offending too obviously. I quickly apologised and cited my cultural crudeness. This seemed enough, and I watched his fox brows fall again into a more relaxed pose, which became animated as he told me of his links to a great ancestral past.

A house boat on the controlled canal

Fabian detested the phrase "urban fox," as many detest the labels given to them (though he did note a variety of urban foxes that were embracing the label and leaning into it; his description of them as alternative, sarcastic and obsessed with mustaches rather made me think of today's hipsters). He came from a long line of foxes, who could be traced generations back to before the founding of the university. Indeed, the Fairfax Foxes were one of the better known families in the area, and their lineage could be traced throughout Oxfordshire and further, reaching even to the borders of Wales and to the edge of the Lake District (wherein resided their enemies, the Fichlocks, with whom they had been feuding for some centuries).

He still had within him, Fabian said, the instincts of the true wild fox, and dreamed sometimes a vivid dream of running through dense pine forests from wolves, of hiding from hungry bears, of hi-fiving beavers - all now since destroyed by humans. I told him of my thoughts, walking beside the tamed rivers and ditches and plants. He turned his head quizzically, just as foxes and dogs do in anthropomorphic animated tv shows.

He asked, for the first time, where I was from and who I was. I told him.

Then he asked about Bath. "I've never been there," he said. "A faction of Fichlocks slipped in the year before I was born. At the moment they're too strong, but their time will come..." He narrowed his eyes at his tea cup, which was by now cold; mine was empty. Then, with an eager grin, "Bath!"

"Well," I said.

Sainsbury Buffalo Bagel - serves two

Ingredients

• 2 loose Sainsbury's bagels (4 for £1)
• Galbani Mozerella (with a fresh and delicate taste of milk)
• Ripe vine tomato (red)
• Chorizo slices by Sainsburys (seasoned with sweet paprika)

Instructions

1. Saw bagels in half with a harshly serrated bread knife, holding vertical carefully because trying to do it horizontally seems more dangerous.
2. Wedge the resulting basically even slices into a baking dish because you can't find a baking tray.
3. Hack up chorizo slices into smaller slices and scatter delicately over the bagels.
4. Slice the tomato and spread them around, trying not to drop the seedy gooey guts on the floor. (Note: Having the baking dish on the same bench as your chopping board may help avoid this.)
5. Slice the mozzarella into hefty chunks and spread it across the surface of the bagels, tearing it when necessary to get full coverage.
6. Put it in the oven, on grill at about, oh, say 180? (Note: If you remember, turn the oven on before you begin cooking. If not, do that now.)
7. Watch the mozerella start to melt in its wonderful, I'm-a-delightfully-textured-soft-white-cheese way. Let it brown just a little.
8. Take it out. Let it cool for at least 4 seconds before you try to eat it.
9. Savour.

Serves 2.

The flight from Singapore to London was yuck.

We had deliberately gone to the Singapore Airlines help desk to book seats with a little more leg room. They booked us some seats. They must have been in shitty, malignant moods that day. Our seats had less leg room than a pair of skinny jeans put in the drier by your passive-aggressive flat mate.

The air was dry and luke-warm, the screens were old, and it was a double-decker affair so we had to wait like forever to get on and to get off. But at least we got some weird but delightful and bright pudding on the plane.

I actually quite like plane food. I've had good experiences. One of them this time involved dumplings.

We are in London now, and we got such a bright and beautiful day for our arrival on Tuesday. We are being put up, most kindly, by relatives who have a small deck that gets sun in the mornings and who live not too far from a variety of London's parks - Holland, Kensington, Hyde, Green. I've gone for jogs in the morning, fending off aggressive peacocks and glaring at those grey demons with busy tails they call squirrels. (I liked them once; then I saw red squirrels and defected to the light.)

And I have had my mozzarella bagel from Sainsburys.

A delightful view.

Danced along a coloured wind

I had never seen lightning in the clouds before. I'm used to jagged strikes in the air, not clouds bursting into light from the inside, like someone's hiding in the middle with a candle that suddenly flares and dies. I watched it spread too, across big heavy clouds, a private light show.

Sleeping leopard lying at Singapore Zoo Night Safari - a fantastic experience, even if you're exhausted from your 10 hour flight and a day's wandering in the humidity.

It was early morning as we flew into Singapore, and the harbours were filled with scattered lights of boats. The patterns from a small fishing boat rippled in v-shapes over silk as the light got brighter. We landed, and the moment we stepped off that air conditioned plane the humidity and heat made themselves heartily apparent.

Singapore is a small city-state island, built on trade and transit, sitting underneath Malaysia. It is just 716 km square with a population today of a modest 5 million or so, a combination of citizens and foreign nationals with genealogical histories from all around the world. Its modern history began with Sir Stamford Raffles, who saw the island as the ideal place to set up a new trading port and stick it to the Dutch. There were about 1,000 people living on the island then, near the river mouth where the heart of Singapore now beats noisily, essentially a small fishing village. Raffles set up some treaty deal on 6 February 1819 with the Sultan of Jahor, giving Britain the right to establish a trading port on Singapore, and promptly had a thousand streets, hotels, and high rise buildings named after him.

The infamous Merlion of Singapore guarding the river mouth,
and secretly named Raffles.

Everything in Singapore is called Raffles. And everything is in English. There are other languages too - especially Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil - but on signs it is much less prevalent than I would have expected. Even the tube announcements are in English, occasionally throwing something in another language at a particular stop.

Everything in Singapore is air conditioned, except the outside air. The outside air is like you've just taken the lid off a big pot of noodles and leaned over it. It smells a bit like noodles (or steamed buns), it's damp, and it's painfully oppressive to someone with my delicate constitution. There is a breeze, but it's hot and heavy and carries a mixed smell of river, salty ocean, Asian cuisine, and damp heat. The wind in Singapore doesn't have one colour, but many, and all of them are bright but hot and heavy.

Bright colours, but surprisingly heavy.

We dropped our bags off at our hostel, Quarters, and had a shower to wash off the layer of sweat already aquired and some of the haziness from a long flight. There was a chap there whistling Christmas carols whilst bleaching the showers and mopping the floor - most notably a highly tuneful rendition of Jingle Bells. The hostel is near the river's edge and a whole lot of restaurants with wait staff who cry "Lunch for you! Lunch for you!" as you walk past at midday, and quite central really. The rooms are small and seem to have no windows, but when the air conditioning works it does not matter a jot.

Marina Bay Sands - a boat balanced on buildings

The world's best pork bao, plus pandan cake and cool
chrysanthemum tea in a can, from  Lau Pa Sat

Two days in Singapore.

High rise buildings shining and shimmering everywhere, a giant boat hotel balanced on high rise buildings, a signature lion fish spitting water out at the river mouth, a cloudy green-brown river, Starbucks and McDonalds on every third street, Lau Pa Sat Festival Pavillion with scores of cheap food stands (including one featuring the most delicious pork bao I have ever eaten, and one featuring pig intestine soup which I did not eat and never will), food and hundreds of shops in Chinatown, a small park with a high of 163 meters above sea level and the was the highest point in Singapore before all the high rises were built, the Asian Civilization Museum with statues of Bodhisattvas and relics from the Indus Valley, Raffles Hotel with their overpriced cocktails (they could keep the place going on sales from those alone, I should think), $1 cans of iced tea and bottles of water from dudes under umbrellas on the street, an incredibly large and wonderful bookshop called Kinokuniya.

The Night Safari out at Singapore Zoo was amazing, and probably my favourite bit. We took the tube and a bus out and arrived shortly after 8pm. A little tram runs around a circuit of the zoo, taking you past flamingos, otters, Gir lions, sambar, babirusa, mouflon, striped Indian hyenas, African laughing Hyenas, gorgeous (but rather large) black and white tapir, hippos, Asian elephants, Cape buffalo. An Indian wolf - skinny, sharp-edged - came out and stood right next to me, howling up at the sky. The tram of course had a tour guide. Ours was incredibly enthusiastic, making good use of cadence and all the frequencies the human voice has on offer. She also had the most peculiar accent, something unidentifiable to my ears but definitely Asian with inflections of English and American.

Fishing cat at Singapore Zoo,
courtesy of the Wild Cat Club site

There were walking paths as well, taking us past pretty little cloud leopards, through enclousures with fruit bats and flying foxes, fishing cats, pangolins, civets, thar. There were two leopards, one of them sleeping right next to the glass, another sprawled over the branch of a tree. I am always impressed by how large and how heavy the are, with dangerous skulls, but still how sleek. I was also impressed by the size of a snail that had popped out of the shrubbery to check out the pavement - its shell would have taken up a good portion of my hand - and quite taken with the tiny bats nibbling away at fruit in the Mangrove enclosure.

I have decided I would like to have a gaur or ankole as my next pet bovine, a red dhole for my canine companion, and a fishing cat to catch my dinner and sit by the fire at night.

The river, and tree danglies

High rises

Kinokuniya

Warning from the Merlion

Yep, I had my overpriced Singapore Sling at the infamous Raffles Hotel Long Bar

100 years since the invention of the Singapore Sling

And a final word from our friend Tom...