I get lessons from strangers, too. Today as I was walking through the West End, I stopped by Fortnum and Mason to get a snack to eat in the park. I settled on a pork pie, and asked the clerk if he could heat it up, to which he replied, “The pork pie likes to be eaten cold, sir.” I thought this was a pleasantly indirect way of telling me how to act (a lesson in itself!). I said, “OK, let’s do what the pork pie wants.”
I got my new passport today — the US Embassy in London was very efficient, the UK post office less so, but I finally got it. The old one hadn’t expired yet, but it didn’t have any more blank pages even though I had added a new sheaf while I was in Tokyo.
The Royal Post Office may be antiquated, inefficient, and staffed by trolls, but the Deposit Protection Service here in the UK is marvelous. I got my housing deposit back with just a few clicks, and I even earned interest on the money.
St. Leonard’s is the “when I grow rich” church at the top of Shoreditch High Street, nestled among the strip clubs, council houses and bars, and watching over the gradual accretion of art galleries (including the one I live above) and design stores. The churchyard is always full of men in long coats sharing bottles, but this looks more and more like a station in their retreat. As the galleries spread and new businesses like the Days Hotel spring up (bringing understandably bewildered Japanese tourists on package holidays to Hackney Road), the streets are getting busier and less dangerous, and you stand a decent chance now of flagging down a taxi when you need one.
There is a lot to like about this area, not least the awareness of how quickly it is changing from dangerous to merely “edgy”: ”Live East, Die Young” is a common slogan on hoodies and art student leather jackets; that’s not the sort of thing you would wear if “Murder Mile” were really still a good description of your neighborhood.
On Saturday, Manny came by with a van to help me take my things to charity. On Sunday, I finished my inventory of possessions, and on Monday the movers came and hauled everything away. It’s funny how quickly you can go from being constrained (with furniture, property, and obligations) to being free. Three days, really. It’s even funnier how much respect you get from other drivers when you’re behind the wheel of a big white van — it looked to Manny and myself like regard for the working man, but maybe it was fear for their paint jobs.
When I was saying my goodbyes, my landlord (an artist and entrepreneur who turned this old handbag factory into a beautiful apartment block) told me, “The business culture here is aggressive, it goes back to the Angles and the Saxons — everyone is out for what they can get. If I were a man your age, I would get out of London and settle somewhere else.” I’m not sure if China is going to be any kind of respite from aggressiveness and selfishness, but it will have the advantage of seeming more like a game, since the experience will be filtered through a language and culture that are more foreign to me than the near relation of English. (What is the American relationship with the British, exactly? You sometimes hear Brits talk of “our American cousins” (when they are being friendly), but I always imagine Britain to be like an uncle — sometimes literally avuncular, sometimes like the old men in the Monty Python skit who say, “Back in MY day, our dad used to wake us up four hours before we went to bed, feed us a lump of cold poison, then we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow UPHILL in both directions…kids these days!”)
This is some of what I will miss:
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I’m sure I don’t know,
Says the great bell at Bow.
Both these photos have a blurry blob at the bottom — that’s a little drop of rain (I’ll miss the lovely English summers) that got on the lens. The same rain kept people away from Columbia Road today, though, and it was easier to see what was on offer.
I’m saying goodbye to various parts of London, including these cupcakes from Broadway Market that I buy most Saturdays. Four cost £7.70, or around $15.00. I never thought about it until I had to write it down in my notebook, but these are expensive little cakes. They are made by a fellow California transplant to the UK.
