back!

One couldn't mistake this tiny slice of my drive home for Hampstead ... although, of course, it's an interesting question why not.  It's often a recognition game that I play with myself: how, if I take a random view like this, do I know I'm in X country.  Here - not a palm tree in sight, so it must be ... I always think that telegraph wires and other bits of communications infrastructure are the most obvious giveaway - so that might include the road markings.  And then there are the strange flat gates, like solid flags.  Anyway, I'm back.

 

mice at both ends

On my walk to Hampstead Village this morning - the most English of autumnal walls, somehow, and then a set of mice leaping along a wall - rather like the ones that bounced along the walls at the V&A's Beatrix Potter show a couple of years back.

And now, some hours later, Gramsci - with one of the toy mice that he's been rounding up in my absence.

That was a long Monday.

 

Hampstead Heath

It was such a beautiful morning that the only thing to do was, obviously, to go for a long walk on Hampstead Heath - which was stunningly autumnal, and managing to look just like an uncountable number of Victorian paintings.

But my real discovery was the Hill Gardens and The Pergola - which Lord Leverhulme decided to build at the bottom of his rather fine gardens, in 1904 - with the garden architect Thomas Mawson.  It does rather render our own garden revamp - what should I say? - modest.  This may have become my new favorite place in London ...

There was a music video shoot going on, of course - made me feel as though I was (almost) back in LA.

I am sure that it's lovely in all seasons - I hope to come back at wisteria time - and the gardens below are beautiful, too.  

I then went down, past the wonderfully named, tucked away little street - or enclave - The Vale of Health - to the Viaduct, and Viaduct Pond, built by Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson in the mid 1840s.  Sir Thomas thought he'd build 28 large villas - surrounded by parkland (Dickens, among others, hated the idea) - so he constructed this viaduct across the swampy land so that they could be reached by road ... and then gave up, seemingly.  It's a viaduct to nowhere.  If you look very closely there's a fine grey heron in there.

I came off the Heath to walk down Well Road (complete with old mineral springs well), to check out where John Constable lived when he lived in Hampstead;

and then back by the churchyard where he's buried - a wonderfully Gothic churchyard - to pay my respects.

And finally, into the parish church of St John - another wonderful surprise. I guess I spend rather a lot of time seeking out the Victorian: this, built in the 1740s, was the antithesis, all white and spacious and like being inside a very tasteful wedding cake.  And I'd found out quite accidentally, earlier in the day, checking something about Hopkins, that GMH, Arthur, and Everard's father - Manley Hopkins - was a church warden here.  Who knew?

 

festive ...

Today, to Guildford, to see cousin Peter and cousin-in-law Kate - the other Kate Flint (a fact of nomenclature that really troubled my mother, for some reason, but that amuses me endlessly - I love getting a photo of her new puppy, say, that seems to have come from me).  This is a misleadingly sparse photo, taken right at the end of a meal that, I promise you, contained a great deal more indulgence than the crumpled tablecloth and empty glasses suggest at first glance.

England already seems to be going into full-on Christmas mode: brass band playing carols on Waterloo Station; a very large snowman wandering down the concourse; decorations everywhere.  This includes windows above a kebab shop in Oxford Street (Oxford Street?  On a Saturday before Christmas?  Yes, it's a sure sign of a visiting expat of a certain age and with well established habits, I suspect, that at some point during her trip she'll head off to M&S to renew her supply of socks and underwear).

What I am not used to is the army of cycle rickshaws that now pedals around Central London, festooned in neon, and blaring out music from their boom boxes: Christmas music, of course, but also Funky Town, and I Want To Dance with Somebody.  With apologies for the bad focus ...  Oxford Street was, in fact, an ordeal.  I know I've probably shrunk an inch since my tallest, but I swear that the average height of everyone in England has increased by six inches during the same period.  People literally don't see me, because they're on their phones ten inches above my head.  I think I should move somewhere where people are my height, like Oaxaca.  Or Leeds.

 

London blue

Into Central London for a couple of things - and was struck by the blueness of the sky, and the blueness of a building.  Above are the Christmas lights that are hanging over the Seven Dials monument: back in the mid nineteenth century, this was the site of one of the most notorious slums in London.  Now it's all trendy boutiques and restaurants ... close to this building below there used to be a decidedly untrendy Indian restaurant - but it was cheap - very cheap - and close to what was then the British Museum Reading Room, so very useful if one was a graduate student - but I think the last time I went to it, sometime in the 1970s, was when a mouse ran over my foot at lunchtime ...

 

Kew, and back to The Hive

First, the picture postcard view.  When I arrived at Kew this morning, it was looking impossibly beautiful.

I'd come for a couple of meetings, but also to see what The Hive is like in winter.  Maybe it wasn't quite wintery enough, because it was still humming away - a low hum, which one might even call an underhum - but still giving the impression of some wings reverberating in a hive, somewhere.   But there were still plenty of flowers in bloom in the gardens - lavender, wild roses - which presumably would furnish a little nectar for wandering bees.  There hasn't been a hard frost yet. I don't recollect there being bird song on the sound tape before, but that - coupled with some geese honking away outside - was, well, very un-bee like. That's to be pursued ... 

One of the things that struck me very strongly, though, was a different form of organicism: the Hive structure took on something of the appearance of bare branches.

And here it is, looming, a bit like a geodesic dome, behind a plane tree.

Elsewhere, plants are getting trimmed and chopped and winterized;

and inevitably it became grey and clammier.

Back inside, I was thrilled to have a tour of the Economic Botany collection - fascinating curatorial organization by raw materials, not finished artifacts, and yet they were, co-existing, on the shelves - raw rubber next to the world's first (1817) rubber flask.  And yes - a real, original, let's-get-plants-to-Kew Wardian Case.  You can't imagine (well, I know a couple of you can) how exciting I found this encounter with what's almost a legendary object.

 

Democratic government, and other bits of London

As T---- starts to put together his Cabinet of Horrors, it's a good day to post a symbolic reminder of a country that at least has something resembling a democratic government, whatever its problems.

The Houses of Parliament are looking very clean and glittering.  This was on my way back from an expedition to the wonderful Garden Museum, in an old church next to Southwark Cathedral,

with an installation, The Vitrine, by Rebecca Louise Law, on the way in,

and an absolutely fascinating exhibition on The Lost Gardens of London.  Here's just one ... well, there are market gardens in the foreground - it's a Big Dust Heap.  All those of you who have read Our Mutual Friend ...this was on the corner of Gray's Inn Road and Euston Road - i.e. pretty much at King's Cross.

And as a bonus, a statue honoring Mary Seacole, outside St Thomas's: Seacole was from Kingston, Jamaica, and among many other things was a formidable nurse during the Crimean War.