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.

 

Hampstead

The truly weird thing about being in Hampstead is how very like 20 Hillside it feels when I look out of the window (it's a little too chilly for sitting outside).  Much of today I had my head down working, but I did go for walks this morning and afternoon to try and orient myself a bit better.  Observations: it's very hilly!  (so, for that matter, is Wimbledon).   There are lots of huge - really huge - red brick houses, and, in West Hampstead, lots of very tall, imposing mansion blocks.

Then, as it started to get darkish in the afternoon, the Heath was - well, leafy, and somehow wilder and not at all like the Common.  

I wasn't, I think, in the best part for views - this is looking towards Cricklewood, I suspect, not the city, and nor did Constable paint any clouds like this here - not that I remember, anyway.  Indeed, it's got that sickly yellow Millais look ...

Oh, and then, heading down the hill, there are some shops with covetable items.

 

 

Scottish morning, London night

The River Tay at dawn; Hampstead at night.  One of the things I've learned over the last couple of days is that all those yellow skies in Millais paintings aren't discoloration, or some weird penchant on his part - but the sky actually looks like that in Perthshire.

Then a seven and a half hour train journey, and now a VRBO in Hampstead - chosen quite deliberately because it's not Wimbledon, but is a very different part of London, that I don't know at all (if I did, I might have realised I was staying - so far as I can tell - a long way away from any shops).  Luckily (because I had to set down my bags and jump into a long meeting), the owners left me some food. A slightly odd selection, very much aimed at breakfast - bread and croissants and eggs, and orange juice, and milk.  But also ... a bottle of prosecco, and masses of fruit - plums and satsumas and apples and raspberries, and a bag of Maltesers, and some chocolate cookies, and ... a packet of six mince pies.  

It's very, very quiet here.  Apart from eating fruit, I have variegated research outings, and friends to see, and intend - seriously intend - to use this as a tiny sliver of a writing retreat.

 

more Millais, and add in Landseer

This isn't dew drenched furze.  First, because there wasn't any dew, any sun - unlike the day that Millais was stopped in his tracks by beauty when heading off shooting, and turned back to get his paints.  But it's a similarly shaped clearing at Murthly.  Actually, there isn't any furze, either, only rhododendrons, which suits my argument perfectly, although I miss the furze.

A fair proportion of the Murthly Estate now seems given over to commercial logging.

But the central avenue up to Murthly Castle would be more or less as Millais would have known it - although I suppose the trees might be a bit taller: they'd have been only about forty or fifty years old in his day.  There were firm No Unauthorized Vehicles sign on the road that led into the estate, but there was a car park in a muddy lane outside, and a handful of other walkers who were tramping the mile or so up the lane - exercising their dogs, or children, not seeking the ghost of a Victorian painter or for that matter Sir William Stewart - the one who introduced (among other things) a couple of buffalo and some Native buffalo stewards.  I kept wondering what the buffalo would have made of it all.  They would have heard the rushing Tay; heard the train chuffing and the train whistle (I hadn't realised quite how close the railway tracks ran to the house that Millais rented, which was demolished when the A9 was built ...).

Stewart's American Garden was finally abandoned in the 1930s: I kept wondering whether US botanical species escaped ... There's also a chapel expanded by Pugin somewhere back there, but I didn't go prowling around too much on a damp and misty morning on land where the footpaths might - courtesy of Access Scotland - be accessible, but I didn't want to be caught trespassing.  It struck me at some point that if Millais were out hunting pheasants on a chill November morning, so maybe were other people.  I saw pheasants, though heard no guns: all the same, it seemed sensible to have been wearing my rather weirdly mustard-colored Barbour.

Here's the obligatory damp Scottish sheep.

And then, driving to where the house that Millais rented would have been, I was reminded of C19th transportation ... one might as well be driving a pony and trap down these roads as anything.

I hadn't pre-planned my next bit of site-specific research, which may have been an error.  I realized that if I drove a couple of miles north, into the true Highlands, I could reach Glen Feshie, which is where Landseer painted, and which is now one of the prime rewilding sites in the Highlands. This was a drive with some stunning moments when the rain briefly cleared - one such moment involving a rainbow, which was truly magical.  But when I got to the Glen Feshie estate, it very firmly was for those Authorized Vehicles only.  Yes, of course I'd have written in advance, if I'd known I was coming, but I didn't.  And I'm sure I could have walked the 4 miles to the lodge, if it hadn't been getting late in the afternoon.  So I had to content myself with recognizing that yes, this was indeed pretty much what Landseer was painting ... 

though maybe not with such gloom as this.

On the way  back, past Loch Insh,

and Insh church - I've only half done justice to its Gothic spookiness -

and then, on the A9 back, I pulled over in a parking layby to look at Ruthven Barracks - site of oppression - built on an old castle mound in 1719 after the 1715 Jacobite rising; besieged in the second Rising in 1745, and instrumental in the Highland Clearances.  Any more of this and I'll be reading Walter Scott.

 

Millais research

I really can't write about Millais and hunting and peat bogs, and so on, without seeing where he painted.  That's my excuse for a couple of nights in Perthshire, anyway.  At the moment, I wish it was a whole week - it's stunningly beautiful, and no wonder he painted so much here in the late autumn.  It's instantly obvious to me that his paintings are a kind of love letter.  This is the Tay - the view from my hotel - where he fished - perhaps not at this precise spot, but about three miles downstream, where I'll head tomorrow.  Obviously it was getting dark when I arrived, and with a thin Scottish rain (think: rental car, driving on the left, tiny amounts of room for passing as I drive through Dunkeld).

So what brings you here, ask the people at Enterprise Rent a Car in Perth.  I explain about Millais, and ask if that's what everyone says.  They look at me as though I'm faintly crazy, and say nooooo, most people's cars have broken down if they come in here ... 

Even from the train coming into Perth, one can see Millais' colors and wetness.

And my argument about the underpinning of this environment by the demands and economics of game rearing/shooting is utterly borne out by all the pheasants on my hotel bed head (and on the curtains, too ...).

 

having fled the country ...

well, don't worry, I'll be back.  I'm in the UK for a very quick blast of research and to see family/friends, but I'd (almost) forgotten how cold and grey London is in November.  Here's my view for the evening - tomorrow I hop on a northbound train early in the morning.

I had to head to an Apple Store in Covent Garden, since I needed a new cable with which to recharge my Apple Watch (I thought that recharging it just before I left the house yesterday would be a suitable prompt to pick it up and pack it, but evidently no ...) - and yes, the Christmas Decorations are already up ... er, festive.  Festive does not describe my state of mind as I flew out: it'll be a week of discussing with completely incredulous British people how 53% or so of voting Americans could possibly vote for That Man (even the Lettuce was chosen internally, not by the country). 

It was, of course, fun wandering round... and now, I hope that I'll sleep.

 

giving the finger

Here's our neighborhood's comment on the President Elect.  Admittedly, this may just be a gory left-over from Halloween, but it's as appropriate - and succinct - a statement as one would wish.

 

today

clearly a catastrophe, whether one's talking about the election or its avatar - whatever happened just down the corridor from my office.  There is a huge damp-looking patch covering the hallway carpet, a missing drinking fountain, and as you can see, the sad inscription out of service. material has been ORDER.  I think that's how we all felt today.  We had a department meeting (the fact that we meet regularly on the first Wednesday of the month is, of course, an emotional liability every four years). This was something of a contrast to eight years ago (four years ago we were on Zoom, because of the pandemic, but in any case [I had to check back] it wasn't called for President Biden until the Saturday - we spent several days in weird limbo).  Eight years ago we were all, unanimously, in black.  Today ... mostly in black, though most of us had made an unconvincing optimistic gesture into ... let's say ... a black and some-other-color scarf.  We were kidding no one with our performed optimism.  Indeed, it was a day of meetings, and that was something of a relief, in the form of displacement activity, at the very least.

democracy at work ...

... on the USC campus.  But who can tell how they're voting?  Yes, I know it's California.  But.  

Sitting watching the results come in.  Georgia just called for Trump.  I never had an especially optimistic view of this election - but part of me suspects that this was a superstitious, cautious, stance to take, hoping that I'd transition into wide-eyed wonder.  It doesn't look like it.  

 

in the 'hood

White roses and skulls; and the blunt message to end all blunt messages.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if, after tomorrow, we didn't have to see that thick orange makeup (and nasty hair) for very much longer on our screens and in our papers ... Mind you, walking around Los Feliz - rather like walking around Eldorado - might be an unrepresentative sample of the total electorate.

All the same ... we're not going back.

 

A collision of ghouls

Really, the collision of horrors is too much - the end of Halloween, and the election on Tuesday.  Kevin de Leon, if you don't know, is the local councilman who was caught making terrible racist comments at a City council meeting - when he wasn't, as he thought, off mike.  

But in less inflammatory news, has anyone else noticed the striking explosion in the number of animal (and bird) skeletons haunting our front yards this year?

 

Storm Cloud, Day 2

When we moved over from the conference hall to the exhibition this afternoon, we had our very own storm cloud - and indeed, driving home, the first rain of the season.  That was a treat - but not as much of one as the conference itself - another excellent morning of papers (half hour, rather than twenty minute, slots really does make a difference to the thickness - in a good way - of argument and example); then an inspiring post-lunch panel discussion about environmental studies and the public humanities; then the show (and how great it was to go round it with truly informed friends, and discuss very nerdy - I mean specialist - details); and then dinner.  I can't believe that it's over - thinking about this has been so much part of my life for the last four years, and I've really loved being a part of it and helping make the conference come together.  Below - Devin Griffiths, and a whole galaxy of Carroll's Alices from Japan; Jesse Oak Taylor and a big fold out Hooker map of the Himalayas, and Eleanor Harvey and some Durand trees.  I learned so much from everyone, and hope someone will have another event soon at which we can continue the conversation.

Oh, and I think that this is what our grass is meant to look like, but it doesn't.  Maybe the rain will help ...

 

Storm Cloud conference, Day 1

There ought to be some witty caption to put under this image, but I can't think of an appropriate one (although it was an odd day for birds - driving away I had, at one point, to stop for a flock of about eight wild peacocks).  It was Day One of the Storm Cloud conference - accompanying the Huntington Exhibition of the same name - and it's been, like the show, about four years in the making.  It was terrific to see it coming into being (terrific to see a lot of friends) - and absolutely every paper was intellectually exciting and fitted well into its particular panel.  I was so happy to have been a co-convener of this ...

 

Happy Halloween

As always, the neighborhood is putting on a fine Halloween show.  Nothing can ever beat the annual Party Girls, who this year are being kept company by an excellent skeletal Archaeopteryx or a version of it.

Then across the street from this exuberance was a decidedly sinister party boat.

The bruja, of course, was wearing her cat on her shoulder, as usual.  Unfortunately I couldn't take him into USC, but I did find a long black dress/coat/thingy, and some designs in the shape of bones for earrings.