London
I’m on the train. I’m wearing a skirt. I’m not wearing High Tops. No, wait, this can’t be me. I wonder where I am?
Hannah’s been over here on business most of this week and I’ve been telling her–frequently–that she’d better be saving me a day or there will be trouble. She’d made the mistake of telling me where she was staying* so I was going to go up today and lay for her if her Sunday off suddenly disappeared.** How to keep your friends: distrust, suspicion and the judicious application of ultimatums. I caught her sneaking across the haunted reception gulag*** bearing a fresh supply of caffeine but she yielded with barely a struggle when I challenged her .†
We went to the National Portrait Gallery†† with the laudable intention of looking at pictures and improving ourselves, and ended up having the longest cup of tea on record at the café, and talking. I admit this was my bad: I have never been good at crowds, and I’m getting worse fast, and a wet Sunday afternoon at a good museum? Brrrrr. Hannah, as a Manhattan working stiff, is accustomed to these things. But I had come up to see her, after all–in theory London is only a couple of hours away from me, aside from little questions of hellhounds and needing thirty hours per to get through my average day–and all those amazingly British faces on the walls of the maze will be there next time (I hope).†††
So we sat in the National Portrait Gallery’s café and talked, and then we went for a walk down Pall Mall and past Buckingham Palace and talked, and then we walked back toward the National Portrait Gallery again and on up Charing Cross and found a restaurant that sold champagne by the glass and went in and had menopausal-women food, which is to say olives, vegetables, and grilled fish, and fortunately it was the sort of restaurant where you have to order bread, which we didn’t, so I didn’t have to tie myself to the mast or anything. Oh, and we talked some more. And I wouldn’t have had to wear a skirt after all, but hey. It’s probably good practise or something. Every now and then I need to pass as a girl.
And now I’m on the train back to Hampshire, and the Great Question Is, Did the Hellhounds Eat Either Their Lunch or Their Supper?‡
* * *
* One of these cutting-edge modernist hotels^ that looks like a big slab of nothing inserted in an old Victorian-brick street and you’re walking by thinking, this is a funny place for a warehouse, or maybe it’s a cinema?^^ And why is there a taxi stand here? And then you notice that you’ve just passed the street number you were looking for . . . Oh. Inside it looks like a bankrupt factory–the bailiffs have taken all the machinery but you think you can see the marks on the floors and walls where it used to be. And not much else. With gloomy indirect lighting and candles on funny blobby end table-y things, and benches instead of chairs, and sudden attacks of dark depressing colours on the walls (gods forbid they should indulge in anything so bourgeois as pictures), and the people sitting at reception look like they’re on trial for particularly nasty crimes. And the lifts^^^. . . the light is purple and it’s so dark you can’t read the control panel. When you get on you have to punch your floor really quickly before the door closes and you can’t see it any more. As Hannah said, if it got stuck you wouldn’t be able to see the emergency button. And there are tiny video screens set into the walls with waving greenery, as if you’re looking out a window, possibly from your submarine, and it’s seaweed.
Her room, after all this^^^^, is tiny but disconcertingly pleasant: the whole outer wall is window, and everything inside is white–except for the very flash black and silver flat screen TV–and the bathroom is a proper bathroom and not a cupboard with a fold-down loo and a fold-up shower. And only one bar of soap. Okay, here’s my question: why haven’t hotels discovered soap-in-a-bottle? Dispensing liquid soap? That they’d only have to top up? So you could have like two soap experiences, one at the sink and one in the shower? Waterloo station has dispensing liquid soap. The ladies’ at Waterloo station, I have to tell you, is actively cultivating the tragically hip vote. It has dispensing soap, electronic eye controlled water, what looks suspiciously like black granite counters and Dyson Airblade hand dryers, which are deeply thrilling and make you feel like you’ve just wandered into Deep Space Nine. It’s also now 30p to get through the turnstile to use all this fancy kit.
^ I wouldn’t know cutting edge if it bit into my flesh. But it looks like something out of a William Gibson novel, okay?
^^ As Hannah emailed me+: Hotel so hip its invisible. Look for taxis in front.
+ From her BlackBerry, where apostrophes are fustian. Please.
^^^ Elevators. Or elevators
^^^^ And I’m sparing you the corridors, which are designed like larger versions of the lifts, only slightly bluer, and without the video screens. But the indiscernibility of the numbering is similar, as is the sense of oppression, and the expectation that Rod Serling will step out of a side corridor any moment now.
** Serious business people travelling on business don’t have weekends, I’ve noticed this before. Serious business appears to be quite a lot like book touring. I’m very grateful I was never drawn to serious businessing.
*** And almost didn’t recognise her in the lighting.
† It’s been a hard week, obviously.
†† Which, long long ago in my tourist days, was ritually my first stop after arrival here
††† I did somehow manage to buy four books at the bookshop however. These things just happen to me.
Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens, because I liked her book on Boadicea, and the one on women in the 17th century
Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500 to 1760, a social history, because how did I miss it?? It’s been out something like twelve years
E H Gombrich, The Story of Art. Yes, that book. Phaidon reissued a really nice, neat, hand-sized, decently bound paperback edition, with, so far as I can tell, all the plates intact, the colour repro not half bad and crucial details like a good legible typeface.
Richard Marsh, The Beetle. Well, that lowered the level. Penguin is apparently reissuing a bunch of classic horror stories: I’ve got most of Gaskell–both her straight stuff and her ghost stories–and more of William Hope Hodgson than is good for me, never mind . . . ahem! . . . looking at the list, everything else on it, (Lovecraft, MR James, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker–he didn’t only write Dracula, you know–Vernon Lee, EA Poe, Wilkie Collins) . . . but I don’t know The Beetle. I know it faintly by rep–it came out the same year as Dracula and, according the blurb, was initially even more popular. Well, have to have that. I read the first chapters waiting for the Leicester Square tube to take me back to Waterloo, and our hero (at least I assume he is our hero) is being scaled by a monstrous beetle. . . .
‡ Yes! YES! YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! . . . Good gods, do you suppose it would happen again, if I went up to London again, on a weekday, say, to check on all those British faces at the National Portrait Gallery?
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