BookCrossing

We ended up back at the London Literature Festival today, not for any particular performance, but rather for its BookCrossing event. BookCrossing is a very simple, rather fantastic activity that you can participate in any time that you want! The main principle is simple: people “release” books (that they’ve finished reading, want others to read, or just don’t want anymore) in public locations, known as “the wild." Each book contains an ID number, a brief explanation of BookCrossing, and the website address. If you find such a book, you go to the website and enter the ID number, which lets the previous owner of the book know the book has been “captured.” Then you are welcome to keep it for as long as you want, but the spirit of BookCrossing also asks you to release the book into the wild again when you’re done with it, along with an explanation of where and when you did so. The hope is that a given book will travel around from reader to reader, rather than getting read once (or not at all) and then sitting on a shelf. It’s an activity that doesn’t require new financial output and will hopefully result in literary gain. Penguin donated 1,000 London-themed books to today’s BookCrossing event, and the books were released into the wild at Southbank. Today’s pouring rain limited the books to indoor locations, but it was still fun to come across books just waiting for new homes. A book exchange shed had been set up behind the Royal Festival Hall,

but most of the books we saw were just sitting on tables, chairs, and banisters throughout the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Some had post-its on their covers saying, “I’m free!” (which isn’t usually part of the BookCrossing ethic),
but others were truer to form, with nothing to identify them as books for the taking
until you opened their front covers. A few of the books we found were part of the 1,000
but we also found two (the two sitting on the table above) which were left by a BookCrossing participant who took advantage of the event to leave some books of her/ his own. These books had the usual BookCrossing tags inside:
From Southbank, we braved the pouring rain as we walked to Borough Market for some delicious lunches standing under the dripping train bridge, then decided to head home to lie around and enjoy our Saturday Guardian in drier surroundings. A wee resident of our street caught my attention on the sidewalk a few houses away from our own:
Bob was concerned that the snail would get stepped on, and suggested moving him away from the curb (or "kerb," as it's spelled here). When I tried to pick him up, it seemed that our little snail friend had already suffered some misadventures, since his shell was a bit cracked. "I can't do it!" I said, as the shell gave way to soft flesh, so Bob bent down and picked up our friend, depositing him on some nearby grass.

One Secret Is to Save Everything

Today is Canada Day in London—Canadians might be a bit confused by this statement, since today is June 29th and Canada’s birthday is on July 1st, and believe me, I share your confusion. Nevertheless, Canada-Day celebrations were held today in Trafalgar Square and Bob and I decided to stop by to see how Canada would be summed up by entertainment, food, and cultural activities. I should preface my review of the event by mentioning that many summers ago, Bob and I did a summer roadtrip across Canada. We drove across every province, including Newfoundland, which we almost balked at after we found out how much the ferries cost, but we rightly figured that it would be a very long time before we were out that way again and so we shelled out the cash in the name of the experience, and I never regret that we did. The more provinces, cities, towns, and countryside we saw, the more our existing belief that any cohesive notion of Canada as singular entity was preposterous rang true, so any attempt at pushing Canadian identity, Trafalgar-Square style, to an audience comprised of Canadians living in London, Londoners curious to see what Canada is all about, and Canadians on vacation in London (yes, I overheard quite a few conversations that suggested that many in the audience fit this description—you’re only in London for four days and THIS is what you want to do while you’re here?) is bound to be rather simplistic, and today’s event was just that—shockingly so. According to today’s lesson, Canadians like listening to folk music (although in all fairness, there were other acts that spanned different genres later in the evening, not one of them my taste),

while snowshoeing

and eating bison burgers (the advertised “Café Québec was nowhere to be found, and this appeared to be the only food kiosk at the event).
Apparently, Canadians are also lacking in proofreading skills: the brochure handed out at Trafalgar Square promises that the last musical performer “will be brining her majesty, artistry and power to ‘O Canada.’” It would almost have been worth it to come back at 21:25 just to see the brining. All of this would have been a bit more palatable if the brochure hadn’t opened with this spiel: “We want to tell the world about the real Canada. Our Canada. It’s vibrant, colorful and filled with progressive people.” The absurdity of using the American spelling of "colourful" in a promise to deliver the “real” Canada just about sums up this embarrassing event. Luckily, we had somewhere else to be this evening, and as we walked across the Thames, we noticed this flag by the London Eye:

“One secret is to save everything” is an installation by British artist Tracey Emin, and I'm not sure how we didn't spot it until now, since the flag has been flying for a few months. Anyway, after stopping on the bridge to ponder what "everything" could be, we got to Southbank a bit early and Bob wanted to sit for a while, so it was a perfect opportunity to pop into the British Film Institute’s Mediatheque for a few short films. They’ve added quite a few films to the database since we were last there and, as with our last visit, the Mediatheque wasn’t full, so it seems like it would always be worth a visit when we’re in the neighbourhood. After we left BFI, we headed next door to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the opening event of the London Literature Festival. I bought us tickets to the reading by Roger McGough and Brian Patten as part of Bob’s birthday present, since McGough is a poet that Bob has mentioned liking on several occasions. I was unfamiliar with most of McGough’s work and hadn’t read any of Patten’s until I head about this show, but can happily balance out my scathing review of today’s Canada-Day event with a much less grouchy one of McGough and Patten, who put on a fantastic performance, full of engaging backstories, humour, and longing. Bob and I agreed that McGough was our favourite of the two, but both poets read out gems, elicited noisy laughter and applause from the audience, and also managed to leave us silent as we reflected over the little sadnesses found in their poetry.

Crystal Palace Park

We arranged to meet Fiona, Max, and Zach (a good friend of Max's) today at Crystal Palace Park for a bit of an afternoon walk--luckily, the rain stopped for a few hours and we had a lovely stroll. We started out in Dinosaur Park, which is filled with representations of how early Victorians saw such prehistoric creatures:

An active turtle (by turtle standards--every time we turned around, so had he!) and a family of ducks frolicked around the sculptures:

Max gazed over at the dinosaurs but didn't require the extra entertainment, and was instead content with a stick, some gravel, and chasing Zach along the path.
Fiona offered to push Max on the merry-go-round, but Max got more enjoyment out of pushing her!
Then it was off to the swings, fun for little boys

and, um, bigger ones too.
On our way out of the park we came across this mish-mash of bodies in less dignified poses than we usually encounter such sculptures in London:

Bags

And I thought I had a lot of plastic bags squirrelled away at home: In London, the blue and blue-and-white-striped bags that fill the majority of the window are commonly used at outdoor markets and small independent grocers, while the orange bags that comprise most of the centre splash of colour are from Sainsbury's. Maybe this is a sly call to shop local? Anyway, I'm not sure whether this is a permanent display or even if the place is occupied or empty, but whatever the case, I think it's rather fantastic.

Listening to Trees

When we got off the bus on the northern side of Kensington Gardens, we soon realised that we hadn't yet wandered much through this part of the park. I loved this drinking fountain, donated by The Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association in honour of their eightieth anniversary in 1939:

The next sculpture we encountered was of Peter Pan,
strangely (at least to me) presented by the story's author, J.M. Barrie, in 1912. Do authors usually donate statues depicting their own works? Anyway, we finally arrived at our destination, the Royal College of Art's summer graduation show, taking place for the first time in a tent near the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens
in addition to the RCA building across the street. One of the artists set up an installation consisting of headphones dangling from this London Plane outside the tent,
giving the public a chance to hear the sound of water being pulled up from a tree's roots.
(I must admit that it just sounded like plain old rushing water to me . . . but I suppose it's still a sound we don't often hear!) Overall, the quality of the work was very high and we spent quite a bit of time wandering through all the different displays. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed in either exhibition space, so the only peek inside I can give you is this assortment of artists' cards that I took from some of my favourites:

Secret Show

A band that I've long been curious to see live is playing a sold-out show to some 1500 people tomorrow night--I heard about the show shortly after it was announced many months ago, but since we didn't know whether we'd be in London or Vancouver toward the end of June (we initially thought Bob's mum's surgery would take place around now, before it got pushed ahead and then back and then ahead and then back again), we didn't book ourselves into anything so far ahead. So, with these circumstances in mind, I was ecstatic to find out a few days ago that Beirut were playing a "secret" free show tonight, in advance of tomorrow's Koko show, and just days after appearing at Glastonbury. I don't know how "secret" the show ended up being, since we were two of a few hundred people who showed up at Queen Elizabeth Hall's Front Room to hear them play, but secret-or-not, it was a fantastic one-hour performance, with all the energy, personality, and infectious music that I was expecting from the band.



Led by wonderkid Zach Condon (all of 21 years old), Beirut has been described as a "Balkan pop orchestra," and the seemingly confusing description for a group of young Americans shy of an orchestra in numbers but not in ethic actually sums up their sound pretty well.

UpMarket

It's not every day that a dog gets a plaque, albeit a bit of a ramshackle one, but a plaque all the same:

Today was Bob's birthday and I had planned on taking him out for breakfast to celebrate, but we ended up doing some spectacular Sunday-morning lazing around the house instead, so breakfast out will have to wait (with the added bonus that, as of today, there's only one week left until the smoking ban kicks in). When Bob requested a particular modest lunch spot instead, we headed down to Brick Lane for Beigel Bake's glorious salt-beef bagels
and Bob proclaimed the chocolate brownie to be "too much chocolate," which is probably the first time I've even heard Mr. Chocoholic claim that he might not be able to finish anything chocolate. (Of course, being the birthday boy, he somehow found room to polish it off.) After our delicious streetside lunch, we wandered down Brick Lane, which was quite busy with the usual last stallholders and crowds of Brick Lane Market, as well as people out to see the latest installment of Free Range.
Photography was the medium of the current displays, and we wandered through a few buildings, where we got a good look at the photos
and the street below.
Last time I was at Free Range, I mentioned wanting to try out the Truman Brewery's Sunday UpMarket, so today we headed in that direction, past the permanent displays of cars in various states of disarray, just beyond the car park ("That's not a good incentive for parking there," Bob said):
The UpMarket turned out to be fantastic,
with a wonderful combination of independent designers
and tempting food. One of the first stalls we saw was one selling Japanese food, including summer ices, edamame salads, and, yes, sushi. When I saw these lovely inari (deep-fried tofu) pockets stuffed with sushi rice, egg, salmon, one edamame (soy) bean, and a perfect carrot flower, I had to buy some:
They were delicious, with a wonderful mix of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter; the sushi rice was seasoned perfectly. When it's Bob's birthday in Vancouver, I always take him out for sushi dinner, but since we have yet to find eat-in sushi here whose quality and price make us happy, we were very pleased with our little sushi treats--and it allowed me to still technically buy Bob sushi for his birthday! At the very back of the market, we had one more small treat:
Seasoned and fried rice balls with a bit of nori at the base, perfect for holding the hot rice while you eat it, these onigiri were deliciously salty and crunchy. Strangely enough, the UpMarket was the first London market we've encountered that featured a number of stalls selling Japanese prepared foods, and we wished we were less full from lunch so that we could try many of the other Japanese temptations, as well as the great-looking curries and salads. In the end, moderation won out and we decided to make our next UpMarket visit on empty stomachs. After we left the market, we continued walking through the East End, encountering more of my favourite shutters
and an unusual view of the Gherkin:
We stopped by Whitechapel Gallery, which is currently accessible via this great alleyway while they undergo renovations,
and then slowly made our way up to Camden Arts Centre for what we thought would be a relaxing sit in their lovely café (which turned out to be a hectic scramble for a table, since there was a performance in the garden today) and a peek at the current exhibits which close later this week. After supper and more wandering in the on-and-off rain that followed us around all day, we decided it was time to get out of the rain (and wind!) and get home. "But the weather's always nice on my birthday," Bob lamented, and in Vancouver, that's true, but London didn't seem to cooperate this year. In the end, even though I had planned on taking Bob on a London Walk for his birthday (he decided to wait for better weather before taking me up on my offer), we had a good day of our own London walking. By the time we got home, a bit chilled, the unseasonable weather was a good excuse for Bob to warm up by digging into one of the two ales that I got him as part of his birthday present: Stinger ended up being the birthday ale, and although Bob was a bit worried about the promised "tongue tingling," it turned out to be more marketing alliteration than injurious side-effect. Too bad it wasn't a month ago, though: Bob could have made his ale-drinking part of this very odd special week!

End

"The Royal Borough" of Kensington and Chelsea is putting on a fascinating array of free events this month and next under the title InTransit, and when Bob was still in Vancouver, I booked us into two events. (If there's anything London's taught me so far, it's that you need to book as soon as you find out about something, or it fills up quicker than a Vancouverite can say, "Well, I'm thinking about going . . .") Our first InTransit activity was today; I thought the description of Oh Doh (Japanese for "King's Road," the high street on which most of our walk would occur) was wonderfully promising, but had no idea what to expect, other than the fact that the artist, Kazuko Hohki, was meant to be great. Adding to my curiosity and confusion was the email I received a few days before the walk, which read:

*

Hello Jenny

I know that things are very strange for you at the moment, but I hope you are managing to cope. I was most sorry to hear of your bad news but I hope that I might be able to help you in some way.

This is not because what has happened is in any way my fault, it is just that I am a quite nice person.

Or at least I was.

And you thought things were confusing for you. To be honest, I’m also rather baffled by much of what has been going on of late, but I am confident that things will become clearer if you follow the simple instructions below.

I hope that you will be so good to come to the Chelsea Theatre at 10.45 am on Saturday 23rd June. It is a charming place with many comfy sofas. Once there, please ingratiate yourself with the Box Office staff, who will furnish you with necessary items. I then ask that you say a brief hello to your fellow travellers and wait until you receive word from my associate, the esteemed Kazuko Hohki.

Miss Hohki will help you to no end.

Best wishes and love to all,

Your friend,

Sir Thomas More

*

After I got over the confusion of the letter's first paragraph, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be good,"--and I'm happy to say that it was rather amazing! We arrived at the Chelsea Theatre at 10:45 A.M., as instructed, where posters highlighting the notion of "the end" were plastered outside. Once inside, we were given another letter, this time from Kazuko, thanking us for "travelling so far at a difficult time" and letting us know that she would be meeting us for tea and rice crackers along our journey. Until then, we were to wait until 11:00 A.M. for our journey to start. While we waited, this man mixed the oddest looking "drinks" and silently served them to people milling about the theatre entrance:
At 11:00 A.M., a woman told our group that we were going to meet Kazuko, and off we went along King's Road, where we saw some odd sights, like this man singing and playing his guitar while it was still in the case, and
this King's Road landmark: a clock that spins counter-clockwise (or anti-clockwise, as I think it's called here) at a rapid rate.
We arrived at the swank Bluebird shop, where Kazuko was ready with mugicha (cold barley tea) and o-sembei (rice crackers) to fortify us for our journey. The snacks were set up near the dressing rooms
and Kazuko showed us "her" room, where she said she lived:

Kazuko told us that she loved the concept of "end" and endings, and that today's walk would be about various ends in and around King's Road. She also said that she was fascinated by death and decay, which was why she lived in England. Her assistant began addressing today's theme of endings by demonstrating the ends of two explorers--here she is showing us the "length" of their accomplishments (ahem)
before they came to a disastrous end in the sea (the blue bag is the turbulent water, the upside-down rice bowl is the island the explorers were trying to reach, and the explorers' ship is being thrust up and down in the sea):
We left the "English capitalist shop" (as Kazuko called it) and began our walk, with Kazuko leading us to our next unknown destination. As we began spotting more performers along our path,
we began looking at everyone on the street, wondering if they were part of the performance too. Suddenly, Kazuko turned and entered this chocolate shop!
After a minute or two of talking in the shop, a door behind the counter opened and this woman walked out:
One of the two children in our group whispered to his mum that he wanted to give the lady one of their wet-wipes, which I thought was very considerate, but the chocolate-lover was clearly enjoying her addiction and even wanted to convert us:
When she made lines of cocoa powder and proceeded to snort them, we realised that her addiction was a bit extreme!
After saying goodbye to the woman who met her end in chocolate, we left Rococo, where this priest called one of us forward:
This woman was looking for her lost puppy,
our friends from earlier were busy cleaning,
the bartender was now waiting at a bus stop that was temporarily out of use,
and the sands of time poured out of this woman's hands
while she pondered her end.
What must all the people walking along King's Road have thought of these odd sights? Although I was busy keeping my eyes open for the next performer, I also looked at passers-by, trying to gauge their reactions. In true London form, no one on the street seemed to be stopping or even wondering what was going on. Only the staff inside shops, who were insulated from the street by that all-important layer of glass, allowed themselves to stand near the windows with confused looks on their faces. Our next stop was outside Starbucks, where this woman kneeled, apparently frozen:
Now, we thought this man was part of our group (in fact, we even spoke with him briefly before we left Chelsea Theatre), but upon seeing the woman, he pulled flowers out of his jacket, apologised for being late, pulled a boom box out of his backpack, took the woman's hand,
and off they went! We looked around at the rest of our group, wondering if anyone else would suddenly become part of the performance--so now we were suspicious of everyone! This football player performed warmups for us in the crosswalk,
and rather disturbingly, this woman stood in the middle of the sidewalk, silent and unmoving.
(No passers-by stopped to inquire if she was alright--but when Bob paused near her, she suddenly grabbed his arm and looked tearfully into his face, still silent.) Our next stop was at
where Kazuko told us she was going to ask if we could come inside to relax and have some cold lemonade, since she's heard that "conservatives are charitable and caring." She banged on the door, rung the bell repeatedly, and yelled through the mailslot: "We are travellers in need of some cold lemonade. Can we come in and have some cold lemonade?" But it turns out that we couldn't. Our next stop was at a church garden/ graveyard, where some unconventional preaching was going on:
Our pair of lovers frolicked around the fig trees (yes, more fig trees!)
and then a door opened at one end of the garden and out marched Henry VIII.
He gleefully showed us all of his wives
and even more happily demonstrated their various ends:
We were led into one of the buildings adjoining the garden
where we met Sir Thomas More (he of the strange email) and he and Kazuko talked about various dead people and their ends (including Sid and Nancy in this photo).
They then passed out identities to all of us, with name tags and tales of our particular ends. Bob was Quentin Crisp
and I was T.S. Eliot.
We then sang a song about Utopia
and Sir Thomas More told us that he would now take us to Utopia, if we wanted to go. When Kazuko said that she wanted to go too, he told her that she couldn't come with us and that she would have to find her own Utopia. She was understandably heartbroken.
We were also told that the various people we'd seen along our journey were also eager to go to Utopia, and that they might want to come along, but that we should ignore them and resist their attempts. The woman holding time seemed upset about this
and when we got into two minivans to drive to Utopia (didn't you know that you could drive to Utopia?), all the people we'd seen surrounded the cars like a scene out of a zombie film.
This was the sight out of my window:
As we slowly drove away, they chased us,

but they eventually tired and we arrived at Utopia . . . which appeared to be a highrise council flat! As we milled about, the lovers appeared from behind a dumpster and the man gave a rousing rendition of Sinatra's My Way, in Japanese-- "And now, the end is near . . .":
Here's the dramatic ending of the song:
We all crammed into one of the lifts and found ourselves outside a flat, where a woman in the role of a 1930s socialite welcomed us ("Hello Quentin! It's been too long!") and ushered us inside for tea and biscuits. My mug had Princess Diana on it, and I think some of the other mugs were similarly themed with ends. We sat around, enjoying our refreshments
and the views
while we listened to Kazuko talking about Utopia on this reel-to-reel machine:
When her talk ended, so did the tape, as it nicely flicked back and forth when the reel ended. After thanking our host (whose mother kept peering out from the kitchen, staring at the craziness going on in her flat), we descended to ground level, where the dejected group of Utopia-seekers scowled at us:
We walked back to Chelsea Theatre, where we were led into a completely dark room, and stood in expectation for a minute before a blinding light turned on, spotlighting Kazuko sitting in the stalls:

She told us how she hoped we enjoyed Utopia and wished that we would each find our own Utopia in time and then another door opened and Oh Doh was finished--but not before we all got goodie bags from Rococo, which included artisan chocolate bars. An amazing free performance AND free chocolate (worth £3.75 a bar)? You really can't beat that. Our other souvenir from the day's walk was the booklet of "ends" that Kazuko handed out:
After our long walk (the performance took about ninety minutes), we wandered around the neighbourhood some more, coming across an Oscar Wilde plaque, before we did some more wandering around Covent Garden, where we witnessed a performance of a different sort. This "small builder of the year" drove down down Long Acre, performing ballads in his van's amplified sound system:
Maybe our King's Road paranoia (Is everyone around us a performer?) was more rational than we thought!