1788 Connection with Kensington

(Notes from a Kensington Coffee Shop - across from the St Mary Abbots Church)

Moss leaks down the stone in green shadows, crowning the heads of stone characters in a very hip luminescence which would earn high praise in the night club across the High Street. From outside, the stained windows are slate black and their colour is lost to us. The sun pokes through occasionally and with the help of the stirring maple trees dapples the stone and windows in blotches of moving light, drawing soft oranges and blues from the windows and lightening the stone, giving it life.

Kensington rushes past Francis Hepburn , buried here in February 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived in Australia. As I rub the dirt and leaves from the engraved letters of her name there is a surreal moment of compressed time and a strange connection made with this place, based on those dates. While Kensington bustled about its ordinary business and Francis was but a month from her grave Sydney cove watched in silence and wonder at the apparition of the fleet - soon proven to be real enough. What was happening in this parish while the fleet was settling into Sydney Cove? The connection seems all the more real for the current existence of this church building, linking time, place and visitor in a surreal way, with the help of Francis' passing. I wonder what she would make of my musing on her helping make a connection with this place.

Heathrow Security - A Joke?

I see the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have grumped about the apparent security mess at Heathrow. Glad they have said what the rest of us were thinking. Especially when they seem so out of step with everyone else. Especially the ridiculousness of the one bag rule. Never mind that the screeching middle aged women (whose families are no doubt glad they are at work) telling you that only one bag is allowed have no idea why. In fact yesterday a BA cabin manager, when asked, had no idea why the rule was imposed either. Most folk, myself included, are happy to buy into an amended rule or process if we know why. We aren't all dullards from Brixton going to Spain for our annual Vitamin D dose. In the last six weeks I have transited Heathrow twice. Each was a horror experience.

In the first case I was transferring to BA to travel to Europe. With a small bag and laptop, both security cleared through Sydney AND Singapore. Sadly Mrs Bucket thought that was not enough and one or the other had to be consigned to the hold. OK for me in that case but very tough for parents and other travellers with extra bags who suddenly had get everything into a single bag. No warning. It is something you discover after you depart your aircraft and are attempting to reconnect to another flight. And you find yourself in along queue for 30 minutes before the rule is barked at you. Leave the queue to check in one of the pieces at a separate counter and then rejoin the queue. I was sweating making my connection.

In the second instance (yesterday) I was departing Heathrow for the US - this time with laptop and samples. No go. Repack. Again no warning for the first time traveller but I was partially prepared given the previous experience going to Europe. Strangely British Airways reckons it is a government imposition. I thought it was an airline rule and could understand it being in place as a result of some sort of cabin management effort. Any security experts out there with any idea why this rule is helpful?

Heathrow is a second class shambles at the best of times. But this new imposition only creates staggering queues (legendary enough to make it onto YouTube) and convinces the cynic in me that these devices are employment ploys - designed to employ middle aged harpies who feel the need to boss a bunch of tired travelers around. Trouble is, these days you can't give them a piece of your mind. If you do there is every chance you will be in breach of some sort of anti terror legislation. Off to Guantanamo Bay, you with the two (small) bags and smart lip!!

In Lincoln Inn Fields

Lincoln Inn Fields is a very pleasant London park well hidden from the regular tourist beat, not far from Fleet Street and the British Museum. When I dropped past it was home to a couple of homeless men who were stretched out asleep in the sun, while other "classes" played tennis nearby. The sleepers were in stark contrast to the towers of the Courts of Justice nearby or the residences of Holborn. Typical of any city really.

My English master warned of trying to rip off a few words to invent a poem, especially if you are not the poet laureate. Sound advice if you tried to do just that in an English exam – the first two lines were outstanding, the rest (about 100) pure twaddle. That is probably the case here too but these lines were ripped down while I sat on a stone step in Lincoln Inn Fields this afternoon and thought about where these homeless men had found themselves. With a bit of luck that English master won’t see this blog – the hacked meter would give him a heart attack.

In Lincoln Inn Fields
I will lay me down
Under Holborn’s money towers
My bed a public lawn.

In Lincoln Inn Fields
The thok of happy tennis
Played by “your Honour”
Reaches my ear on the lawn.

Behind Lincoln Inn Fields,
Lawyers wigs for sale.
My head is crowned with grey:
Backpack pillow on a damp lawn.

At Lincoln Inn Fields
I read inscribed in stone
Second Viscount of Hambeldon was
A man unselfish – to the bone.

In Lincoln Inn Fields
I dream that such might be
But Second Viscount anything
No hand stretched out to me.

Ah, in Lincoln Inn Fields
“neath singing maple leaves
My chancery lawn is bed enough
Wrapped in a summer breeze.

But Lincoln Inn Fields
Is a harpy when she’s drawn,
You’ll find my bed has shifted
Come autumn’s chilly dawn.

From Lincoln Inn Fields
I’ll shift, tho not very far,
Sadly not under any tidy roof,
Of Holborn’s slate and tar.

Homeless at Lincoln Inn Field
Pack for pillow, lawn for bed
Holey socks and rubbish bin coat
Bad dreams in this down, grey head.

Play your tennis,
Shout your sporting joy,
Relish your Chancery high houses
Justice cares less for this old boy.

I’ll settle for the thrush and blackbird
The Constable cloud wallpaper
The orchestra of the rustling maple leaf
And, alas, the lawn of the Lincoln Inn Fields.

Kensington Gardens

Every day is a new experience. And full of new things. Of discovery. Even if that discovery is not pioneering and others have been here before you. And even if the names of the places are so very familiar. I step into Kensington Gardens from off Bayswater Road and am confronted by a sprawling acreage that is full of surprises. And discovery. Its size for a start. The open park come farm feel to the place. Stretching into the distance are chestnuts, beech, oaks and elms, sentinels to pathways and mown edges but most commonly ruling over the unruly and the unkept. Knee high, unmown grass covers most of the place. Dogs love it. Little boys with sticks do what little boys with sticks do. Every now and then you spot the raised knees of someone lying on their back, the rest of them hidden by the grass. Every so often you are startled by the prostrate, bleached white body of a Londoner, in nothing but their swimwear, trying to get some Vitamin D. Although the day is pleasant the sky is a John Constable - more cloud and light than sunlight and blue sky, although patches of that appear through the racing, tumbling clouds. Couples meet for lunch. A scarf covered head has leaning on her the swarthy head of her husband. From behind, as you watch them silently communicate, clumped down in this open field with the breeze snapping around them you imagine an immigrant’s tale. Comforting each other in this strange land but in a field that accentuates our basic cravings for peace and light – and each other. And maybe a stupid dog.

The foliage skirts of the oaks and chestnuts, hems flapping in the breeze, soon give way to the Serpentine and its green silted waters, Italian fountains and arched bridge. I walk along a railed fence, past Peter Pan being assaulted by tourists, past thick undergrowth and then ripening elderberry and clawing blackberry, its hard green fruit just starting to hint at purple. I half expect Peter Rabbit to come squeezing through the railings but I settle for a hen thrush instead, which scurries across the path in front of me. Under rustling beech leaves old men remove their shoes and socks and wriggle their toes in the turf. Families break open lunches. Kids play hide and seek. A scotch thistle gives up its crown, and seeds lift away on the breeze which, incidentally, carries to me the turbo-fan whine of the unending stream of aircraft on long finals into Heathrow. These gardens are a plane spotters delight.

I eventually give in and make like a Londoner, find my own patch of wilderness field and disappear into the undergrowth. As I do so I discover I am checking were I put my feet in case there are any snakes – we are products of our places too. Thrips leap to the white page of the journal and scurry about. A spider runs up the spine and grass seeds are startled by my movement and rain across the pages. In the end the thing most synonymous with this country (OK, apart from the Queen, the Tower and Beckham) moves me on – the ground is damp and the stained patches on my pants had better be dried off before I hit the streets. Only a bleached Londoner could lie in this damp stuff in only his Speedos and figure he was onto a good thing. Perhaps he actually is. Some things are just beyond figuring out.

The British Museum

This museum is a zoo! A human zoo. Summer in London and its school holidays and they are here from all corners of the earth looking at all corners of the earth. Fancy a quiet afternoon wandering a whisper quiet, hushed monument? Best go somewhere else. Here a heaving, chattering throng, charging through ancient Egypt, classical Greece and Imperial Rome. School kids from Korea shout into their mobile phones and attempt to answer a written quiz on Celtic England. Their mystification is complete. Tour groups of Chinese throttle along through broken faced Greek statues as they manoeuvre to the next talking point behind a guide holding a little flag up high. Japanese tourists look on in disdain – such travel and guide methodologies are so passé! But they still happily snap away like their parents and grandparents did and cannot resist posing in front of anything standing still – which is course just what they have in spades here. But they snap without too much discernment I suspect. I wonder what Grandma will think of the pose in front of a broken penised Greek god. The marble testicles will show up quite nicely beside her left ear though.

Eastern Europeans outnumber us all. In and out of the museum it seems. They are in a rush to catch up methinks, and they crowd in solemn assembly around Assyrian bull gods, admire Islamic glassware and linger over the mummies of Egypt. I am plagued by a precocious loud mouthed twelve year old from Michigan who is embarrassing his siblings and parents with his know-it-all commentary. We even got the atomic weight of gold as we admired ancient Chinese coins. Despite a crowd of ten thousand he found me in Napoleonic Europe, North European prehistory, Korean prints and even in the book shop where I think his parents were trying to escape him (His older brother had taken a couple of swipes at him in the bookshop which did not connect, and my uncharitable self fancied I should hold him still while brother took another swing at him). I can thank him though for saving me some money – I fled his lecture on the rules of chess in Anglo Saxon times before I could spend anything in that shop.

July 2007

A Grand Piano in McDonalds - Now I Have Seen Everything!

It might be raining in the rest of England but London is strangely unaffected. The Thames has a boiling roil of water heading down it and the broken banks visible as you tun to land at Heathrow suggest things are not as the should be. But except for the perfectly inane 24 hour coverage on Sky News you would not know this place had been washed out. It is a mild day, sunny on occasions and High Street in Kensington is as you would expect it to be, with its flower baskets, shoppers, children on holidays and all nationalities mixed up in this cosmopolitan hub. I have to confess to being a cultural Philistine by eating at McDonalds the morning I arrived. As I sat in the window I was amused to watch the two Chinese drivers of a DHL delivery van get booked in the 4.8 seconds they were away from their vehicle by a couple of African giraffes, who if any taller would have been bumping the flower baskets as they casually sauntered along the pavement in that peculiarly rolling African way, issuing their tickets. But the incongruous cultural highlight this morning comes not from the crowds outside, but from inside McDonalds. Tucked into a corner is a grand piano – electronic, so of course it is tinkling away by itself. A grand piano in McDonalds?! I am not sure if that is a marketing misstep by McDonalds or whether someone feels a Kensington fast food joint should look and feel a bit more upmarket. I cannot think why.

An Earls Court Lunch

The service is unclear, hesitant and slow. Fish and chips are de rigueur in this part of the world are they not? So let’s order that. I sit on a high-stool 3 metres from a staring bank of faces captured by a double decker bus, which is leaning towards me as it tilts at rest on the camber of the road. A rat tailed Rastafarian looking Caribbean dude is plunking coins into a slot machine which makes mechanical noises back at him for a while then goes silent. It’s the conversation of a tyrannical mistress – stony silence and folded arms, toe tapping even, and bright luminous look . So he makes more conversational noise as he feeds her what she wants. She wins of course. They always do.A fifty something woman sits on her high chair under Sky News describing floods in Tewkesbury. A blond ten year old brat of a boy glares at her from the other side of the menu and demands his meal now! Her shabby clothes, ruddy cheeks, bulging midriff, and thin black eyebrows (why do they do that?) tell their own battling story.
At the bar a sixty something fellow with an open face, goofy smile and the startled look of someone who has had too much cosmetic surgery leans on the bar attempting to look suave. His badly done, patchy, kitchen sink hair dye undoes all the work his flashing cuff links and gums are doing to impress a blond in high heels. Initial impression is “sad case” but as lunch wears on and I hear his polite patter, and especially after she leaves with him that turns (slightly) to admiration. He is working jolly hard. But I hope he has invested in plenty of Viagra - the amount of sherry he toasts her with then sculls means he won’t be getting it up on his own for at least 24 hours. But maybe that is why she is putting up with all this attention, knowing she is under no threat of anything except a free lunch of bangers and mash and some inane toasts to her perfect cleavage.

Stonehenge

It is 0430 in the morning. In this part of the world the sky is light and on this particular morning surprisingly clear. Frank has roused me from bed with the promise of a farmer’s breakfast . He won’t tell me where. “Just get going boy, we need to beat the crowds.” Crowds lining up for a farmer’s breakfast in England?! I have to see this. He grinned as he went out to warm up the Antichrist, the nickname for his treasured VW Combi. We drove into a clear day, clattering down lanes and between hedgerows wide enough only for the AntiChrist. In some places so narrow the oaks and hawthorns gave us a firm brushing clean. Pity help us if anyone was coming the other way. But at this time of the morning no one was about. Which was Frank’s point all along – there were no crowds at Stonehenge. Only the two of us. No traffic humming past. No ignorant commentary around us. Just the silence, a clear sky, a couple of unseen larks, and a warm sun. And none to see us jump the fence (access is normally via a steep fee and through a tunnel under the road from a car park a few hundred metres away) in order to get a decent photo. Then off to that breakfast. Well earned by the time we got there. And no crowds in the diner either.
May 1995

Paul Potts Wins

It has been a meteoric rise for Paul Potts, the Welsh cell phone salesman with the dodgy teeth. Last night he won the talent contest (Britains Got Talent) in which he caught everyone's imagination (and emotion) when he sang Nessun Dorma. Video clip here. There has been a lot of churlish stuff out there about how he does not measure up to the greats (it is easier to tear down that to build up, after all). But my sentiment about seeing an underdog get up still stands. And I love his win all the more for his:

• modesty,
• appreciation of the public support,
• apparent genuine surprise at the public support
• ignoring the disbelief of the judges, though he could see it in their faces (and we could see the hurt in his),
  
• lack of pretension
• complete lack of any pop idol imagery, preening, or strutting,
• lack of any sense that the world owes him anything (item above refers),
• having a go,
• ignoring any post performance detractors,
• ability to evoke all that emotion in the audience, and the rest of us,
  
• loving the ride (the bus (on a rollercoaster) he does not want to get off),
• his surprise at the results in each three "sing-offs"
• hangdog face (behind which I suspect he has long learned to mask what he really thinks and feels), and
• his new-found appointment to sing before the Queen.

Its all good and I feel very pleased for him. Bizarre isn't it - all the way around the other side of the world, of a nationality we Australians just love to beat in anything in which we are competing, and he is getting this response. The internet is a great lesson in how our humanity is connected, even at emotional levels - not just via our computers. Good on you Paul.

Paul Potts - Cell Phone Salesman The Next Pavarotti

This week we watched (thanks to YouTube) an amazing performance by Paul Potts in a British talent quest, a performance that had many of us in the office in tears. It is a moving effort. But what I love about this song is his complete overturning of a cynical, even hostile judging panel. OK, they are paid to insert some drama into these things. But watch them sit slack jawed as he sings his Operatic piece. Watch the rolled eyes and sense the disbelief when he tells them he is going to sing opera. Then watch their transformation. There is something else I enjoy about this as well - Paul Potts, insofar as anyone can tell through the filter of the media, is a pretty unassuming guy. He has zero tickets on himself, seems like a thoroughly nice guy and just gets up there and lets rip. And for a chap who seems to have had bit of a rough run at life this is a nice turn around for him. Watch the audience in tears and then on their feet as they recognise what they are seeing and hearing. It always warms the heart to see an underdog win.

Watch it yourself and let me know your reaction. Once you have cleared the tears.

By the way, he went on and won the semifinal tonight.

Heathrow

A clear spring day. Sunday morning and in this part of the hemisphere the sun has been up since before 5am. It now glances white light off the American Airlines 777 sitting beside us. It is a marked change to the inbound flight last week when the day was overcast and the feeling of depression was only exacerbated by the abruptness and churlishness of the airport staff who conducted themselves in the finest “British Rail” service which was legendary in the pre privatised world we know today for its appalling indifference.

This used to be the busiest airport in the world. It still may be. Certainly the experience of not having enough gates for the aircraft arriving here underscores that claim. When I was a kid the closest airstrip was a sharply inclined strip of grass which ran to the top of a small knoll (used by an agricultural pilot sowing super phosphate) the notion that an airport handled an aircraft a minute was nigh on incomprehensible. So it is with some satisfaction and irony that I note the guy loading this aircraft sitting down on the luggage escalator and taking it easy. It is Sunday morning after all. Heathrow or not.

Things That Alert You to the Passage of Time

Your son rings you and tells you he is getting married.

• The new jet fighter announced by the government when you joined the military are now in a wind-down program and replacement types have been approved.


• New employees have birth dates after the date you joined the workforce.


• The very latest Main Battle Tank (MBT) in secret development when you joined the military is now sitting in a museum, with enthusiasts keeping it alive.

Here it is here. The British Challenger MBT boasted all sorts of innovation but especially the revolutionary CHOBHAM armour (now used by the US Abrams MBT). That it sits in a museum is fair enough given a second generation Challenger is in use. But it does only seem like yesterday that it was being introduced into service.

Aldershot

In my early teens I devoured a series of books which followed the fortunes of a new infantry officer in the British Army as he joined his regiment and then found himself engaged in various scrapes in Europe. Boys Own stuff. I cannot remember who he was nor are the story lines at my fingertips. But I do recall the military town of Aldershot figuring in his training at some point and the place has remained linked in my mind to the British Army ever since. If however there was any romanticism attached to the place as a result of those books such sentiment was sadly tempered this weekend. The town does not wear its military history at all. Sitting in the main street drinking coffee the view, conversation and experience is a grey one. A country town slum would be kind. The plumage of colour I took from the books, if ever true, is non existent. The occasional building hints at some history but military barracks are utilitarian in function and most now reflect that in their design. The best I could find that gave any hint of military heritage was the comparatively young officers mess of the Queens Own Gurkha Transport Regiment. I am sure there is history more tucked away but the town hides it very well.

I Was an RSM in the Scottish Blagoons

On a train from Liverpool to London and a short while after leaving Lime Street we pull into a suburban station. Into the carriage climbed a wild eyed man in his late forties, mop of hair coiffed back onto his collar, rings in his ears, spare tire around his waist and shirt hanging out. Stumbling as if the train was in motion. With his missus. Looking for a seat. Which he never took but on which he propped his case. She took a seat and roused at the lively “Billy” who proceed to swear his way up and down the carriage as he made conversation. Nothing violent at all – more in the vein o f another Scottish comedian called Billy. They fuelled themselves up with more vodka and proceeded to keep us entertained for a large portion of the trip. When they discovered they had missed their stop they simply laughed.

In fact the couple were a perpetual laugh machine. He had the dry wit of a Glaswegian and the swearing to match. Not in an offensive way (most of the time) but she was alternating between scolding him for swearing and bursting into giggles. Which only encouraged him some more. He refused to sit down and paraded up and down the aisle provoking and prodding with his wit to get responses from us. Her giggles only fuelled him on. Both of these folk were in their late forties but were giving the inner child free rein. Despite this she was concerned at one point that they might get kicked off ‘again”. It tempered his madness very little. Turns out he was a truck driver who drove all over Europe but had lost his license due to drink driving. Was a little over three weeks from having it reinstated. He was going to have to work very hard to be sober in time to pick it up.

There are numerous highlights from that trip which are almost impossible to translate onto the page. One gem went thus: in a moment of complete seriousness he informed us he was a former Regimental Sergeant Major of the Scottish Blagoons. Hissed out three or four times as he very earnestly strained to get his drunken tongue around the words. But the “you had to be there moment” was the moment Billy’s heart stopped when one of the women sitting opposite us informed him she was a vicar. The tone of the trip changed, the swearing vanished (though it was still noisy) and Billy set about convincing her he was not a bad person. Somehow atoning for all the madness that had gone on before - especially given he had just been telling her he could bring any woman to the best orgasm she ever had (in the background his missus was decrying his claims, amidst much giggling). Later, as we disembarked we complimented the vicar on how well she handled Billy. She fessed up to being a prison chaplain, so Billy was no challenge at all.