England, part 8: The beautiful cat endures

It was my last afternoon in London, and I went to Highgate Cemetery, which was quite close to my hostel. Karl Marx is buried there, beneath an enormous likeness of himself, and there's an odd assortment of other prominent people: George Eliot and Douglas Adams; the father of Virginia Woolf, and the baron who oversaw the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the inventor of Hovis bread and the doctor who devised the vaccine against typhoid in WWI, and a great many artists and firefighters. In late summer, in the brilliant slanting sunlight of late afternoon, it was an uncommonly beautiful place, and I wandered around taking dozens of photographs.

As I pondered the headstone of Herbert Spencer, a group of women and little girls clustered around a gravestone nearby. One of the children wants to know why the dead person wasn't there -- the inscription said he had "gone home." The adults laughed, and one explained that people don't like to say someone died, so instead they say that person "was called home" or "went to his rest" or "fell asleep." But what it really means is that the person is dead.

The little girls wandered around looking at headstones, and one of them found this one:



They clustered around it and conferred.

"It's a dead cat!"
"No it isn't!"
"It is! Look, it says, 'The beautiful cat endures.' It is a dead cat."
"Mummy! Mummy, come look! Mummy a cat died and it's really sad."

This concludes my account of my trip to England! (And it only took me 2 months to get through all the photos!) The whole photoset is here -- do have a look at the photos of gorgeous Highgate, in particular.

England, part 7: Hampstead Heath

My last day in London, a Sunday, was brilliantly sunny and warm, and I went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath. My destination was Kenwood House, but it took me awhile to get there, as I kept getting lost; twice I realized that I'd been walking for 20 minutes in a direction opposite to where I should have been going. But I didn't really mind; I was having a great time rambling around, soaking up the sun and eavesdropping on English people.

Two men in their 40s, walking with wives & strollers.

1st man: ... which worked well with my assistants in Hong Kong, but then it didn't work at all with my assistants in Japan.
2nd man: You have to find a balance. That's the key, finding a balance.

Man in his 40s to female friend: [Happily and somewhat bashfully] ... smart, funny, and she's half-Jewish. Her father's Jewish.
Female friend: [throwing up hands and laughing] Wow!

Londoners make enthusiastic use of their outdoor public spaces in fine weather, I noticed. Both the Heath and Waterlow Park, which I walked through later that day, were full of people having picnics, jogging, playing with their dogs, or just lolling on blankets reading paperbacks.



Full photoset here.

England, part 6: Looking at London from the Tate Modern; Aren't birds brilliant!

I followed up the Tate Britain with a visit to the Tate Modern the next day. I loved the eclectic collection; I was particularly mesmerized by the room of portraits by mid-20th-century West African photographer Seydou Keïta, and by a room in which all four walls, from floor to 20-foot ceiling, were covered with original Soviet propaganda posters. And the Tate's worth visiting for the building alone, a former power station with a vast Turbine Hall at its centre and a 99-metre-tall chimney, from which you get the spectacular city view in the photo above.

The Thames Festival was on, and the riverfront was crowded with people. Directly in front of the gallery, a bandstand and outdoor dance floor had been set up, and a beginners' tango lesson was in progress. I snapped some photos from the chimney with my zoom lens.



In front of the gallery, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had set up a booth & were explaining to people that a pair of peregrine falcons had built a nest way, way up in the chimney. There were binoculars at the booth through which you could look at the nest, though both of the falcons were off hunting when I was there. This was one of a series of RSPB events called "Aren't Birds Brilliant!" You really have to say that out loud with a British accent.

I walked to the British Museum after that; I've been before, and I got there only 30 minutes before it closed this time, but I love the British Museum and it was good to spend a little while poking about in the Enlightenment Gallery. There was a big exhibition on about the Emperor Hadrian, and it was "Roman Life" day at the museum; people dressed as centurions were wandering around having their photos taken with tourists.



Photoset here.

Next: getting lost on Hampstead Heath.

England, part 5: London! Portobello Road, and the first Tate

I took a coach into London on Thursday, did some laundry in my hostel that night, and set out Friday morning. This was my third time in London; I seem to wind up there about once every ten years. I've seen the big tourist draws before: Tower Bridge, St. Paul's, Buckingham Palace. This time, I headed first for Portobello Road. Looked at lovely piles of ephemera and junk; bought a china phrenology head! I am going to put it in my office next term & scare my students with it. Here is what it looks like now, ensconced on my bookshelf at home:



I'd seen ads in the Tube for a big Francis Bacon exhibition that had just opened in the Tate Britain, so I went there next. The permanent collection closed earlier, so I looked at that first. I was standing in the big central hall when a guy in running shorts went tearing past me at top speed, vanishing around a corner at the end. I thought, "Well, that was odd," then when it happened again 30 seconds later I thought, "Aha! Art." I asked a nearby guard about it, and he explained that indeed, the sprinters were part of Martin Creed's Work No. 850. I stood for a few minutes & watch them sprint through at regular intervals. It was pretty great: a nice conceptual counterpoint to all the gorgeous yet static Turners and Rossettis in the galleries.

After that I wandered through the Bacon exhibit. Large canvases of screaming eyeless popes and mashed chimpanzees. This being only the second night, and a Friday, the exhibition was well-attended. There were a few tourists in windbreakers, walking through silently, having run out of things to talk to talk about with their travelling companions; a lot of giddy boys in tight t-shirts, flinging their arms around each other; middle-aged men unremarkably holding hands.

The electricity went out for several minutes. Only the last of the daylight, filtering through the skylights, illuminated the gallery. The handful of tourists were all "What's happening? What's going on?" but the Londoners seemed to take it in stride, like they're used to things fucking up randomly on a regular basis. Soon enough the lights came back on.

All my England pics, including more from Portobello Road, here.

Next: The view from the Tate Modern.

England, part 4: The conference, a castle, random Oxford

The conference, an interdisciplinary meeting on the topic of madness, went very well. The range of presenters -- both geographically and in terms of the kinds of work they were doing -- was remarkable, and at the same time the conference seemed very coherent, as everyone was concerned with the same broad set of questions relating to mental illness and its troubled connections with agency and creativity. This is not an academic blog, though, so I'm going to talk more about the building and the food. The building was Oxford's Mansfield College, a late-Victorian neo-Gothic structure that would not look out of place on U of T's St. George campus. Dinner on the first day, and lunch on the subsequent days, was included with conference registration, and was served in a dining room with vaulted, painted ceilings, halfway up the college's central tower. The food was marvellous: roast lamb with mint sauce, chicken-and-mushroom pies, piles of steamed vegetables, golden roasted potatoes, and for dessert: bread-and-butter pudding with stewed apples and little pitchers of clotted cream. I have nothing bad to say about English cuisine.

Post-conference on the second day, some of us went for dinner at The Big Bang, "Officially the Finest Sausage and Mash in Britain." They serve nothing but mash (potatoes and/or turnips), and sausages. If you are vegetarian, you can have vegetarian sausages. It's a small place, and about a dozen of us descended on it unannounced and were served by a flummoxed but cheerful waitress who seemed to be channelling Emma Thompson circa 1990. I have no idea whether the sausages were indeed the best in Britain, but they were good.

What else did I do in Oxford? I visited Oxford Castle. Its central tower was built by the Normans in 1071, but as I learned on the tour, archaologists now believe there was already a Saxon structure on the site which the Normans took over and built up, and that the Saxons in turn had built on a pre-existing, pre-Saxon burial ground. So: Really old building. It was a castle & a keep, then it was used as a jail for 700 years, decommissioned only in 1996. Now it is partly a museum and partly a "hotel and leisure complex"; you can stay in a jail-cell-turned-hotel-room for up to £300/night, and there is a posh restaurant and a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.

All my Oxford photos are up now. Next: On to London!

England, part 3: There's the dodo! -- and other scenes from museums

The weather was pretty awful -- rainy and cold -- but that made it a perfect day for checking out some of Oxford's fantastic museums.

First: the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This is a Victorian neo-Gothic museum -- opened in 1860 -- stuffed with dinosaur skeletons, insect specimens, cephalopods in jars, and all kinds of other relics of the natural world that are interesting to look at. It was the site of the famous (if largely apocryphal) debate about evolution between T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, and there's a statue of Darwin and a display about evolutionary theory. Also, the museum houses the Oxford Dodo -- the "most complete remains of a single dodo" extant today, along with a model of what a living dodo likely looked like.



Excitable small British child in the Museum of Natural History: "Where's the dodo? Where's the dodo? Where's the dodo? THERE'S the dodo!"

Then I moved on to the Museum of the History of Science, which is apparently "the world's oldest surviving purpose-built museum building" and was "the world's first museum open to the general public" when it opened in 1683 to showcase the collection of Elias Ashmole. (There is now a New Ashmolean, a different museum, which I didn't get to this trip.)

The focus in the History of Science museum is on esoteric and wonderful antique scientific devices of all kinds: clockwork models of the solar system, early cameras and microscopes, the second-oldest grandfather clock in England, etc. Also, a chalkboard which Albert Einstein wrote on when he gave a lecture at Oxford in 1931, which someone had the presence of mind to take down & cover with glass before it could be wiped clean.



More museum photos.

Next: The conference, and random Oxford photos.

England, part 2: Canal, houseboats, friendly cat

I had one full day to explore Oxford before the conference began. I didn't have any kind of plan, but Oxford's pretty small, and I figured it wouldn't be hard to find things worth looking at. I was really jetlagged, but, bolstered by that impressive hostel breakfast, I went out and started walking.

Almost immediately I happened upon the Oxford Canal. Did you know Oxford has a canal? And it's lined with houseboats!

I walked along it for awhile, taking pictures of the houseboats. I saw this cat perched on one of them & tried to take a picture of that, but as soon as the cat saw me, it hopped down onto the path and presented its belly to be rubbed, and then it followed me for awhile, purring.



More houseboat pictures here.

Next: Museums!