{"id":4942,"date":"2013-10-23T07:40:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T15:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4942"},"modified":"2013-10-23T07:59:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T15:59:03","slug":"england-2-crowds-churches-pub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/23\/england-2-crowds-churches-pub\/","title":{"rendered":"England #2. Crowds, Churches, Pubs"},"content":{"rendered":"

In London, we rode around a lot in those classic double-decker red buses. Public transportation. They\u2019re better than tour busses\u2014you get up on the high level and you really see a lot. And you\u2019re with the locals. And if you get on the wrong bus, doesn\u2019t matter, you\u2019re still seeing London. One \u201cwrong\u201d\u009d bus led me to one of the biggest bookstores in the world: Foyle\u2019s. My old hacker pal John Walker had recommended it to me. Spent a half hour there, comfortable, reading new science books.<\/p>\n

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I was surprised how crowded London was\u2014I have this nostalgic tendency to think of London as lonely and foggy like in an old black and white movie, with echoing footsteps on the damp pavements. Many of the sidewalks were filled to capacity people\u2014particularly a shopping area like Oxford Street on a weekend. And the subway trains can be as full as in NYC or Tokyo.<\/p>\n

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Looking up a site about sizes <\/a>of city-sprawls or \u201cagglomerations,\u201d\u009d I later found Tokyo at #1 with 34 million, New York at #10 with 21 million, London at #24 with 13 million people, and San Francisco (including the whole Bay Area, that is, Oakland and San Jose) at #46 with 7 million.<\/p>\n

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Lots of white people in London\u2014in NYC or the SF Bay Area you don\u2019t see quite as many. And these English white people, they\u2019re really <\/em>white\u2026they\u2019re, like, the archetype <\/em>of whiteness. In the US, we\u2019re programmed by decades of Madison Ave propaganda to think of them as the norm, the Platonic ideal. Many of them are indeed very beautiful or handsome.<\/p>\n

I saw a lots of pairs of young women going around together, like hunting teams, with, almost invariably, one blonde and one brunette. The bare legs often quite doughy. Tough-looking short-haired pasty-faced guys as well. Many interracial groups.<\/p>\n

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Many Indians, Africans, Arabs, and West Indians are in London as well\u2014blow-back from the Imperial days. These two West Indian guys were doing a show in a big square at Covent Garden. <\/p>\n

The deal with these outdoor shows is that you yell for a really long time, it\u2019s your chance to shine, and maybe your eventual tricks aren\u2019t all that amazing\u2014these guys were leading up to a limbo routine. But the crowd enjoys the shouting, the rhythm, and the simple feeling of being in a horde.<\/p>\n

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Peaceful in the churches of course. Sleeping sarcophagus people in Westminster Abbey (or is that the leg-weary Rudy and Sylvia in their hotel room.) Westminster an amazing place, one of those tourist attractions that far outstrips expectations, so full of stuff, with so many levels of detail. Like a fractal.<\/p>\n

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I was ultra-psyched to see Isaac Newton\u2019s grave. Newton! The laws of motion, calculus, the spectrum, gravity\u2014Newton! \u201cHe invented calculus<\/em>?\u201d\u009d said Sylvia dubiously. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s much to be thankful for.\u201d\u009d I stood there for awhile, communing with Newton’s big soul. I dug that they had special spot for the graves of scientists, and other spots for artists, and for writers.<\/p>\n

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Awed and unsure, a woman makes her way past the (replica) sacarphogi in the Victoria and Albert museum. One of those symbols-of-our-daily-life photos.<\/p>\n

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At one point we managed to attend a church service in Christopher Wren\u2019s St. Paul\u2019s cathedral. I liked sitting there with the lovely, echoing choir music. I was counting things\u2014like the number of panels set into the arches. Odd numbers like 11 and 13. Clever numerical rhythms in the stilled stone.<\/p>\n

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Studying my guidebook, I’d learned of this seriously old pub on (yes!) Fleet Street called \u201cYe Olde Cheshire Cheese<\/a>.\u201d\u009d Rebuilt shortly after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Samuel Johnson lived practically next door, and it\u2019s believed (at least by the pub\u2019s aficionados) that Johnson went in there from time to time with Boswell. Like he\u2019d say, \u201cLet\u2019s take a walk on Fleet Street.\u201d\u009d Possibly reticent here, as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese was also, in the old days, a brothel.<\/p>\n

The name cracked me up, so we went in there, a windowless place with many nooks and crannies, populated by yuppyish workers from the nearby law courts, dank, echoing, unchanging. Inspired by the Johnson connection, I got Boswell\u2019s \u201cLife of Samuel Johnson\u201d\u009d for my Kindle from gutenberg.org, and started reading it every evening. Soothing, mildly amusing.<\/p>\n

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\n[Photo above was taken near the way-too-crowded Portobello Road Market on a Saturday in Notting Hill, with two old guys playing John Lee Hooker songs behind the woman checking her phone.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Another day we stopped by a more congenial pub, the Spread Eagle in Camden Town, with windows, couches and old wooden tables. It was a Sunday, and people were settling in for the afternoon, certainly drinking and laughing, but in a more sociable, slow-paced way than in an American bar. One couple was even playing the Jenga stacking game\u2014the pub had a stack of games behind one of the couches. Like a lodge, kind of. Or a shared living-room. Albeit with a large puddle of questionable liquid on the floor outside the basement bathrooms\u2014a bit manky, that. Even so, I\u2019d happily frequent the Spread Eagle if it were in my neighborhood. You could even sign up to have a convivial Christmas dinner there. And in the evenings\u2014well, I think of James Joyce\u2019s phrase, \u201cshoutmost shoviality.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

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The wallpaper in our hotel bedroom had elephants on it. Back in the day, the sun never set on the British Empire, right?<\/p>\n

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And the nice lady guard at Buckingham Palace holds a machine gun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In London, we rode around a lot in those classic double-decker red buses. Public transportation. They\u2019re better than tour busses\u2014you get up on the high level and you really see a lot. And you\u2019re with the locals. And if you get on the wrong bus, doesn\u2019t matter, you\u2019re still seeing London. One \u201cwrong\u201d\u009d bus led […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4942"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4952,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions\/4952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}