Day 13

Yesterday AM I went to tour Sir John Soane's museum, which every single guidebook or website I've read describes as "one of the hidden gems of London." And so it is: the museum consists of two houses on Lincoln's Field, a residential spot not far from where I'm living, that belonged to Soane, a Regency architect of some reknown. Soane had a complicated family life and died estranged from his only surviving son, leaving his estate instead to endow the museum. Soane was, apparently, an inveterate collector but a discerning one, and the meticulously preserved house--which, in addition to serving as a residence and the base of Soane's architectural practice, was designed and modified specifically to show off his collections to best advantage, mostly by playing with filtered natural light from overhead-- is filled to the brim with statues, vases, plaster casts, paintings, stone building elements, stained glass, and architectural models. The sarcophagous of the pharo Seti I is in the basement; Hogarth's A Rake's Progress series (paintings, not prints. I had no idea.) is on the walls in the picture room. It's difficult to describe the exuberant density of things in the house. In some cases, hinged panels are installed in the walls to allow multiple layers of pictures to hang. The panels can then be unhooked and swung forward to reveal additional works (or, in one case, a sort of nave with a statue and a model of Soane's design for the Bank of England). The tour took great pains to point out the ways in which the house itself is quite interesting and experimental in its use of light, mirrors, colored glass, curved ceilings and the like, but the overall impression really is the abundance of stuff on display. The collections were brought together to serve a didactic purpose, for the education of Soane's pupils and others, but there's a palpable sense of whimsy as well. E.g., Soane was notably antipathetic toward neo-Gothic trends in architecture and only one room has any such elements in it. He called it the monk's parlor and invented a fictional monk, Padre Giovanni, who lived there (with his dog!). There's a tomb for both Padre Giovanni and the dog outside. There's a shrine to Shakepeare on the landing of the staircase, all marble busts and dewey oil paintings of a young-ish Bard being attended to by the muses (who's a romantic now, hm?). The guide happily and proudly related to me how Soane-- and here's the fetishization of the material object again-- owned copies of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Folios. I certainly did not later get in an argument with this guide, who was the curator of drawings at the museum, about the Society of Antiquaries.

On my way back I stopped at the plaza outfront of the Waitrose near my hall to check out what the signs advertised as a farmers' market. I think that it does not mean what they think it means, or at least what I think of as a farmers' market, having been conditioned by the ambient slow food, organic, localvore mentality of my delightfully lefty neighborhood back home: there was only one stall selling produce, and two or three selling fresh bread. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the rest of the market, which had maybe twenty stalls altogether, was made up of vendors selling cheese, sausage, chocolate, fudge, cupcakes and numerous varieties of street food (malaysian, indian, etc.). And there were samples! I wandered around for a bit noshing on what I could and chatting with people. Cheesemongers are some of my favorite foodpeople to talk with, almost every one I met has come to it as a second career and has an interesting backstory. As it turns out, the man running the Neal's Yard Dairy table was originally from Battle Creek, and had lived in Ann Arbor and worked and Zingermann's for a number of years before coming to London-- the first Michigander, I think, that I've met here. Later, before it started to rain and I, umbrella-less, ran off, I tried some amazing harissa. "Secret recipe!" the Turk (?) behind the table assured me. Although I wouldn't dare entrust, well, anything, to the communal fridge in the tea kitchen, I'll probably make a return trip next week for items I can keep in my room to vary my peanut-butter-and-apple lunch routine and offset the rather uninspired offerings in the dinning hall. I still haven't had a restaurant or home-cooked meal in England, though I try and eat as many whole foods in the dining hall as is possible.

Later, I ventured back out, to the gym in the student union. Numerous people have advised me that gyms in the UK are vaguely "different" than those in the US and I can confirm that this is true. This one is small, and rather dingy, but I can pay over the counter month to month and it will do. It's got a 30m pool as well, which was a major selling point, but when I took a look yesterday it was really, really crowded, maybe 6+ to a lane. Hopefully, it's less busy at times other than Saturday afternoon. A helpful undergraduate alerted me earlier this week to the precence of a machine in the building at which one can buy cell phone time ("top up one's mobile") using cash, so I've now got a working cell phone. Don't have any one to call, or be called by, but it's probably a good thing to have.

After dinner, I ventured out in the ugly, nasty weather with a large-ish group of mostly postgrads from my hall to a Canadian pub to watch the Penguins play the Senators in Sweden. Apparently it was a regular season game, despite the fact that it was played in Sweden. Who knew? It was pleasant enough, if crowded, but I am always skeptical of these sort of group outings based solely on residential proximity to one another. I mean, yes, it's good to know your neighbors, and it's definitely pleasant to have people to sit with at meals and so on, but just because we are living in the same place does not mean we have anything beyond that in common with one another. There's a kind of group-think that arises in these situations that is just deadly in its banality. Everyone is encouraged to excise the most interesting and distinctive parts of their personailty and winds up becoming boring when they are really just trying to be nice. (My friends, you are my friends because you are interesting, not because you are nice. A great many of you are terrific, kind-hearted individuals but not all of you are and that's okay because you know what? There's room in life for that. We'll never be BFFs but a girl needs wit and whiskey as well as tea and sympathy.) Anyway, you wind up doing things like going to see "Dirty Dancing" the musical or agreeing to the statement "it's good to try new foods, but it can be hard" because you're hard up for social interaction and just desperate for the comfort of some kind of group formation. And it's not that you disagree because the activities and the statements are just pabulum, really, and there's no way to disagree with them, it's that at a fundamental level you just don't care and you're really quite bored and you hold back from doing the things that are uniquely, specifically, and passionately interesting to you because a big part of what makes them so personally fascinating is that they don't have wide appeal. This is me being a snob (a hipster, perhaps, that rare [or not] American creature?), but I am making a stand for quality over quanity in social activities.

So I ditched the boring group and went to another bar with three very nice Canadian boys (are any of you seeing a theme here?). The bar, called, hilariously, FREVD, had cheap drinks and minimalist techno and concrete walls and was full-- very very full-- of pretty young Londoners in elaborate rock-and-roll getup. (London requires a certain recalibration of my personal aesthetic and also reminds me every twenty minutes or so that I am no longer twenty one. More's the pity.) The Canadians tried to convince a giggling trio of Greek girls to come with them to a concert. They were having none of it. I chatted with another guy who really, really wanted to talk to me about Chaucer, thumping bass and bored-looking date be damned. London nightlife, at least my extremely limited experience of it so far, seems highly social but also effervescent, even with the curiously standard exchange of email addresses for Facebook purposes. Not knowing anyone frees you up to talk to everyone.

Today, I am supposed to go to see the bike polo (hipsters on fixed gear bikes hit a ball with mallets made out of ski poles and gas piping), but it's raining for real, not just drizzling and I have only a so-so idea of where the court is located. Also, something about a dissertation? Work to do? I dunno. We'll see what the weather does.