Mysticism and Highway Robbery in Chelsea

Well, my day at work wound up not being so quiet after all. I had several tasks to complete, putting together packets for middle school book clubs, clearing a display, re-shelving a cart of books about ancient Greece, etc etc etc. I wound up eating lunch at my desk and didn't even have a chance to respond to blog comments! So that wasn't the day I expected at all. Today might be better.

After work, my co-worker Staci and I went to see Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of "Fleishman is in Trouble" and "Long Island Compromise," both of which I read and enjoyed. She was appearing at a bookstore in Chelsea, and because I've long admired her writing I was eager to see her in person. She was in conversation with Jesse Armstrong, the screenwriter for "Succession," so it was a bonus to see him too.

I got down to Chelsea a bit early, and Staci was running late and couldn't meet me immediately. So I wandered around for a bit. That's St. Luke's and Christ Church, above, off Sydney Street. I had my AirPods in and was listening to my iTunes, which I recently "weeded" to remove some music that caused my heart to sink every time it came on -- mainly classical or show tunes. (One feature of iTunes that I disdain is, when you're shuffling your music, it tries to mix up the genres, so you go from rock to pop to classical to jazz and back to pop, and that causes me musical whiplash. I do not want to go from a light Dionne Warwick pop song to a nine-minute Mozart concerto, and then to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" or George Winston on piano. I could fix this with playlists but instead I just removed the more specialized content, which I don't listen to very frequently.)

Anyway, I was grooving up and down the King's Road with my iTunes, and I wound up in Sloane Square, home of Morrissey's hairdresser. (Whether or not you like Morrissey or The Smiths, that linked video, with footage from British Pathé studios, is completely weird and well worth watching.)

I made my own more sedate video of Sloane Square, with its trees wound with fairy lights, and then made my way back toward the bookstore. I stopped in at the Chelsea Potter pub, where I paid an outrageous £8.15 for a pint of Neck Oil IPA (!), before meeting up with Staci. I enjoyed Brodesser-Akner's talk, including the tale of how her agent told her both books "weren't very good" before she decided to find a new agent and wound up selling them to great acclaim. Tales of perseverance in creative endeavors are always inspiring, right?

She said that working in journalism -- she writes for The New York Times -- trained her to have less ego about being edited, which I'm sure is true. Newspaper editors don't have much patience for a prima donna. (When I spoke to her afterwards I told her I'd worked at the Times too, so we had that bond!) She also mentioned a celebrity profile she once wrote about Nicki Minaj based on an interview where Minaj actually fell asleep, and I'm thinking I need to find that story.

Anyway, it was a fun evening out and I had her sign our library copies of "Fleishman" and "Long Island" (the latter was originally my copy before I donated it to the school). I think there's something so cool about the thought of a writer laboring over a pair of books, the books being published by the thousands, and all those copies going out into the world, shipped in boxes and stacked in bookstores, and then two random copies coming back around years later to be signed by the very author who wrote them. It's almost mystical.

Forms and Documents

I repotted our blooming Primula the other day, because the hanging basket where it was living was several years old and disintegrating. I found this little ladybug (ladybird, if you prefer) nestled among the foliage. More evidence of things coming to life at this time of year.

Yesterday was a day for dealing with bureaucracy! I needed to renew my US passport, which meant filling out an online form, downloading it, printing it (one-sided only, please), signing it, having my picture taken according to US (not UK!) specifications, paying $130 on a US government website, and then mailing form, photo, evidence of payment, expiring passport and a self-addressed special delivery envelope to the US Embassy in London. At least I can do it by mail, which is better than taking half a day off work to go stand in a queue.

We also signed our US taxes, which means they can now be electronically filed via our accountant. I did our taxes myself for years but starting last year, having inherited some investments from my mother, I began having them professionally done. They are officially too complex for me now.

I'm relieved to have both those tasks completed. Whew!

Dave, meanwhile, is off to The Hague in the Netherlands today on a school trip. The entire high school is on trips this week, which means traffic in the library will be significantly lower than usual. My boss is away too. Maybe I can actually read a book!

A Long Midday Wander

Rose & Crown pub, Southwark

Yesterday morning was pretty quiet. I watered the houseplants and the orchids, did some puttering in the garden (why is the garden the only place where anyone ever "putters"?) and then some reading. By lunchtime I was feeling restless, so after having a meatloaf sandwich out on the garden bench, I decided to take a walk.

I grabbed my big camera and took the tube down to Southwark, near the Tate Modern. I hadn't been on a photo walk in a while and I felt a little rusty, and I'm supposed to help lead a group of Middle Schoolers on a "Street Photography" outing on Thursday. (More on that to come!) So I thought I'd flex my own photography muscles a bit.
 

I specifically wanted to walk across the Millennium Bridge, so I did. That view never gets tiring, does it?

While standing on the bridge, I saw this woman coming toward me, rollerblading in a long red-velvet dress. She was coming so fast that I only had time for one shot, and fortunately it worked out pretty well. I wish I'd seen her at street level, but oh well!

I wandered around St. Paul's Cathedral and then came westward along Fleet Street and The Strand. This statue of Hodge, Samuel Johnson's cat, stands in Gough Square. The streets in that area are a warren of little squares and alleys, with treasures like this at every turn.

I could have sworn that I've photographed this statue before, but if I have, my methods of archiving are failing me because I can't find the shot anywhere.

Samuel Johnson's house is also on the square, and it's a museum now. I've filed that away for a possible future visit.

More interesting sartorial choices.

I thought my Australian readers might appreciate seeing Australia House on The Strand, the home of the Australian High Commission. It's both the oldest Australian diplomatic mission in the world and the longest-occupied foreign mission in London, according to its web page. The sculpted figures in front were created by Harold Parker from 1915-18. The woman at top right looks particularly rapturous.

Finally, I made my way to Trafalgar Square, where I stumbled onto these young women making a dance video to the song "Armageddon" by the K-Pop group Aespa. (I didn't recognize the song as such; I Shazammed it.)

At first I thought maybe they were Aespa, but they'd surely be thronged by fans if that were the case. I guess they're doing a tribute. The way that camera operator is swooping around, their video looks like it might be a bit nauseating to watch, but that's me talking like the 59-year-old man I am.

From there I navigated my way through Soho and along a very crowded Oxford Street to the tube and back home, my wanderlust satisfied!

Post-Equinox Brunch

Yesterday's sky was deep blue and so clear that Dave and I could watch a jet precisely flying in the contrails of another jet that had passed moments before, like Hansel and Gretel following their popcorn path through the forest. "You should just take a picture of this sky," he said. But of course I opted for shadows instead, the dark, clear-cut shadows of spring.

And I just realized we passed the equinox two days ago, so it is in fact spring now. Woo hoo!

We took ourselves out for brunch in the morning, right after Dave got his hair cut. In fact when I walked up to the cafe where I was meeting him, there was a random man sitting in my seat chatting away to Dave -- turns out it was his barber, who came out to sit with him between customers!

It felt great to sit outside and soak up the warmth of the sun and watch the passing parade of people, cars and buses. We are all emerging from our winter coccoons.

In the afternoon I re-potted a couple more plants. I was forced to kill a toadflax that had taken root in one of our lily pots. I'd meant to move it to its own pot but it had woven a net of roots so tightly around the lily bulbs that I couldn't extract them. I just pulled out the crown of the toadflax and repotted the whole root ball, figuring the roots would disintegrate on their own, leaving just the lilies. (Which have already started sprouting.)

I also cleaned the house, read blogs and got about 80 pages into "Flashlight," which is pretty interesting so far. And in the evening I made a martini and we watched "Bugonia," which is one of the weirder movies I've ever seen. It was good right up until it wasn't, toward the end, when it took a twist that neither of us could quite swallow. But it was entertaining, I'll give it that.

The Arch at the Arches

As I was walking on Finchley Road on Thursday morning, I saw these guys installing a big floral arch over the doorway at McDonald's. I guess someone was having some sort of celebration there? I've seen these arches installed over the doorways of homes for weddings and things like that, but I've never seen one at a fast-food restaurant! It was gone by the next day.

Yesterday was all about doing more to prepare for the handoff at work. I went through my entire Google Drive -- 14 years of accumulated work documents -- and moved anything even remotely valuable over to my boss's Google account for safekeeping. I also went through my desk and passed off a couple of things to her that should be preserved -- but of course most work documents are "virtual" these days as opposed to pieces of paper, so there wasn't that much.

I also culled that thick folder of thank-you notes and brought home the ones I decided to keep, along with the originals of all my work photos. Some of you wondered about the group photos in my retirement video -- why they were all so similar from year to year. We took them at school picture time using the school's photographer, and sometimes they were included in yearbooks, but mostly they were just for us. As you can see we tried to have a "theme" each year, somehow related to what was going on in the library or the school. For example, the one in which we all dressed as artists was taken the year our new Arts Building opened.

By the way, we created a second version of the retirement video, including one more group photo I found -- of all of us in masks during the pandemic -- and my boss put a little note on each slide noting that it's for my retirement so that anyone who looks up and sees the show in the middle won't wonder what it's for. Don't feel like you have to watch it. It's otherwise exactly the same as the first one.

I think I might actually start reading a book today. I've made a sufficient enough dent in my New Yorkers that I feel like they're once again at a manageable level, though I'm not by any means caught up. I've been meaning to read "Flashlight" by Susan Choi so I think I'll give that a go.

A Light No Longer Lit

Here's one of our orchids, giving us another round of blossoms. Although this one is doing well and at least two others have flower stalks, I have a few orchids that are looking pretty pathetic. Many are getting on in years and I find that they get a lot less vigorous over time, failing to grow new leaves, not to mention flowers, despite regular and careful watering and feeding. I'm thinking about doing an orchid cull. We have 11 of them, so we're hardly lacking, and I could let three or four go.

But that is not a problem I need to think about today.

Here's my retirement slideshow, the one we made to play in the library. It's made to run on a loop, and it has no sound. It mostly shows me with my co-workers over the years, and it has a few other little odds and ends thrown in. Hopefully no one will mind me posting it here. (It's not public on YouTube.) My boss said the flowery background reminds her of the shirts I wear, which I can definitely see, and it sorts of alludes to my gardening too.

When I came in yesterday morning it was stuck on the first slide, and I couldn't figure out how to get it to auto-play. So I asked my friend Colin for help. "You're setting up your own retirement slideshow? That's pretty pathetic!" he said. I laughed and told him my boss had made it, though I provided the photos. So it's not that pathetic. I just want it to display properly! We got it going eventually.

So, yes, the word is finally out. I'm glad it's not a secret anymore.

I liked the statistic that my boss provided -- that we've checked out nearly half a million books from August 2013 (when I started in the library) to now. I didn't process all of those checkouts, of course, because I'm not working first thing in the morning and I take an hour for lunch each day, but I probably did most of them. And then had to get them all back and re-shelve them!

If I'd thought about it I'd have included something about reading all the Newbery Medal winners, because that's undoubtedly one of my biggest library achievements -- that and talking up the award with the school community. But oh well.

Oh, and remember the light relentlessly burning in the apartment window opposite? I texted the caretaker of the apartments yesterday and told him about it, and he said he'd mention it to the cleaner (?), and when I checked last night it was off. Problem solved, at least for the time being! Dave laughs when I do things like that. "Your retirement is going to be very entertaining," he says.

Getting the Word Out

The sign-maker, whose apartment I pass on my walk to work and who was once fond of hanging elaborate signs in his/her window criticizing Boris Johnson and other Tory leaders, has now taken to sending messages to our Labour politicians. Perhaps this is a sign of how unhappy everyone is with Labour, even the center-leftists. I don't think Keir Starmer is so bad, honestly, but to hear the media talk he's a disaster. Early on he did make some strange choices and decisions that seemed to me very un-Labour-like, but I think he's been better recently. I'm not sure how the next round of elections will go for him, though.

Speaking of which, we got a flyer in the mail yesterday reminding us to vote in early May. Our first opportunity to vote in England since we became citizens! I don't even know where to go or what to do, though I assume that will become obvious as we get closer to the time. I don't think they're national elections -- just local councillors -- but still, I'm excited to participate for once.

I spoke with my boss yesterday about our need to tell kids about my imminent departure. As I told her, I don't want to just disappear and have everyone assume I'd been fired, or worse, hit by a bus. She agreed and we concocted a plan to put up a slideshow in the library wishing me a happy retirement, with photos taken over my 14-year career at the school. I helped her put it together and I think we'll start showing it soon, so the cat will be out of the bag.

I did tell my pal, the eighth-grader who often quizzes me about cameras and wanted me to shoot film for him to develop, and I was surprised by how strongly he reacted. He literally put his hands up to his face in a "Home Alone" gesture and said, "NO! WHY?!" His skin flushed red and I was afraid he would burst into tears, but fortunately he didn't. I told him I'd still see him since Dave still works at the school and I'll be attending events now and then. It made me feel terrible that I blurted it out so casually but I didn't expect that degree of reaction!

I'm actually beginning to feel a little dread about my departure. Excitement, but also a sense of what-the-heck-am-I-doing?! How will I keep myself occupied? I hope I don't regret this.

I met up yesterday after work with a blog reader, Joni, who happens to be traveling through Britain and France. She e-mailed me out of the blue several weeks ago and mentioned she'd be passing through and did I want to connect? So we had a pint together at a pub near the school in St. John's Wood. I think it may be the first time I've ever met up with anyone from blogland who didn't also write their own blog. She told me about her trip and we chatted about our shared affinity for dogs and some of our common experiences with people in the blogosphere. Today she's headed back home to Canada. Safe travels, Joni! (No, her last name is not Mitchell.)