Amaryllis

This is our kitchen window at the moment -- not too shabby, right? Dave ordered four amaryllis bulbs from the Netherlands a few months ago, and we planted them in our herb pots when the herbs began to look ragged. The bulbs sat quietly for several weeks and didn't seem to be doing much, and then all of a sudden, boom! Stalks and flowers. Leaves come next, apparently. (Isn't it funny how that third one is so much smaller than the rest? Genetics can be unpredictable!)

We were disappointed to learn that our neighborhood fishmonger closed over the weekend. Apparently the rent went up on their Notting Hill store, so they will now operate solely from Selfridges department store on Oxford Street (not at all nearby). Although they're a posh fishmonger, and we mainly went there when we wanted something special, I hate to see them driven out. Several other stores have also closed in nearby buildings. This seems to be happening more and more all over the world -- I read about it often in New York. What will we do when every store is a Starbucks or a Subway or a 7-Eleven?

Speaking of Starbucks, I always liked it in the states, but here in England the Starbucks drip coffee is nasty. I don't know whether it's the water or the roast, but I am not a fan. Even more of an incentive to search out independent coffee shops.

I think I figured out my voting problem. Apparently I am entitled as an overseas resident to vote in the district where I last lived in the U.S. So I'm in the process of registering in New Jersey as an overseas voter. I believe the designation entitles me only to vote in federal elections, but that's fine. I don't really need to weigh in on the Middlesex County freeholder race.

Regent's Canal

I've written before about the Grand Union Canal, near our neighborhood -- the canalside towpath is one of my favorite running and walking routes. I hadn't explored much of the canal beyond our area, though, and I often wondered how far the path goes. Yesterday, I began following it to the east.


I didn't intend to, but I wound up walking nearly 12 miles, the entire length of the Regent's Canal. The 200-year-old canal flows through the boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets before coming out at the Thames in Limehouse, near Canary Wharf.

The Grand Union Canal joins the Regent's Canal in a picturesque area east of our neighborhood known as Little Venice, near Maida Vale (top). Little Venice is a boat basin with a park and lots of anchored longboats along the shore, surrounding an island graced by a weeping willow tree. The canal here branches into two waterways.


I followed one, but soon wound up at a dead-end basin near Paddington Station -- a very urban area with overhead highway ramps and waterside warehouses and office blocks. I found this sculpture, Sean Henry's "Standing Man." Then I turned around and went back to Little Venice to get back on track.


Following the other branch, I walked east toward Marylebone. The canal goes into a tunnel under Edgware Road and the towpath briefly ends, so I had to walk a few blocks along the streets to pick it up again -- and when I did, the towpath was crowded with potted plants, garden decorations and other items from a neighborhood of (apparently permanently) moored longboats.


Soon the path opened up again, though, and I found myself walking through a very wealthy area along the north side of Regent's Park. I passed beside the London Zoo and into Camden.


At Camden there are locks that allow boats to navigate changes in the canal's height. These are the first of many locks that I encountered as I walked eastward. I stopped here and had some vegetarian Indian food, a cappuccino and a scone at Camden Market. By this time, I'd been walking a little more than two hours.




The canal continued through a somewhat industrial-looking area just north of the St. Pancras railroad station, and then into Islington, where it was lined by townhouses. It entered another tunnel, so I came up to street level for several blocks until I could rejoin the waterway again. I started seeing more and more walkers, runners and bicyclists.


In Hackney, the walls along the canal became canvases for graffiti and street art of all kinds. I got lots of interesting pictures of the artwork.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, I found myself walking through Mile End, with the towers of Canary Wharf gleaming gold ahead of me.


By the time I got to Limehouse Basin, where the canal joins the Thames, the sun was beginning to set. As you can see, the basin contains lots of swanky-looking boats.


I circled the basin and reached the canal's mouth at the Thames just in time for sunset. It took me from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to walk the entire distance -- though I'm sure it could be done much faster. (I was pausing to take lots of photos along the way.) I was so happy to get on the train at Limehouse and rest my aching dogs as I rode back to Notting Hill!

Carrying the Stone

Last night Dave and I watched "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring," one of my favorite movies. (Just bought the DVD from Amazon!) It's a Korean film about a Buddhist monk who lives in a floating temple in the middle of a lake. A boy comes to live with him and the monk trains the boy in Buddhism. The film follows the boy's life as he grows up, strays from the path and commits a murder, and struggles to redeem himself.

Near the beginning, the boy is playing in the forest. He ties a stone to various small animals -- a fish, a frog, a snake -- and laughs as he watches them struggle. He doesn't know his teacher is also watching.

That night, the teacher ties a large stone to the boy's back. When the boy awakens the next morning, he pleads with the monk to remove the stone. The monk tells the boy he must first remove the stones from each of the animals he'd trapped the day before. He warns the boy that if any of the animals are dead, he will carry a stone in his heart for the rest of his life.

The rock still strapped to his back, the boy struggles into the forest. He finds the frog alive and releases it. But the fish and the snake are dead. The boy cries inconsolably.

That lesson always impresses me. I don't remember ever consciously tormenting an animal as a child, though I'm sure I caught my share of fireflies. I remember trying to save frogs from another boy on the elementary school playground, as he ran around stabbing them with a stick. I did my best to throw them over a fence before he could get to them.

I do remember harming an animal, ironically, when I was in the Peace Corps. I was out in the countryside with my Moroccan colleague, treating wells with large chlorine tablets to purify the water. We'd drop a tablet or two in each well to kill any bacteria. We came upon an underground spring that bubbled up into a pool, covered with a concrete cap and a door. When my counterpart opened the door, we saw numerous turtles swimming in the water.

It seemed amazing to me that these aquatic turtles were living in the arid environment of the Anti-Atlas mountains. But my Moroccan colleague was not amused. "This water is very dirty," he said, and proceeded to dump about ten chlorine tablets into the spring.

We didn't hang around to see what happened to the turtles, but I don't see how they could have survived. I felt so guilty about it afterwards that I decorated one of my shirts with drawings of turtles to memorialize them -- not that it did them any good.

The monk was right -- I still carry that stone in my heart!

(Photo: Two lizards on a house in Notting Hill.)

Trent Country Park

Just north of the Cockfosters tube station is the large Trent Country Park, about 420 acres of fields and forests surrounding a campus of Middlesex University. It used to be part of Enfield Chase, a historic royal hunting ground dating back to the 1300s.

When I rode up to Cockfosters on Friday, I decided to visit the park, since the weather was sunny for the first time in several days. I walked along the avenue of lime trees (this kind of lime, not this) leading from the entrance and watched people romp with their dogs in the muddy fields.


I don't think I've ever seen so many dogs in one place before. I saw one guy -- surely a dog-walker -- with 10 dogs. He let them off their leashes to run around and chase each other, which they did with abandon.

I mostly focused my lens on the landscape, though, since it's rare that I get out of the city into such a woodsy environment.



The mud in Trent Park got a little challenging -- it stuck to my shoes and got quite slippery in places. But I soldiered on. If little old ladies could get out there and stomp around, well, I could too.


I came to a cleared grassy path that led up a hill to a huge obelisk, marking the birth of George Grey, Earl of Harold, the son of Henry and Sophia, the Duke and Duchess of Kent. George was born in 1732 and died in infancy; the monument seems rather outsized for such a short life.


I wound back through a forest filled with ferns browned by winter. By this time I was chilly, so I made tracks to the park's cafe for some coffee and cocoa biscuits, and sat surrounded by a large group of older people who seemed to be part of a club or group of some kind. (Power walkers? Dog lovers?) When one would stand up and leave, the others would all say, "See you next Friday!"

Warmed by my coffee, I headed for the main entrance gate to continue my exploration of Cockfosters.

Cockfosters

Cockfosters is not a metaphor. It's merely a suburb.

Author David Leavitt is responsible for planting in my head the idea that it could be more. Years ago I read his book "While England Sleeps," in which an author and enthusiast of the London tube system named Brian Botsford is curiously fixated on the Cockfosters tube stop. One of Botsford's mantras is "Imagine Cockfosters" -- for him, it represents a distant place of potential. In fact, he never actually goes there, because he's afraid if he did, he would find plain old stifled suburbia. The question, to him, was more interesting than the answer.

Yesterday, I decided to stop Imagining Cockfosters and go see it for myself. I hopped on the Piccadilly tube line and rode it all the way to the end, about nine miles north of central London.


It's interesting that Leavitt chose the Cockfosters stop for his book. It's not the most distant tube stop from central London -- that's Amersham in Buckinghamshire, on the Metropolitan Line, about 24 miles northwest of Charing Cross. But the book took place in the 1930s, and maybe at the time Cockfosters was one of the more remote stops in the underground network.

More likely: I suspect that Leavitt, a gay author whose books can be frankly sexual, and who was writing about a gay character, was making a not-so-subtle double entendre. If you're a conflicted gay man in the 1930s like Botsford and you're "Imagining Cockfosters," what are you really thinking about? Surely some graduate student somewhere has already made that the subject of a thesis. Or is it too obvious?


Anyway, as you can see, the real, non-metaphorical Cockfosters is mostly a pleasant but unremarkable community of semi-detached houses and small businesses. I walked for a couple of hours through Trent Country Park, a huge park of forests and fields just north of the tube station. (Photos to come!) Then I walked westward to High Barnet, a tube stop on another line, and rode back into Central London.

Now I don't have to Imagine Cockfosters. I've been there. (Wink, wink.)

Chips and Shards

In case you're curious to see the stuff I've found beachcombing at Bankside on the Thames, here it is. The clay tubes are from single-use smoking pipes, which as I understand it are at least 100 years old. (I suppose picking them up back then would be like picking up cigarette filters today! Bleah!)

The pottery is an assortment of earth-colored stoneware and finer dinnerware. Again, I have no idea how old any of it is, but I'm guessing based on the decorations it's about 100 years old, maybe a little more. And the glass is just a mix of interesting shards -- the bottle neck has a seam, so it was manufactured rather than blown, and that piece of stemware looks fairly recent. But all the sharp edges have been worn down, so who knows?

Beachcombing and Jobs

Yesterday I went back to the Thames at low tide, to pick up a few more interesting bits of pottery and such on the beach at Bankside. (Nothing valuable or very interesting, I hasten to add, for the benefit of any authorities reading my blog.) I am such a beachcomber. I could do it for hours.

Afterwards I walked to St. Paul's, on the north side of the Thames, and then to the Tower of London a bit farther downstream. I tried to do some photography but the weather wasn't great -- the skies were gray and leaden -- and that part of town just isn't very inspiring to me. It's very businessy, full of banks and office towers. I dunno. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

I've been looking at job listings online, but I haven't seen anything very promising. The journalism jobs all seem to involve covering either markets or specific technologies, neither of which I'm equipped to do. (Or want to do, for that matter.) Of course, those are the jobs that require very specific experience, the ones that need to be advertised. There may be other jobs out there that are more general, but that begs the question: Do I want to return to reporting, chasing ambulances and working nights? Could I even do it in this environment, where the government structure is a mystery to me and I don't yet know the subtleties of the culture?

Other writing jobs seem geared toward technical writing and that sort of thing, where I have no experience. I'm continuing to look, but I'm still uncertain about my place in the current economy. Do my talents and training have any value anymore? Or are there so many people out there who can write and gather information -- "citizen journalists," and other media people squeezed out of disappearing jobs -- that what I used to provide for a fee can now be had for nothing?

I have no teaching experience. I have no retail experience -- at least, not since college. Many job types seem the domain of various groups -- Eastern Europeans, for example, make up so much of the food service industry that it's been the subject of articles in the newspaper. (Besides, I'm not yet to the point where I feel like I have to take any job, at McDonald's or the grocery store. My time is more valuable to me than that.)

I've applied for three jobs since I got here -- one a temporary position -- and all three came to naught. It's not like I've been plastering London with resumes, and maybe I should be. Or maybe I should turn away from all that and continue finding a way to work for myself as a photographer and/or writer.

As you can see, there are more questions than answers!

(Photo: An alley in the old City of London, yesterday. I liked the bright pink trash bag amid an otherwise dark scene.)