Magic and Insanity

Yesterday I went down to Croydon, in far south London. I was not in search of a magical haircut (given my hairline any haircut I receive would have to be REALLY magical) but I was in search of this shopfront. I saw it from the car when my friend Chris and I drove to Hastings in August, and ever since I've meant to photograph it. I'm always struck by overly optimistic shop names, and this fits the bill -- especially given the condition of the shop.

As it turns out, though, it's still possible to get a magical haircut in Croydon. The business appears to have simply moved across the street. Here it is in 2018 on Google Street View.

Now -- assuming it's the same business -- it's in a third shopfront, right next to the second one, and called Magical Barber. Which isn't quite as good a name, in my opinion, but maybe they were trying to point out that they do more than haircuts and your shave or your beard trim would be equally magical.

Having satisfied my interest in the supernatural barbers of Croydon, I walked along the high street and through the downtown shopping area, taking lots of pictures. Then I hopped a bus and rode out to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, where there's a museum exhibit I wanted to see.

Bethlem, from which the word "bedlam" is derived, is a psychiatric hospital that has existed since the 1200s in several different locations in London. As you can imagine, back in the old days, mental health care was pretty primitive and the place had a horrific reputation. Now it's a modern research and patient care facility on a large campus with spreading lawns and its own museum.

One of Bethlem's patients, back in the 1920s, was Louis Wain, a Victorian artist who was famous for his fanciful portraits and drawings of cats. If you're like me, you'll remember Wain because his artwork was often used in textbooks as evidence of the effects of psychosis. I specifically remember reading about this myself, in college -- his cat portraits were shown in a series, from easily identifiable to wildly abstract, with the contention that they got more and more fanciful as Wain's schizophrenia progressed. I found it scary that someone could so lose control of their mind and their perceptions.

Well, Bethlem now has an exhibit of Wain's works, and I wanted to see those kaleidoscopic cats in person. As it turns out, the idea that they depict Wain's psychiatric illness is something of a myth -- or at least conjecture. None of the drawings are dated, so no one knows the order in which Wain produced them, and he was always interested in textile patterns and embroidery and other artistic imagery that might have lent itself to such abstraction. In fact, there's doubt that Wain was psychotic or schizophrenic at all, although he did live the last years of his life in mental hospitals.

Anyway, it was an interesting exhibit, made all the more timely by the imminent release of a movie about Wain's life, called "The Electrical Life of Lewis Wain," with Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. It comes out around New Year's Day and I'll definitely go.

My bus ride was interesting, too. I sat next to a woman who yammered on her cell phone with a friend about the intimate details of a third person's relationship. "Just because he loves her don't mean he likes her," she said at one point.

I took a few more pictures in the Shirley neighborhood of East Croydon, and then caught a train back to London. Thameslink trains run directly between Croydon and West Hampstead, making it incredibly easy to get down there and back with no faffing around on the tube.

Finally, and speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch, last night Dave and I watched "The Power of the Dog," Jane Campion's new film on Netflix. It's slow-paced, but I enjoyed it and it definitely left me with images and ideas to ponder -- some of them relating to mental illness, incidentally. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a go.