Random London

On Friday, I set off on a vain quest to find my imagined magickal London. In my mind, it is the location of that 'olde bookshoppe' on the corner of Hangrope Lane and Handspit Alley, where you buy an obscure tome from a wizened mystic, and then, upon seeking to return the cursed book, find the shop no longer there the next day!  

With such a silly aim in mind, it's no surprise I had an entirely random day. 

London Wall is one of the strangest archaeology sites I have ever seen. Tiny stretches of the Old Roman Wall around Castra Londinium still exist, but they are all mixed up with medieval and Victorian-era walls, the old Barber Surgeon's Hall, brand new skyscrapers, massive roundabouts in tunnels, a lily pond, larch-panelled Scandi cafes, and a park full of daydrinkers. The City seems to have given up on any consistency here, and stuck the historical eras together with sticky-tape into a very loose pastiche.

I moved on to see the Barbrican, which is famous for its 'brutalist' architecture, but it looked to me much like any other concrete high-rise, to be honest. I took photos, but they are of a boring high-rise. Next up was Smithfield Market, the place where William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered, and many other traitors and criminals were put to death for the entertainment of people buying their vegetables. Now it's a rather gaudy market hall built in the Victorian era. 

I walked the length of Fleet Street, where the river Fleet once flowed before they reclaimed all the land. I stopped in at the Cheshire Cheese, a very famous old pub from the 17th century, where my family had a ploughman's lunch in 1980. This was done on the insistence of my Dad, who said it was a famous London experience, one that would have been shared by Pepys and Doctor Johnson, who both lived nearby. The ploughman's was 23 pounds, so I had a pint instead, and grabbed in selfie in front of Doctor Johnson's house, in honour of my Dad. 

Further down the Strand (which used to be the riverbank, I believe), I ran into a large pro-Palestine demonstration in front of the Central Court of Justice. I joined in for about ten minutes until they started chanting 'Death to the IDF', at which point I decided to leave. I don't personally think that calling for more Israeli deaths is going to help the folk of Gaza much at all, and it rather easy to say when you are in Westminster and you don't have to do any of the fighting. 

I found my magical bookshop, Watkins Books, on Cecil Court. The same street has map shops, coin shops, stamp shops, and it basically a magnet for collectors and souvenir hunters. Watkins books is run by the descendants of Alfred Watkins, the man who invented the notion of leylines. It was full of mystical and new age claptrap. I scoured their second-hand section in the hope of finding something amusingly esoteric, and cheap. I didn't find such a book, but I did overhear two extremely serious young gentlemen with goatees having a hilarious conversation in which they managed to namedrop about fifty esoteric authors in the space of twenty minutes before finally introducing themselves to each other and then leaving without buying anything. Glorious. I bought some modern books on English folklore and departed. 

​Now it was time to head over the river and get close to Battersea, where I was intending to see a jazz band in the evening. The famous old power station has now been turned into a shopping centre. I am pleased to think that numerous of the photos taken by other tourists that day will feature a rather tired-looking man in a green collared short-sleeve, picking the toe-jam out of his feet and doing calf-stretches on the courtesy seats. Tour walking tires me more than forest walking, I don't know why. 

St Anne's in Battersea was lovely and the jazz duo were excellent. I got back about midnight. I set off to see my cousin Miriam out in Kent, the next morning. I am at her place now.