Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Yikes.

I have just read over previous entries, and good lord, I must purge "perhaps" from my writing vocabulary. Appalling.

Your travel photos are boring, part one.

Everything in this post is no doubt more interesting to me than to you, and more useful for my own reference than for yours, but here you go anyhow.

3 Dray Walk

Spitalfields

London E1 6QL

Story Deli is opposite the Rough Trade record store, just off Brick Lane. There are small and communal tables inside and a few long communal tables outside. If you sit outside you have to step inside to place your order and pay, then they bring it out to you when it's ready. Very very thin crusts piled with good fresh interesting toppings. While normally I tend toward the less is more view on pizza toppings, here it was a success. 

52 Brushfield Street

Spitalfields

London E1 6AG

This is Market Coffee, a few blocks away. Really I should have taken a picture of my little Bakewell tart, which was very good. Actually that may be it in the background, but at that degree of detail it might as well be a wad of paper, so no points to me.

Russell Square

Bloomsbury

London WC1N 1DB

I am used to the idea that cafes in gardens and squares are likely to be both dismal and overpriced, like museum cafes but with more Cadbury flake. The Cafe in the Garden at Russell Square is run by an Italian family, however, and the coffee shows it. I have no idea how the sandwiches and things are but we had several excellent cappuccinos and lattes here while playing cards and watching the squirrels.

This squirrel went methodically from planter to planter, pushing his whole face in up to the ears, and then turning over the dirt with his head like a spade. Perhaps he was a truffle pig in a former life. 

47-48 St John's Square

Clerkenwell

London EC1V 4JJ

The Modern Pantry (the building hiding in the upper right corner here) also serves dinner, but we only went for morning coffee. There's also a small takeaway shop, "the pantry," which has nice salady things. The "honey roasted oats," aka granola, with yogurt and grated apple, are very good. Somehow I continually found the service disconcerting and subtly wrongfooted, or at least it kept making US feel subtly wrongfooted, perhaps an instance of culture clash somehow, though the only one of its sort we ran into, but we did keep going back. I note that the internet generally seems to find the waitstaff delightful, so presumably the problem is me. 

According to Foyles.

Foyles is a great big wonderful bookstore of long standing in London. For many decades before I ever set foot in it, it was famous for being an absolute pig to shop or to work in. Apparently Christina Foyle, daughter of one of the founders and the store's owner between the early sixties and her death in 1999, insisted on keeping everything as dark, muddled, and inconvenient as possible, with a checking-out system that required standing in three separate lines before you were allowed to get your damn books and leave. Even then, it had an impressive stock (though not much to help you navigate it, since there was no modern cataloging system, books were filed by publisher, and Miss Foyle tended to sack staff in the delightfully prolific yet willy-nilly fashion guaranteed to produce best results).

Today, by contrast, it is light, airy, modernized, and very well staffed. There are many, many books, often including both the very book you want and several more you hadn't realized you wanted yet. Just to ensure that you remember that it is not a bland, characterless chain, however, books are sometimes shelved according to a logic that may elude lesser mortals.

Thus, this conversation was exactly as it should have been:

Me: Do you have anything by Rebecca West? I didn't see anything in fiction but I thought I should check and see if maybe it was somewhere else.

Very pleasant information desk clerk: [checking her computer] Oh, yes, we do, actually. It's all filed together in Lesbian Fiction, on the second floor.

Me: Oh! That is interesting, because... she wasn't.

VPIDC: [smiling understandingly] Yes, it's... well... don't question.

(When I got to the Lesbian Fiction section I found that they had exactly the book I wanted, which is not in print in the U.S. Hooray!)

My rarified surroundings.

We are currently sitting in the downstairs sitting room of our expensive hotel in London. Or I am sitting, and Snark is perusing the offerings in the well-stocked, mirror-backed "honesty bar". I think he is fixing himself some kind of whiskey. No, I was wrong, he has returned with a gin and tonic. It seems that there are even limes in the honesty bar. How very civilized.

I regret to report that jazz is playing, but somehow it is less regrettable in this setting than it might otherwise be, because it is contributing to the general feeling of Woosterhood, working hard to counteract the distinctly unWooster contribution I am making to the atmosphere by typing away on a MacBook Pro. Earlier a business sort of man came in, said that it was "too hot" (it is not) and that he was certainly going to have a beer. We were perhaps insufficiently promising company, because he did not stay but took his beer and went away with it. 

Hanging on the wall opposite me, there is a large terrible painting of four men in top hats standing around a Hereford. There is a copy of the Guardian under Snark's drink, and, equitably, a copy of the Daily Mail on a similar little table nearby. 

Earlier I was in Boots buying a few things, and the woman ringing me up asked if I had any need of a Boots card. "No? You don't live in London?"

"No. I wish I did."

"You want to stay? But where do you live?"

"In the U.S."

"Oh! No! But the U.S. is great. You can see so many celebrities, like Beyonce. Who can you see here? And it is so cheap! My sister bought me a shirt that cost £120 here. But there it cost like £20! I wish I could live there."

It's a point of view, I suppose.

Under my shirt.

Yesterday we had been thinking of doing something fun and pleasant, instead of errands, but instead we wound up spending the afternoon shopping in preparation for our trip. Why is it that every activity of any note in our house seems to require a preliminary act of shopping? No doubt it is because we are ill-disciplined materialistic capitalist pigdogs, and of the worst sort too since we are also very bad at keeping track of the things we own once they have been used the first time.

For instance, I am well aware that I have procured outlet converters in advance of every other trip abroad I have ever made, and yet I have been entirely unable to lay my hands on a single one. Thus a trip to the soul-depleting Radio Shack was required, where two fresh ones, irritatingly much bulkier than the last pair, were obtained.

More happily, I also procured two truly glorious brassieres, not at Radio Shack, but at Nordstrom's. It is commonly said that most women have their bra size completely wrong. This is a vast national misfortune, causing widespread discomfort and diminished attractiveness. One is urged to see a professional bra fitter and always to try on bras in person, advised by said professional, before purchase, and not at Victoria's Secret, either, where core strengths lie in producing softcore masturbation materials and sweatpants that say PINK across the bottom, rather than putting you into a bra that fits properly. So I hear.

I'd looked into the first part some time ago and truly I do know my size, I know it perfectly well, there is no mistake there. But for years I have been shopping only online, never in person. On the Internet the selection is magnificent, but of course the opportunity to try before you buy, with input from someone who knows better than you and can see your tits being squashed live and in real time, is limited. And what do you know! That last part can be very useful after all.

The brilliant advising bralady was one of those truly impressive high-level department store saleswomen who really pay attention, the sort who also keep a list of all their customers and know their stuff backwards and forwards and assuredly make an absolute mint in commissions, I read an article about it once that I wish I could find again--they are rather terrifying but also rather admirable. She certainly knew what she was doing, both in terms of parting me from my money and in her expertise regarding variations from model to model in a single brand.

After a comic series of inadequacies that I'd selected for myself, she brought something else over in the same brand and size and said, "You should try this one. I think you will be very happy." And I am, I am. My back feels like something miraculous has happened inside it. Tiny angel massage therapists working from within, perhaps.

When I got home, I posted about my bra glee to Facebook. (Sorry about that, students I cavalierly allowed to friend me.) Rarely are my status updates particularly commented upon, but this one instantly got a flood of interested and sympathetic replies. Truly bras and their flaws are the great uniter.

The text box overflows.

In less than a week, Team Snarkfox will be in glorious London, England, with all that entails (acute childhood nostalgia, oddly flavored crisps, gawking at things in Liberty, visits to cousins, buckets of tea, the Tate Modern, hemorrhaging money). We haven't been in almost six years, and I can hardly wait. I am filling the time until then with:

• desultory filling-out of forms that must be completed before my job status shifts over to something else, which it will do while we are out of town;
• largely failing to read the things I ought to be reading in preparation for next semester;
• sending occasional work-related emails so that people will be under the mistaken impression that I am getting something done;
• formulating schemes to run away and read novels on the lawn.

I have been feeling somewhat ancient and unaccomplished lately--or rather, naggingly aware of the fact that I should have gotten a good deal more sorted out by now, given the age that I am, and that I'm not going to suddenly get a few years back to get it righter. On the other hand, this state of affairs is hardly a surprising outcome of the habits outlined above, now is it? Also I note that my face appears to have mutated into that of a well-creased yet puffy monkey, which is not heartening. I had hoped to age gracefully, but it seems that unless it turns out that "comic and rubbery" is the height of grace, I am out of luck. Too bad.

But London! London will be extremely heartening, and indeed probably even replete with actual reading of novels on lawns. There are a lot of grassy squares that are eminently suitable for just that very thing. It will be restorative.

Speaking of novels, I keep reading The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West, over and over again. I read lots of books more than once, of course, but this is a different, more total and consuming, kind of rereading. There are a number of books that I read and have read this way, often coming to the end and flipping back to the beginning to start over again without standing up in between. Most of the books that fall into this category I read for the first time quite some time ago. The majority date from childhood, when it seems my whole life was consumed by an unbroken stream of reading, and whenever I happened by some circumstance to be forced to do something other than read, my mind was still awash in whatever books I had been reading just before.

The Fountain Overflows I read for the first time only six months ago and I believe I have read it at least six times since then. I wish I felt I had the skill to explain what makes it so entirely compelling to me.

It was written in 1956 but is set about fifty years earlier. The narrator, Rose Aubrey, is one of four children in a family that appears to be almost entirely unfit for the world in which it lives. Their father is brilliant, handsome, mercurial, a political genius, and constitutionally incapable of passing up an opportunity to lose money in the stock market or to bite a hand that feeds him. Their mother, once an accomplished concert pianist, is thin, anxious, nerve-jangled, shabby. To outsiders she seems hopelessly odd, but in fact she is clever and generous, capable of holding the family together and looking after a number of other characters in distress that cross their path.

Rose, her twin sister Mary, and their brother Richard Quin never doubt that where the Aubreys and the outside world diverge, it is infinitely better to be an Aubrey. The oldest child, Cordelia, is built differently. Their oddness and poverty agonize her. She is pretty; she plays the violin in a way that stupider adults think is impressive, though the musical Aubreys know better and are agonized in their turn:

...we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.

This gives you some idea of the quality of the writing. The discrepancies between the judgments of the non-Cordelia Aubreys and the judgments of most of the people they come into contact with (in all of which the book sides definitively with Rose) produce the emotional tensions and central drama of the book, though page to page it is filled with small events. Mainly it brilliantly captures what it is to be a child, (thus) relatively powerless, and possessed of very high standards. I love it.

Oh dear, what a ridiculously long post this turned out to be, and with so little holding it together. On the other hand, writing it cheered me up enormously. Since I'm pretty sure that only about three people are going to read it in any case, so be it. Maybe one of you will even read the book and tell me how much you loved it.

In which I talk a lot about rot.

In a shocking deviation from normal practice, I got something done around the house. Yesterday I put together something called a back porch compost tumbler, which is a sort of drum on wheels that you can dump your scraps into and whirl around, then push like a wheelbarrow if you want to move it somewhere else. Because who doesn't want to roll a lot of half-rotted vegetable bits from place to place?

I'd been feeling a little ridiculous throwing out piles of vegetable scraps every week, which I do, and don't have the freezer space or need for stock required to save anything like all of them for cooking. Compost, then, is the obvious solution, but since the garden at our rented house is small and mainly the domain of the owners, who live on the other side of the duplex, I needed to get something unobtrusive, smallish, and self contained. 

The composter we got I think perhaps missed a step in its factory fabrication, because every single hole that a screw or bolt was supposed to run through seemed to be unfinished and needed to be drilled out before I could proceed. On the other hand, doing that did make me feel extra handy and competent, so all in all it was perhaps more satisfying this way than the alternative.

Previously.

Here.