And I had been to London before, with Nina in 2016, though I didn't write about here. My memories from that trip: We stayed in a very modern but very small (verging on "capsule") hotel room with adjustable colored LED lighting and, distressingly, a transparent bathroom wall. We took a Jack the Ripper-themed London Ghost Walk where we were admonished to consider the lives and deaths of Victorian sex workers in a way that seemed a little ahead of its time. We toured the Tower of London, where I tipped a Cornishman a tuppence (?) after using a pay toilet by the Traitors' Gate. The Crown Jewels? Nice, I suppose, but the crown's a piece of shit. We ate strange and cumin-heavy approximation of Mexican food at a now-defunct restaurant in Notting Hill called Crazy Homies. I ate a very mayonnaise-y chicken salad on a big leaf of lettuce at a historic pub (maybe The Seven Stars in Holborn) and survived. We navigated a gauntlet of Friday night revelers on Shoreditch High Street, some of them passed out on the threshold of the pubs they'd been entering or leaving, other visitors stepping over them as they went inside. We chickened out of buying entry to a smoke-filled bingo parlor tucked away in an abandoned corner of the mall at Elephant & Castle. I bungled a scheduled visit to Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium in East London and left us wandering the tall grasses at Hackney City Farm. It was December, but as I recall it wasn't very cold. Harry Potter was everywhere.
Reflecting upon that trip, my conclusion is that London is (obviously) a multifarious place where people live and work and rejoice and despair, and making itself visible and clear to tourists is a small function of its overall activity. So for a return trip I felt some motivation to dig into it a bit deeper. You can't just wander around. You do have to plan a little bit, book some tickets to the rides. I was aided in this effort by a fleet of British podcasts in my RSS feed, in particular What's All This Then, which gave me an updated cultural lens on a full spectrum of British cultural ephemera; and The Evolution of Horror, which primed me for FrightFest and the London cinemar experience. My sister also identified that AEW would be coming to Wembley that week, and tapped her network of gourmandizers to identify restaurants that would meet our party's array of dietary restrictions. She also booked a charming three-story row house for us all to stay at in Shoreditch, right across a narrow street from St. Leonard's churchyard, and down the street from a really nice little cafe with the not-quite-idiomatic name Beans Love Greens. (We ate there almost every day.) A few blocks away from the Museum of the Home, a surprisingly charming collection that I visited twice.
The evening of the first full day, my sister and Nina and Pete and I had procured tickets to see Paranormal Activity in the West End. This was another "what if we just did it" impulse booking, but it turned out to be a hoot. Mike Muncer didn't like it, and I can sort of understand why: As a horror story, it's pretty thin soup. And for better or worse it doesn't really have anything to do with the Paranormal Activity films. (I'd made everyone re-watch the first one the night before.) But! It has some genuinely surprising special effects that are a thrill to see live, a few feet from your face; in particular a bit with a bathrobe, and a bit with a couch. We argued about how they must have been achieved for the rest of the night.
The next day we'd booked tickets to see an open-air performance of Much Ado About Nothing (or "much ado about p-word" as I explained to my sister) at Shakespeare's Globe in South Bank. A fun performance for the whole family, with practical effects: dry ice billowing out of Hero's grave plot; a fake wiener that Borachio uses to pee onto the set balcony. I think I saw Charles Dance in the audience. The people in the yard got some fun interactions with the cast, but I was glad we had seats in the stalls, under a truly luxuriant thatched roof. Afterwards we walked through Borough Market and got Sri Lankan food at Rambutan. It was pungent and good. And then that evening Caroline and Pete and Nina and I went over to The Queen's Head on Shoreditch High Street and I got to try a spice bag for the first time. I think it may have been a kind of "gastropub" formulation of the dish, since "cauliflower hot wings" were also on the menu (and we also ordered some of those). But it was good!
Nina and I booked a tour of Highgate Cemetery. I wanted to see Marx—the big guy—but she persuaded me that we should take in the catacombs as well, which required joining a tour group. Hiking up steep incline of Swain's Lane, we saw lots of enormous ravens (we saw ravens everywhere during the trip) and we also saw, briefly, a fox standing on a brick wall. Was this a normal thing to see, like the ravens, I wondered? Exotic to us Yanks but everyday stakes for Londoners? "Oi, that's a fox innit," said someone nearby. So there you go. Highgate is divided into two parts, and our tour covered the older, Western side. Our guide emphasized that the Eastern half might have more of the celebrity graves (Marx, McLaren, Eliot) but that we should consider the other people buried there, and how they were buried (and sometimes dug up). Faraday. The lost girls of Highgate. We got to go inside the locked catacombs up by the terrace and heard about the vampire panic of the 1970s. We saw Lion the Dog of Sayers and Nero the Lion of Wombwell. Afterwards we did cross over to the Eastern side, and we did go in search of Marx's huge marble grave. It's impressive! Just like the photos. I didn't touch it. There were a lot of tributes piled up, many of them in Chinese. A few other visitors were paying their respects, including a serious young binoclard, a girl with powerful Steban The Student Communist energy who stood a long time in quiet contemplation. We'd learned on the tour that Marx had been reinterred from a previous location, and after looking at the new one for a bit we went in search of the old one as well. You can sort of understand why they moved it back in 1954; the original grave is unassuming and mingled in among many others. The map was confusing and we doubled back a few times. And then a small black cat came trotting up the lane, stopping briefly to sun itself on a large rock next to us before getting up, stretching, and then veering off the road into the graves. An Omen, we thought, and followed it. And it didn't quite lead us to Marx but we wouldn't have found him without the intervention of the cat. On the flat surface of the grave someone had left a note: "They charged me ten quid to come in here."
The next day, I had to reckon with a weird problem with my new phone that was starting to become a real impediment: It kept thinking there was water in the charging port and was refusing to charge. I'd hoped it would resolve on its own (maybe there really was some water in there!) but it had been days and I was running out of juice. I finally broke the news to everyone and the whole entourage insisted on joining me on a visit to the Samsung Experience at Coal Drops Yard. They couldn't help me there (charging port was fucked and in need of replacement) and the mobile fix-it kiosks in Saint Pancras weren't much help either. But we did all wind up having lunch at North Sea Fish Restaurant, where I finally had a real fish and chips. There was a preserved perch in a sort of murky diorama mounted on the wall in the dining room along with other nautical bric-a-bac, with a claim that it had been there since the mid-1800s. Was that true, my dad asked our server. No idea. A party of nonagenarian friends (cousins?) were eating lunch there at the same time and explained as we were leaving that they were celebrating someone's 92nd birthday.
From there we tried to get into Sir John Soane's Museum, but it was too crowded, so we tried the Hunterian Museum instead. Committed readers may recall that I disapproved of the Mütter Museum when I visited a long time ago. The Hunterian seems more tuned for empathy than for showcasing the grotesque. I think that's good! There were still plenty of pickled wieners to look at, though.
Dinner at the Shoreditch location of Dishoom, a famous Indian restaurant with a sprawling internal layout meant to channel 1960s Mumbai cafe culture. I don't know! The food was very good.
The next night, we all went over to the Royal Albert Hall to catch Altın Gün performing with the BBC orchestra. This was a lucky coincidence of our attempts to find live music that would be happening during our trip. My recollection from my last visit was that I couldn't seem to find a way into the middle tier of performance in London; you could see a guy with a guitar playing the back of a pub, or you could spend a thousand dollars to see, like, Oasis playing a venue for a hundred thousand people. But there was nothing at the scale of, like, Music Hall of Williamsburg or whatever. So it was quite a stroke of luck to find Altın Gün, performing a crazy prestige showcase. Pete had opened for them, as a member of Ghost King! But this was a very different formation. I don't quite know how to describe it. Our seats were in the balcony looking down over the stage, where the band was gathered in a knot at the apron. Behind them was the entire BBC orchestra, a massive string and horn section filling the stage, with a gong and a bass drum tucked up in a nook above. The set began with some uptempo rock songs but transitioned quickly into a moodier set, longer instrumental pieces with melodies that rose and fell beneath the drone of hundreds of vibrating strings. Hovering in the air above us the massive sound diffuser mushrooms, blue and violet light playing over them to make them look like jellyfish. Maybe we were underwater.
After the show my parents wanted to go to bed but the rest of us went back out to for more adventures, first to The Queen's Head but then (initially as a joke) we walked over to The Munch to see about a "kebab munchy box." I thought the food looked sort of horrible but the really wild thing was that there was a security guard inside the shop brusquely directing traffic and rousting anyone who tried to sit down with their food. "Can't eat here, mate. Take it outside." I can only imagine the Friday night brawls that must have broken out before they hired him.
On Saturday we'd planned some slack time and I decided I would indeed like to check out FrightFest. My sister demurred (tummy ache) and Nina had a prior engagement; she dropped me off near Leicester Square on her way. So I made my way down Cranbourn Street in the rain, realizing that the treads on my Allbirds had worn almost entirely off and so I had to step carefully to avoid slipping on the paving stones. And as I got closer to Leicester Square I was surprised to see it was full of Chinese restaurants. But that was also where the Odeon was, and even if there hadn't been a huge FrightFest banner mounted above the entrance, the crowd of lanky men in black graphic tees would have signaled that something was up. The demographic actually reminded me strongly of LibrePlanet, a geek milieu I hadn't been immersed in for quite a while. Everybody was extraordinarily kind, and the festival staff accommodated my request to buy a single ticket to a random movie that happened to be playing. That movie happened to be The Brook, and it turned it wasn't actually playing at the main Odeon, it was showing instead at "Discovery Screen 1" which was in the Odeon Luxe West End on the other side of Leicester Square. The theater was several stories down underground and turned out to be extremely comfy—bed-sized reclining seats like the Battery Park Regal, with cup holders big enough to hold a stock pot. I ate about half of a small popcorn. The movie itself was, you know, alright. A sort of Murders in the Rue Morgue refactored to feature "The Elmbrook Puma," a premise I found hard to countenance until I discovered it was grounded in historical fact: The Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 had apparently made illegal hundreds of exotic pets across England, and rather than comply with the new regulations, many owners apparently set their animals loose into the streets. The director and the cast were on hand to answer questions after the film, clearly very hyped to be featured at FrightFest. It was very sweet. On my way out, I poked my head in the door at The Moon Under Water, a neighboring pub with an amazing (though apparently not unique) name, in the hopes of glimpsing one of the hosts of The Evolution of Horror or Gore Things, but I didn't recognize anyone in the press of goth-y FrightFesters and working class Londoners.
I'd first heard about Gregg's sausage rolls on What's All This Then, in which the hosts grudgingly acknowledged how good they are, but also that there were vegan ones available. So I knew I wanted to try one of those. I'd had one at Beans Love Greens that was very tasty, but also five quid. So when I found myself a bit at loose ends after the movie, wandering The Strand near Covent Garden and I happened to pass a Gregg's, I thought, This is the moment. So I went in and got one. It was good! A bit mushier than the high end version. But here's the crazy thing- they're only one-pound-twenty, same price for the vegan one as the regular one, and if you spend three fifty you get four. Truly unbelievable.
Saturday Nina took me to Brixton for dinner after a long walk through Westminster. A mentally ill man shouted theories about microwaves from outside the gates to 10 Downing Street to some amused-looking guards cradling assault rifles. Once in Brixton we walked through Electric Avenue to a cute food court to a cute restaurant called Veg & Tings, an offshoot of a place called Fish, Wings & Tings next door. I ordered vegetable roti. It was very good. As the evening drew on the food court was transitioning to a party scene, and people were queueing up to get into a nightclub. I stopped to use the bathroom, a modernized pay toilet that accepted contactless payment. The urinals were all grouped together in a single large stall at the end of a row of cubicles. There was a guy in there pissing when I went in, and he was still pissing when I finished up. "'Ow's your night going?" he called after me.
We had a Sunday roast upstairs at Owl & Pussycat, a slightly self-conscious pub with an ersatz tin ceiling. Vegan for me, a sort of spinachy pot pie alongside the carrots and parsnips. I felt beyond stuffed for the rest of the day.
And finally, we came to the wrestling. I'm not a huge wrestling guy. No problem with it, I think the new generation of it just kind of missed me. But my sister and Pete are fanatics, and this AEW show promised to delivery important developments in The Lore. It takes a while to get out to Wembley, and you pass through several strata of English class society on the way there, I think, at least as viewed through the tube window. We timed things so we'd mostly catch the fights at the top of the card, and so the Olympic Way was mostly empty as we walked up from the station under a cloudy sky and the huge print banners with the faces of the wrestlers. It took us a good 20 minutes of walking to get all the way to our seats, and we were just in time for the Jon Moxley / Nigel McGuinness match. I'm not sure how much I have to say about the fights themselves—you can look 'em up on Wikipedia, I guess. The fight where the CEO Lady kicked the ass of the Positive Attitude Lady was both brutal and very funny. Darby Allin climbed the rigging, jumped off, and seems like he got pretty badly fucked up. Sting hit some guys with a bat. Everyone was very brave and talented. But the arena experience was wild on its own. Wembley is really big! The show was mostly sold out at around forty thousand tickets, my sister estimated, but the arena was only at half capacity. All of the action took place in a small tent in the middle of the field. We wouldn't have been able to see much without the mounted screens blowing up the action. Elaborate video montages for each group of wrestlers promenading up to the ring, amid a generous evocation of fireworks. At my sister and Pete's recommendation, we left before the end of the top of the card and began to make our way back to Shoreditch through the drizzle.
And that's all this then.
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