The dead centre of Acton

Since I moved to London last July, I've travelled into to work every weekday on the Central Line, which takes me through through Acton, White City, Shepherd's Bush, Holland Park, Bayswater and into the city. Peeking over the fence at North Acton station I would often notice the wingtips of a stone angel, or the curve of a Celtic cross, and make a note that I must visit that cemetery someday. And then I would promptly forget all about it. Finally in October, before the trees were bare and the sky was eternally grey, we spent one Saturday exploring the cemetery as well as some less than salubrious parts of Acton and Park Royal.

Let me save you the time right now and say that there is no reason to explore Acton and Park Royal, unless you are particularly interested in mercilessly unending major roads, blocks upon blocks of grey concrete warehouses, and the odd deserted pub. And Acton Cemetery. We only did it because we got lost in a vortex of roundabouts and endless identical sidestreets on the way back from the cemetery. We were trying to find the cinemas in Park Royal in time for the 2.15pm showing of Burn After Reading. Later we realised that we'd been walking in exactly the opposite direction and had no hope of ever making the movie. Still haven't seen it either.

Acton Cemetery looks newer than the more central London cemeteries I've seen, which is logical as it was only opened in 1895 and not the 1600s. It's now closed to new burials but if you have an existing family grave in there you can still be buried in it. Sadly, that's about all I was able to discover about Acton Cemetery by Googling it.

This building was gated so I'm not sure it's a proper church/chapel or just a shelter.

Wonky graves (a bit like the inside of the Intrepid Fox).

Autumn redness
Now, I consulted Google about this as well, but had no luck discovering the significance of the rubber ducks below. They were on several graves around the cemetery but I couldn't see a pattern between those memorialised by toy ducks in sunglasses. I suppose I prefer them to fake flowers though.

Mysterious ways

Another point of noteworthiness near my office, in some circles at least, is England's oldest Catholic church, St Etheldreda's. It was built in 1250. That's about 650 years older than the oldest buildings in Brisbane. It's sandwiched between two other buildings on Ely Place, Holborn.


Ely Place is another London anomaly - it looks like normal London street (albeit dead-ended by a massive brick wall) but it's guarded by a beadle who sits in his little gate house at the entry to the street, presumably making sure no unsavoury types go near the barristers' chambers and classily understated businesses which fill the grand rows of houses. I think this is because the street happens to still be the responsibility of the Crown, rather than the City of London like most streets. That might be right, who knows... it's nice to see how much my property law knowledge has come along since my arrival in the UK 18 months ago (i.e. not at all).

Moving back to Princess Etheldreda, the church's namesake, she sounds like one of those medieval heroines who was lauded then, but would be a terrible bore now. According to the church website, she hoped to be a nun, but agreed to a politically-motivated arranged marriage with a neighbouring king on the proviso that she could remain a virgin. When her husband tried to talk her around, she ran off and founded a religious community. The website says she then lived a life of "exemplary austerity". There's also a vague hint that she had some sort of supernatural properties which prevented her body from decomposing at the normal rate upon her death. Perhaps it was something to do with all that austerity.

This puts me in mind of Mansfield Park (which I finished reading a few weeks ago), and its heroine who is so prim and disapproving of everything (other than sewing and doing what she's told) that I spent the whole book hoping she'd loosen up a bit and run off with the dashing villain instead of marrying her annoyingly virtuous first cousin.

The website also says Etheldreda was the daughter of "King Anna". Sounds very progressive for 600 AD.

More recently, the church has been the subject of extensive controversy (according to the Telegraph) because apparently the new rector this year is "not very enthusiastic" about giving mass in Latin, which could impact on the entrenched tradition of giving the 11:00 mass at St Etheldreda's in Latin. And, even more shockingly, the new curate "doesn't know Latin" so he will say mass only in English. He also "declines to wear the church's sleeveless embroidered Roman chasubles". I have no idea what a chasuble entails but it certainly sounds like some moneyed London matrons would have been clutching at their pearls and repressing their outrage in true English fashion earlier this year. Or maybe that stereotype is inaccurate for Catholics? :>)

(Just look at the photo of that journalist on the Telegraph site - a poster-boy for prim disapproval if I ever did see one.)

One the same day I wandered past St Etheldreda's, I came across St James Clerkenwell - from a distance, a fairly normal-looking London church (you can see it here). Now I'm not attempting to have a go at churches or religion in general today, but I don't know what this was all about:


Stairs to a brick wall? Is this like in Indiana Jones, where he had to walk across an invisible bridge to show his faith?

Things that made me seethe last week #1

We spent a bit of time on trains between northern Italian towns last week and I amused myself intermittently by listening to various podcasts from Radio National, an arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's radio empire. One particular program featured, among other things, an interview with Cathy Day of the Australian National University, on her recently completed study of inbreeding in English rural villages. There is a report on it here if you feel compelled to learn more on this subject.

Towards the end of the interview, the interviewer (Richard Aedy) asked Day what the residents of Stourton and Kilmington, Wiltshire, thought about her coming to delve into their respective shady ancestral histories. Day responded that some of them were much more bemused by the fact that a colonial was conducting a research project in the first place. She went on to say that several people said they had not realised there were any universities in Australia as there are none on Neighbours. One gentleman likened the situation to "an ant coming to study the entomologist".

I'm struggling to craft a response to this which isn't guilty of similar offensive generalisations and ignorance about the British. Or one that has any sense of humour. Perhaps I'll just let the powers of deduction behind the Neighbours reference speak for the residents of Stourton and Kilmington.

Thank you, travel gods

This was St Mark's Square, Venice on 5 December:

This was St Mark's Square on 11 December:

(Note these are not my photos. The first is from the International Herald Tribune and the second is from the Orlando Sentinel.)

Luckily this was St Mark's Square on 8 and 9 December, when we were there.

Sometimes the travel gods smile on you.

Although we also picked up dismal colds so I suppose it all evens out in the end.

Sesame street scariness

For my birthday when I was little (I couldn't say for sure how old) Mum made me one of those old classic Bert-and-Ernie-from-Sesame-Street cakes, like this one (although I don't remember the colours being so lurid):

That night I had a nightmare that the Ernie reached out from the cake and pulled off my nose.

I'm not sure if that's why these cupcakes (below) freak me out so much.

Maybe it's just the slightly evil look of glee they have ... as though they're about to come and eat me. Like little cake piranhas.

Notes...

1. Sitting on the tube to my home station the other night - usually an iPod on, put-my-head-down-and-bear-it experience of unexplained delays, mysterious odours and forced close proximity to others - the trip was hugely improved by the train driver. He had a more pleasant and calming intonation than your average TV host and his announcements managed to be both concise and slightly entertaining. (You don't want to be too entertaining in that environment - people's fuses are too short and you end up with eye-rolling and impatience, like on Virgin Blue in Australia.) Anyway, I was completely charmed by the driver's voice, so once the trip was over I looked out for him on the platform. Luckily he seemed to be at the end of his shift and so was packing up and alighting along with the rest of the passengers (the station is the terminus for that branch of the Central Line). He was chatting animatedly with a co-worker and I noticed he was carrying Buddhism for Dummies.

2. It is so cold here lately that the footpath was actually slippery with frost this morning. Even with my killer Doc Martens on (not white) it was like ice-skating at one point.

3. I can't believe I didn't mention this earlier, as it was quite exciting for me, but I've resigned from my job and am now serving out the purgatory of my three-month notice period. I'm sure my firm would quite like me to leave earlier but the contractual requirement is three months' notice so I couldn't leave it till later on and cross my fingers that they'd let me go earlier. After all, we have a plane out of London and into Cairo all booked.

Kew Gardens

While I'm still on Autumn, here are some shots from Kew Gardens in late October. I'm feeling a bit fuzzy and in need of a holiday (which I'm getting next week) so expect things to quiet down here again until I get back from Italy with some more photos and hopefully some more inspiration.

General autumn-ness

That's The Boyfriend playing a corpse under the spectacular tree.

Autumn apples
The Boyfriend on the skywalk thing - a huge wood and metal walkway through the canopy (sponsored by Xstrata, of course).
I don't know what these flowers are (they look a little like fresias) but when I was small and read old picture books they'd always have illustrations of woodland with carpets of individual blooms like this. I recommend clicking on the picture to see it more closely.

The incongrous Kew Gardens pagoda in the distance.

A typical London sight - prostrate person shamelessly and desperately soaking up the fleeting sun.
The Boyfriend was very excited about this greenhouse because he thought The Cure made a film clip there. (We think it was actually a different one on the other side of the Gardens, but I didn't take a photo of that one, so...)

The full set of photos, including close ups of The Boyfriend's "corpse", is on flickr here.

Autumn again

Our street is, like most of the suburb, lined with deciduous trees which are a riot of green all through spring and summer. About this time last year I remember being struck by the sudden change the trees go through - I moved to the UK in July so I turned up just in time to see all the greenery before autumn turned everything into something out of a Rob Reiner movie. Well, that's what it seemed like. As I would have said at the time, they have real seasons here! What I'm trying to say is that this is exciting for me, because autumn in Brisbane looks pretty much the same as all the other seasons.

This was our street one morning a few weeks ago.

I also saw another bit of picturesque continuity - this house a few lots down with a carpet of leaves adorning its path.
I photographed this same house and path sometime in April when it had a different seasonal carpet:

The street looks quite different again now. The trees are bare, and the only thing lining the streets are a few rotting remnants of the autumn leaves, and people's recycling spilling out of their front yards while it waits to be collected. Most of the houses seem to have to leave their rubbish and recycling out on the footpath and because most of it is in bags or open topped containers, the squirrels have an excellent time sorting through it all and then leaving all manner of disgusting things strewn all over the footpath. It's been cold and drizzly all week so this makes the street look particularly unpleasant. I'm sad we'll be leaving before things turn around in spring, but then again, the end of February seems to be London's least inviting time of year so perhaps it's the perfect time to go after all.

The Boyfriend's London

On a recent Saturday we set out to buy The Boyfriend some jeans (you'll see why shortly) and to visit the Tate Modern, which I keep harping on about because our annual membership is going to expire shortly. To be honest the Tate is never that appealing on a Saturday afternoon as it's packed to the rafters with people, mostly families, and the Members' Room is a stroller/pram/frazzled parent obstacle course instead of the calm refuge with bar I always hope for.

So after we'd braved the ludicrous crowds on Oxford Street, we decided to walk down to the Tate. However, we got distracted by the shops on Carnaby Street and then Soho, and never actually managed to make it to the art. I suspect this was a ploy of The Boyfriend's to avoid the Tate, because I've never seen him so interested in shopping as he was that afternoon.

Carnaby Street's Christmas lights this year are comprised of giant, white, obese men lit from inside who float above the arcade amongst white snowflakes.

The Oxford Street lights seem to be the same ones as last year - is this normal? I thought they changed each year?

We followed up a fruitless quest for new shoes for The Boyfriend with lunch at Cha Cha Moon in Kingly Court, which was a revelation as it keeps getting terrible reviews from all the snobby food critics in the UK papers. Now I think about it, the negative reviews seemed to based mostly on either the acoustics, which really seemed to offend one particular reviewer, or the fact that the food isn't authentically Chinese enough, a sentiment I find pretentious and annoying - the mains are £3.50 each for goodness' sake. We had awesomely cheap (for Central London), delicious crispy duck and jasmine tea-smoked chicken liao mian in completely inoffensive ambient conditions and I'm sorry we didn't discover it earlier in our London stay.


After a few hours wandering in Soho, we inevitably we found ourselves at Forbidden Planet, the flagship of the famous comic book/sci-fi pop culture store. This is probably The Boyfriend's favourite place in London, except perhaps the street with all the guitar shops near Charing Cross Road.

Here is The Boyfriend checking out the merchandise.

As you can see, his unfashionably saggy jeans prevent me checking out any of his merchandise. We purchased two more snug fitting pairs at Gap this same afternoon which are much more flattering, although The Boyfriend's friend back in Australia heard he'd bought some tight jeans and warned The Boyfriend in no uncertain terms not to come back wearing some crazy European wardrobe like their mutual friend who returned from his London stint sporting some lovely lederhosen-style short shorts. And not in a humorous or ironic way.

There are a lot of puzzling and or amusing things to find in Forbidden Planet, which has two enormous floors of comics, graphic novels, figurines, costumes, books, DVDs, toys, collectibles, etc devoted to every feature of pop culture with even the most tenuous connection to science fiction you can imagine, and probably much more. This particular shelf caught my eye though. That's a fairly specific category.

Finally, we ended up at the Intrepid Fox, a goth bar near Tottenham Court Road station.

This bar is adorned with the usual gargoyles, headstones, headless creatures etc but it plays a pretty good selection of metal and rock music (which means The Boyfriend will tolerate being there - pubs that play top 40 pop music bring out his petulant side) and the crowd is definitely more interesting to watch than the tourist and hen night crowds in most of the watering holes in the area.

White Docs: they do go with everything, don't they?

Of course, after an afternoon of retail and cider, we were rather jolly on the way home and recorded some aspects of our journey back into West London.

The Boyfriend and friends

This is me with the Paolazzi mosaics in Tottenham Court Road tube station. As you can see I was not really suitably attired for the goth bar (although I suppose the font on the front of my hoodie could be described as Gothic). If only we'd known where the afternoon would take us, I would have gotten my white Doc Martens out. If I had any.

Sand dollars

On my way to Waterloo Station to catch the train to Brockenhurst (for our New Forest adventure, see below) I walked along the South Bank of the Thames, past the Tate Modern, Oxo Tower, National Theatre, and the British Film Institute. As this was late October, the sun was actually still up (only just) at 5pm. Unlike now, when you look out the office window at 4pm into pitch blackness.

This was the view from the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge across to Westminster.

And the view back towards the bridge and the City from the South Bank.


I also spotted something with some continuity to an earlier post, which was nice. Early this year I posted some (grainy) photos of sand-dwellers in this particular area of the South Bank who were merrily sozzled and singing to the passers by while crafting couches and other things from sand. The primary purpose of all this was to coax money out of us, for beer they said, but the whole effect, with their roaring fires and sand furniture and straight-to-the-point chorus, was decidedly entertaining.

So I passed by this spot on the way to Waterloo and found some more sand-sculpting but of a more morbid (yet still enterprising) variety.



The headstone says:
'Here lies a sandy queen
Waiting for next Halloween
In 7 days she will wake up
So throw a coin and wish her luck.'

(As always, click on the photo for a better view.)

I like how he has her showing a bit of leg, just in case that would reel us in.

The New(ish) Forest

The Boyfriend took me to a fancy English spa hotel a few weeks ago. This is extremely unlike him, as he usually makes a point of broadcasting that he hates "all that rubbish" and just wants his punk music and his computer and a bottle of wine. But he seemed to be actually feeling the stress of being a City professional in the current economic climate and, after encouragement from a workmate, booked this package at a hotel in the New Forest, Hampshire.

Soon after we arrived, The Boyfriend took in the embossed wallpaper, chintzy curtains and the spa treatment list that started at £60 for the most basic treatment, and realised his folly. While I was quite happy to book an overpriced massage and to recline in front of an open fire while the wind whistled outside, I'm pretty sure The Boyfriend was almost terminally bored. It was a nice experiment though. And also interesting to experience the dining room, which seemed to be a relic of English upper-class country life (no denim or t-shirts, attentive and polite service, no changes, excessive amounts of meat). There was actually a man at the next table on our first visit with a white bouffant, salmon sports coat and cream trousers looking snootily around at all us pretenders.

This was the hotel:

Not too bad really.

We decided to take a ramble through the New Forest itself, and on our way we came across actual livestock, roaming the streets and fields at their leisure. This seemed a bit unusual to me. Is this laid on for the tourists?


(OK, I've looked it up - this is another legal hangover from hundreds of years ago which gives the peasants the right to turn horses and cattle (and pigs, presumably) out to graze in this particular forest.)

The New Forest itself was uneventful, particularly because a large part of it is actually new, so that part is mostly scrubby bracken and young pine trees planted in neat rows. But deeper into the forest, things became older and more enchanting. (Click on these to see them properly.)

We decided to walk the 9 miles to Lyndhurst, the path to which the hotel receptionist ensured us was clearly signed. We saw one sign, which seemed to have no correlation with the map she'd given us. Other ramblers also seemed to be taking different paths from the ones that seemed logical. They were dressed in Gore-Tex from head to toe, wearing hi-tech footwear, and carrying those professional walking stick helper things. Maybe they were expecting to discover some as yet undetected mountains?

Anyway, somehow we made it to into the town, which seemed to consist almost entirely of antique stores and luxury car dealerships including Maserati and Porsche, so The Boyfriend was rewarded in the end by being allowed to gaze on the shiny, monstrous glory of European vehicle technology (until I couldn't bear it any longer and hauled him off).

The rest of the weekend was spent, frankly, eating and drinking, so I'm certainly not going to complain about that.

Friday vegetable update

Over here, some things in the supermarket are a little bit different than in Queensland. For one thing, you can buy alcohol here (because unlike in Queensland, the government has not been hamstrung by a super-powerful alcohol distribution monopoly). Also, there are massive aisles of pre-prepared "ready meals" for one which cover a whole range of cuisines but by and large manage to taste almost exactly the same as each other. "Woolies" here is not the dominant and most profitable supermarket in the country, but a minor purveyor of homewares and hi-fi equipment. And finally, things have completely different names: what I know as a snowpea is mangetout, those orange pumpkins are butternut squash, eggplants are aubergines, and zucchini is courgette. Plus, for somewhere with a decidly non-tropical climate, they all seem awfully keen on pomegranate. I don't think I'd ever seen a pomegranate before I arrived in England.

Today I had my first British experience of an entirely new vegetable (rather than something with a different name), the golden beetroot. In Australia, beetroot usually means violently magenta hued, very sweet slices extracted from a tin made by Golden Circle and served at barbecues. Possibly for serving with pineapple on a hamburger. Occasionally someone (like my mother) might bother to buy fresh ones and cook them (meaning they would have about 400% less sugar than the canned variety), but most Australians I know probably don't even realise this is possible. However, I had no idea it was possible to get beetroot in different colours. It was like the time I first encountered those purple potatoes.


The weirdest thing is, it tastes almost exactly the same as red beetroot, so while eating it I experienced a weird sort of sensory confusion. Apparently golden beetroot used to be very common in England before being supplanted (ha!) by the red variety. So there you go. Maybe I should start farming it in Australia and selling it with a mark-up on the red beetroot price. It's not really golden though... more of a dull, slightly translucent yellow.

Another thing I've learned about golden beetroot is that it seems to emit some sort of invisible forcefield that prevents the camera from being in focus when someone tries to take a photo of it. This the only possible explanation for the range of substandard photos Google Images brings up when you search "golden beetroot".

I personally, at this moment in time...

I'm not really in a cheery blog posting frame of mind at the moment, for a variety of reasons that include my deteriorating spine and how that might prevent me from my rice cracker hookup later in the week, and if I wrote about how I was really feeling it might be a bit too profane for my family-friendly little blog. However, this article about the 10 expressions English people find most irritating is giving me a welcome sense of superiority and well-being. In case you can't take the suspense of waiting for the page to load, here is the list:

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science

I don't really see what the problem is with no. 7. A resigned exclamation of "Nightmare!", usually in the context of supermarket or ATM queues, is definitely more prevalent here than in Oz but I've found myself adopting that particular piece of annoyingness.

I heartily agree with no. 1 though. It's right up there with people around the office who say "ramp up" and "on the same page" and [shudder] "synergy/ies". I thought everyone had finally caught on to the uselessness of all that indirect, pointless business jargon, but apparently I was wrong.

I suppose glib top ten lists would fall into some people's idea of irritating too. But it's nice to have something straightforward and concise to refer to, particularly when you're cranky.

Coram's Fields

Since I reigned myself in from binging on all manner of artery-hardening junk food when bored, one of my life's greatest pleasures has been snacking on tzatziki with rice crackers. (Oh yeah. I live on the EDGE!) Not those cardboard-tasting, frisbee like puffed rice discs, and not the glazed, sweet Japanese-style ones, but the small, fairly basic rice cracker you find everywhere in Oz, looking much like this:

(These are the barbecue-flavoured ones, which are okay, although I'm more partial to the seaweed flavour.)

When I first moved to the UK, I was gutted to discover that neither Tesco nor Sainsbury's (our local supermarkets) stocked this kind of rice cracker. At one point Tesco had something similar, but in these almost surreal-ly insipid flavours (something like "Oriental Spice" and "Sweet Thai Herb") and not only were they so sweet as to be almost inedible, they definitely didn't go with the all-important tzatziki.

For the following twelve months I would duck into every single off-licence and corner store we happened to pass in the hope that I would find a rice cracker with which to satisfy my cravings. Everytime I spoke to other Australians living in London I would interrogate them about where and when they'd seen them for sale in the UK. Occasionally I would find an almost-adequate substitute (e.g. there is a "chilli-flavoured" version which actually almost resembles something flavoured with chilli) and buy five or six packs in order to hoard them until more could be found. But when I'd return to the shop, I would always find they hadn't re-stocked since the last time I cleaned them out.

Finally I stopped bothering The Boyfriend and others with my insane rice cracker obsession and started to look for other snack alternatives.

Then, when I moved into my new group at work, my lovely temporary office-mate, a Kiwi, happened to mention something about rice crackers and I gave her my sad story of defeat. And she replied casually that they sell them at Waitrose (one of the UK's largest supermarket chains, i.e. freaking everywhere). There is a Waitrose in our area but the Tesco and Sainsbury's are much closer so we'd never bothered to trek down to it. Imagine my pleasure (and dismay at all those wasted months).

I've now taken to making a regular sojourn on the way home to the Waitrose near Russell Square in central London to stock up on just this one item, Sakata rice crackers (seaweed flavour). I am a much happier person generally.

This has been an enormously long (and dull?) segue into how I discovered Coram's Fields, which is located along the walk from my office in Holborn to Waitrose, Russell Square. There is a lot to see on this particular walk, including as it does parts of Clerkenwell and Bloomsbury and therefore lots of beautiful old terrace houses and antique and/or seedy bookshops. However, I was overjoyed to find on my inaugural Waitrose trip another London park to add to my list of favourites.

My joy was diminished almost immediately because as I discovered, you can't go into Coram's Fields WITHOUT A CHILD ACCOMPANYING YOU.

I see from Wikipedia that Coram's Fields offers a playground, sand pits, a duck pond, a pets corner, a café, four half-sized football pitches, one normal-sized pitch, and a basketball court. As I had no child at my disposal (and am not likely to at around 6.30pm on any weeknight), I couldn't verify this with certainty. I recalled later that some of the companies around London play sporting fixtures at the Fields, and wondered how this rule was applied to them. Does every member of each team need a child, or is one per team sufficient? How do they verify the children's ages anyway? Does the child have to want to be there, or can they exclude you if the child is throwing a massive temper tantrum about wanting to go home and watch Dora the Explorer for the 89th time?

Anyway, it doesn't look all that nice inside the high fences. In fact it's so dull the photo I took is not even worth posting. Take that, Coram's Fields. I don't need you anyway.