But like a favourite tv programme at Christmas it can, despite all the right elements, ( drama, religion, snow, romance, royalty, christmas ) go wrong.
I had it all planned. I had exexdh organised to come on Sunday morning so that I could go to the service at a chapel in St James's Palace. There is no other way in as far as I can see. It is a royal chapel, within the security of the palace. Though they say the public are welcome for services. Afterwards I intended to rush to House of Fraser to buy PSM's son a birthday present ( why had I not done this before?) get the boys with their shoes on - SHOES! SHOES! SHOES! and then to The Nightmare before Christmas in 3D at the BFI for PSM's youngest son's birthday celebration.
But. My Indonesian friend phoned up early morning crying. She managed to gulp out - would I be in this morning? Could she come round? I said yes. And phoned exexdh to say I would stay put, wait for her to come, not go to a royal chapel. I have known for ages that something is wrong. I have nearly written about it. But it seems something bigger than I can manage or understand. Something sinister and scary. I take her son to school quite often, when her husband does not come back from his nightshifts in time ( for she works full time now ) and her son ( who I love - his beautiful curly eyelashes like disney ink drawings, and his cheeky manly chats with my eldest, (though he is the same age as the youngest) are hilarious. And like my older son he has great balance and bravery and the pair of them dare each other further on skateboards and bikes. Though the lollipop lady looks at me as if I am mad - three boisterous boys barely controlled. But my friend's son told me one morning putting on his shoes by our front door - that someone had broken into their 'house' and messed up their things but he wasn't allowed to tell anyone. That his Dad slept under the bed when they came. I felt like he thought I was the grown up and that I might be able to do something about it. I would like to think I was. But there wasn't anything I could think to do. If it was me I would ring the police. But it isn't my choice. I texted and texted my friend saying I hoped she was ok. But I kept it neutral. I didn't want to get her son into trouble. But something very serious is up. I think they are being threatened.
I didn't meet her Yemenese husband for a long time and then when I did I didn't think I liked him. I see her as a rare flower - intelligent, kind and funny and strong, open to all. Which is so rare. Though she has to do what her husband says and runs out to buy gym vitamin supplements when he wants. Though she said he was a kind man for an arab husband. I felt from the way she said it that she meant he didn't hit her. He is a short, boyish and handsome. But I also felt he disapproved of me and our friendship and he never looks me in the eye. But increasingly I have noticed his unfriendliness is anxiety and the other morning he shook my hand, which seemed a mark of acceptance, though he still averted his gaze.
On this Sunday when she phones crying, they are meant to fly to Yemen either that evening or the next day - (I can't quite remember) - though because they don't have a credit card I helped book the tickets - my friend brought the money round to give me while I tried to put it on my card. But I wasn't allowed to do it. The name on the card had to be the name on the tickets they said when we phoned them up. Though writing this I bet my name has been stored as someone who tried to buy tickets for another to Yemen.
I can't explain my sense of trust. But I trust her implicitly though not him. Not him at all. I think he has charm but is very insecure. It is a weak combination.
Anyhow. I waited for her but she didn't come. And when I texted her to say I would love to see her, to know she was ok, but I had to leave for a birthday party at 12.30 she texted back don't worry, have a lovely holiday. A day later she texted to say, that because of the snow they were still waiting for their flight, but they were at Stansted now not Heathrow. They would be boarding in 15 mins.
Insyaallah. She texted. 'God willing' in brackets.
The snow had come the day before, on the Saturday. Great big flakes, hundreds, thousands, a brief blizzard that blanketed the ground. Me and the boys came back from a school project morning, mouths open, tasting the snow - then made a snowman in our courtyard.
That night I met U,OL in a pub near the flat. I ran out, excited to see him. The snow had made our arrangements complicated. But for the first time he was there. Not the angry, anxious person tucked in a shell of himself. Just himself. His face smiling. We went on the 148 bus that said 'White City' which was where I lived when I knew him, a bus into a happier time. We went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. Like a christmas mini break, it is an over the top, finely-detailed, fairy-tale fun fair, sinister and romantic at the same time. He said as we got off the bus it looked like Gorky Park from a distance. And I winced, unexpectedly, ludicrously jealous. After all, I had wanted to go to Gorky Park, had wanted to share his adventures. But I wasn't allowed to go. And here, across the snow, these beautiful lights twinkling in the park - were magical, but something I had missed out on.
But. We had a brilliant time. I don't know what it means. I have no idea. But to stand alongside someone you love that had vanished from you. And know without touching and in a very fundamental way that they love you too. Is so peaceful. Whatever that can or mainly cannot mean. I worry about writing this. But I feel it is true.
When we sat and had drinks in the Spiegel tent - a velvet draped structure with 1930's glass, slightly random event chairs, leather sofas and a couple of incongruous bean bags - a future x factor boot camp (but no further) contestant singing - 'don't stop believing' infront of a twinkly star background - it felt like a dream. A really happy dream. It doesn't sound it but it was beautiful. I noticed a good looking double-date of married partners on the opposite leather sofa observe our annimation - as if we were breaking the rules of our age group. Looking at the velvet drapes U,OL told me a story of his old house mate that I knew and really loved who had constructed as part of a perfomance that took place on a walk around the east end of London, a velvet draped theatre in the foyer of an office block, which was designed to be taken down in ten minutes. The plan was that the performance was seen, then the audience led again on the east end walk, and then ten minutes later pass by the modern foyer perhaps ( and all that effort for only a perhaps ) observing the illusion of a place so beautiful that no longer existed. But, and I can't remember or couldn't understand the reason, the organizers decided that it would take too long to walk the audience back again to see this sleight of hand, so the masterpiece of transformation and memory was not observed. Perhaps it doesn't matter. It was possible. It could happen.
Hurtling towards christmas, living on lists of stocking fillers still to buy, food to cook and cleaning to do I try again to go to a church. On a boris bike, attempting to order a turkey on Lupus Street ( butcher's closed, Maria's gone) - St Saviour's Pimlico's lights are on. But the door is shut. Then I plan to go up to the edge of Mayfair and buy my friend's girlfriend pickled walnuts at Fortnum and Mason's and visit a church I have glimpsed from a bus on Park Lane. But I run out of time and realise I won't see them until after christmas, so I'll go up afterwards.
Desperate, I think I will listen to the carol service on Radio 4 and approximate, fob you off with a service at home. But I miss it queueing in Sainsbury's - food lists and present lists nearly all neatly crossed out.
My Christmas Special, like many tv spectaculars has something missing, doesn't quite hit the mark but it is the central thing not there - like an xmas day Dr Who without Dr Who - I didn't reach a church.
However I still wish you a Merry Christmas. And Peace on Earth.
Amen
Showing posts with label Winter Wonderland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winter Wonderland. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Saturday, 4 December 2010
St Paul's Wilton Place, Knightsbridge
My favourite toy on our shelves is a perspex children's tool box with red, slightly wobbly clasps, that we call 'The City Box'. In it are: shiny, shaped bricks, in 80s colours - old, wooden, coloured tiles, bought from a car boot sale in a 50s tin with a picture of a red-haired girl holding two puppies on the front - a string bag with German ( I think ), wooden houses, horses, hedges, a school house, a church - a tiny, slightly torn box with thin bits of wood painted as sky scrapers that funnily enough U,OL brought back from Russia as a present years ago, before he went to live there, when we were still together - a metal souvenir of the eiffel tower, another of grand central station in New York and a model of a bullet train and two bags of Muiji city blocks -those pale wood blank shapes of city monuments, one marked London and another New York. And the children always moan that I make them put everything back in the right bags and boxes. Though eventually, with encouragement they do.
Cycling alongside Buckingham Palace back from my trip to St Paul's, I am unsure how to write this. I don't feel attached to what I have to write about. The Tractarian movement initially championed by St Paul's church is difficult to fathom as a non believer in the twenty first century, though at it's core is the division between the Church of England and the Catholic church and the overlaps between the two. But, the beautiful view of Big Ben through a gap in the expanse of trees and then the hoop of the wheel above Horse Guards Parade remind me of the blank wood of the Muiji models and of the cities we have made laid out on the carpet. Invented metropolis that have included a school with horses in a hedged playground, the gherkin building alongside the statue of liberty and a high-speed, japanese-style train link made in bright orange and blue bricks alongside tiny skyscrapers of all colours. A city made from scratch.
To visit the church I park the bike in Hyde Park, jostling with the Winter Wonderland and Knightsbridge shopping crowds. Like time has tipped into Christmas. Everyone busy. A family walk past, wrapped up against the cold, talking about somewhere I know really well from my childhood in Hertfordshire - they must have come up on the train for the day. Though there are many different nationalities in the throng. Somehow I am against the tide, I am not going to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, I am not going ice skating or on a helter skelter. I am trying to cross the road into the quiet, grand, residential street, with a few Embassy flags visible, past a stately hotel with doormen outside.
St Paul's is set back from the road with a tall, dark tower, made from dirty stone, but I can see there are lights on, and the door is open. A man with a knapsack squeezes in before me as I stand in the porch fiddling my phone to silence. There is singing inside the church and for a minute I think maybe there is a service, though it is Saturday afternoon (the boys are at swimming lessons). When I step inside I realise it is a rehearsal. Gathered on the steps infront of an ornate rood screen, are singers and musicians, the music grand and beautiful. I stand, slightly self concious watching them, I am not sure where the man in the knapsack has gone. The church has a beautiful, high roof with wooden, carved trusses, a wooden gallery with carved angels looking down and tiled panels, like murals along the walls, almost pre-raphaelite drawn, showing scenes of Christ's life, and slightly awkward paintings of the stations of the cross sandwiched between each panel. The church is really clean, the carpets just vacuumed, everything polished. I am slightly embarrassed to interrupt the rehearsal as I look quickly round, worrying about mud from my boots on the carpet. When I leave I pick up a leaflet for the concert that evening, Handel's Coronation Anthems.
I know, I think, cycling home, I will let myself finally buy the book of London maps, that I have eyed covetously in the nearby amazing map shop 'The National Map Centre' on Caxton St. The shop is where I have found many of the old maps for this project. But this book 'Mapping London' which charts in maps, the growth and expansion of London from the initial clusters of population on the banks of the Thames costs £39.95 and I have looked and looked at it but not let myself buy it. I thought I would ask for it for christmas, but my mum and dad have already bought me an expensive cup and saucer to match the set I am collecting. ( I know, I know, I don't think my priorities are always right, but lovely things do make me happy.) And there isn't really anyone else I can ask for such an expensive book. But the building of this city, has become, suddenly the key - the population and expansion of London and for a moment with excitement, I think oh go on, just buy it. But the shop is not open. Perhaps a good thing, with christmas, my son's birthday and swimming lessons to pay for.
Instead I buy 'London. A Social History' by Roy Porter from the Westminster Bookshop on Artillery Row. Which is like a bookshop in a film, or a portal to another, slightly older, well-read world. I also buy a copy of 'On Churches' John Betjeman for my dad's christmas present and the nice, northern, gently spoken, man who is passionate about the books he sells gives me a pound off and we talk about the snow.
This is what I garner.
Around 1700 Celia Fiennes was impressed to find 'London joyned with Westminster...'
By 1760 When Lord Chesterfield built his mansion facing Hyde Park, the site was so rural he quipped he would need a dog for company.
It is just numbers really:
'London grew astonishingly in the nineteenth century, with its hordes of labourers and landlords, it pen-pushers and porters. Between 1841 and 1851 alone, some 330,000 migrants flooded into the capital, representing a staggering 17 per cent of London's total population. Of these 46,000 came from Ireland, fleeing famine and swelling the London Irish community to around 130,000. In the 1850s a further 286,000 migrants arrived; in the 1860s 331,000 Before 1840 the majority came from the south-east but by the 1860s, with agriculture in crisis, the net widened; all were drawn by the hope of work.'
Tobias Smollett's country character Matt Bramble says, 'What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets and squares and palaces and churches....Pimlico and Knightsbridge are now almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington and if this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole country of Middlesex will be covered with brick'
And a beautiful description by H. Llewellyn Smith,
'The contagion of numbers, the sense of something going on, the theatres, and the music halls, the brightly lighted streets and busy crowds - all, in short, that makes the difference between the Mile End fair on a Saturday night and a dark muddy land, with no glimmer of gas and with nothing to do. Who could wonder that men are drawn into such a vortex?'
Knightsbridge was, until 1824, a boggy and dangerous route threatened by highwaymen and thought too marshy for development. From 1825 Thomas Cubitt, the master builder developer who worked for the Marquess of Westminster, and on many projects ( including the nearby east front of Buckingham Palace, parts of Stoke Newington, Clapham, Camden and Pimlico) brought gravel up on barges from St Katherine's Dock ( which he was also developing ) and laid out his most prestigious development including Belgrave Square. He was the first builder to employ his own craftsmen and labourers. Also cannily he established brick fields in Barnsbury and built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, as a complex of sawmills, timber wharves, and cement and iron works which serviced his many projects. Thomas Cundy Junior ( there were three - senior, junior and the third) who all worked for the Grosvenor Estates alongside Cubitt designed St Paul's at Wilton Place. Initially ( and with great controversy ) the church was the first in London to champion the victorian Tractarian movement, ideas coming from Oxford emphasising a return to the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church and condemning the state as weakening the church.
I worry that I am an old fashioned mum, an old fashioned person, caught up in all these thoughts about old theological beliefs and educational toys. City boxes are not,after all, X boxes. Though my youngest son recently made a Wii out of a cardboard box, drew switches and cut handsets from card, biro-ing controls. The three of us played imaginary Wii for an hour. Tennis, running races, skateboarding, and ski ing. It was really good fun, though I wondered what the neighbours across the way would have thought at our strange antics. Though they probably just thought we were playing Wii. I don't think imaginary Wii and real Wii look much different from a distance.
Infact I have already bought the boys one for christmas ( though they haven't even asked for one - I think they just don't believe I will go for it) - so the neighbours will have to get used to us waving our arms around in our small living room. Though on Sunday, glancing across, Great Peter Street while we were having breakfast we saw framed in the window of one of the flats opposite a big, naked lady, like a Rembrandt painting. Which has made us laugh for days.
Finally, I read in the Guardian magazine this weekend in an interview with Gordon Brown and it says in a sneery kind of way,
'Brown would probably have been more at home a century or more ago when politics was about morality, principles and ideas.' Not bad things to aspire to I think, just not what we have at the moment.
This morning on Radio 4 it said Nick Clegg had been advised not to ride his bike in case someone pushes him off.
Amen
Cycling alongside Buckingham Palace back from my trip to St Paul's, I am unsure how to write this. I don't feel attached to what I have to write about. The Tractarian movement initially championed by St Paul's church is difficult to fathom as a non believer in the twenty first century, though at it's core is the division between the Church of England and the Catholic church and the overlaps between the two. But, the beautiful view of Big Ben through a gap in the expanse of trees and then the hoop of the wheel above Horse Guards Parade remind me of the blank wood of the Muiji models and of the cities we have made laid out on the carpet. Invented metropolis that have included a school with horses in a hedged playground, the gherkin building alongside the statue of liberty and a high-speed, japanese-style train link made in bright orange and blue bricks alongside tiny skyscrapers of all colours. A city made from scratch.
To visit the church I park the bike in Hyde Park, jostling with the Winter Wonderland and Knightsbridge shopping crowds. Like time has tipped into Christmas. Everyone busy. A family walk past, wrapped up against the cold, talking about somewhere I know really well from my childhood in Hertfordshire - they must have come up on the train for the day. Though there are many different nationalities in the throng. Somehow I am against the tide, I am not going to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, I am not going ice skating or on a helter skelter. I am trying to cross the road into the quiet, grand, residential street, with a few Embassy flags visible, past a stately hotel with doormen outside.
St Paul's is set back from the road with a tall, dark tower, made from dirty stone, but I can see there are lights on, and the door is open. A man with a knapsack squeezes in before me as I stand in the porch fiddling my phone to silence. There is singing inside the church and for a minute I think maybe there is a service, though it is Saturday afternoon (the boys are at swimming lessons). When I step inside I realise it is a rehearsal. Gathered on the steps infront of an ornate rood screen, are singers and musicians, the music grand and beautiful. I stand, slightly self concious watching them, I am not sure where the man in the knapsack has gone. The church has a beautiful, high roof with wooden, carved trusses, a wooden gallery with carved angels looking down and tiled panels, like murals along the walls, almost pre-raphaelite drawn, showing scenes of Christ's life, and slightly awkward paintings of the stations of the cross sandwiched between each panel. The church is really clean, the carpets just vacuumed, everything polished. I am slightly embarrassed to interrupt the rehearsal as I look quickly round, worrying about mud from my boots on the carpet. When I leave I pick up a leaflet for the concert that evening, Handel's Coronation Anthems.
I know, I think, cycling home, I will let myself finally buy the book of London maps, that I have eyed covetously in the nearby amazing map shop 'The National Map Centre' on Caxton St. The shop is where I have found many of the old maps for this project. But this book 'Mapping London' which charts in maps, the growth and expansion of London from the initial clusters of population on the banks of the Thames costs £39.95 and I have looked and looked at it but not let myself buy it. I thought I would ask for it for christmas, but my mum and dad have already bought me an expensive cup and saucer to match the set I am collecting. ( I know, I know, I don't think my priorities are always right, but lovely things do make me happy.) And there isn't really anyone else I can ask for such an expensive book. But the building of this city, has become, suddenly the key - the population and expansion of London and for a moment with excitement, I think oh go on, just buy it. But the shop is not open. Perhaps a good thing, with christmas, my son's birthday and swimming lessons to pay for.
Instead I buy 'London. A Social History' by Roy Porter from the Westminster Bookshop on Artillery Row. Which is like a bookshop in a film, or a portal to another, slightly older, well-read world. I also buy a copy of 'On Churches' John Betjeman for my dad's christmas present and the nice, northern, gently spoken, man who is passionate about the books he sells gives me a pound off and we talk about the snow.
This is what I garner.
Around 1700 Celia Fiennes was impressed to find 'London joyned with Westminster...'
By 1760 When Lord Chesterfield built his mansion facing Hyde Park, the site was so rural he quipped he would need a dog for company.
It is just numbers really:
'London grew astonishingly in the nineteenth century, with its hordes of labourers and landlords, it pen-pushers and porters. Between 1841 and 1851 alone, some 330,000 migrants flooded into the capital, representing a staggering 17 per cent of London's total population. Of these 46,000 came from Ireland, fleeing famine and swelling the London Irish community to around 130,000. In the 1850s a further 286,000 migrants arrived; in the 1860s 331,000 Before 1840 the majority came from the south-east but by the 1860s, with agriculture in crisis, the net widened; all were drawn by the hope of work.'
Tobias Smollett's country character Matt Bramble says, 'What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets and squares and palaces and churches....Pimlico and Knightsbridge are now almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington and if this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole country of Middlesex will be covered with brick'
And a beautiful description by H. Llewellyn Smith,
'The contagion of numbers, the sense of something going on, the theatres, and the music halls, the brightly lighted streets and busy crowds - all, in short, that makes the difference between the Mile End fair on a Saturday night and a dark muddy land, with no glimmer of gas and with nothing to do. Who could wonder that men are drawn into such a vortex?'
Knightsbridge was, until 1824, a boggy and dangerous route threatened by highwaymen and thought too marshy for development. From 1825 Thomas Cubitt, the master builder developer who worked for the Marquess of Westminster, and on many projects ( including the nearby east front of Buckingham Palace, parts of Stoke Newington, Clapham, Camden and Pimlico) brought gravel up on barges from St Katherine's Dock ( which he was also developing ) and laid out his most prestigious development including Belgrave Square. He was the first builder to employ his own craftsmen and labourers. Also cannily he established brick fields in Barnsbury and built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, as a complex of sawmills, timber wharves, and cement and iron works which serviced his many projects. Thomas Cundy Junior ( there were three - senior, junior and the third) who all worked for the Grosvenor Estates alongside Cubitt designed St Paul's at Wilton Place. Initially ( and with great controversy ) the church was the first in London to champion the victorian Tractarian movement, ideas coming from Oxford emphasising a return to the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church and condemning the state as weakening the church.
I worry that I am an old fashioned mum, an old fashioned person, caught up in all these thoughts about old theological beliefs and educational toys. City boxes are not,after all, X boxes. Though my youngest son recently made a Wii out of a cardboard box, drew switches and cut handsets from card, biro-ing controls. The three of us played imaginary Wii for an hour. Tennis, running races, skateboarding, and ski ing. It was really good fun, though I wondered what the neighbours across the way would have thought at our strange antics. Though they probably just thought we were playing Wii. I don't think imaginary Wii and real Wii look much different from a distance.
Infact I have already bought the boys one for christmas ( though they haven't even asked for one - I think they just don't believe I will go for it) - so the neighbours will have to get used to us waving our arms around in our small living room. Though on Sunday, glancing across, Great Peter Street while we were having breakfast we saw framed in the window of one of the flats opposite a big, naked lady, like a Rembrandt painting. Which has made us laugh for days.
Finally, I read in the Guardian magazine this weekend in an interview with Gordon Brown and it says in a sneery kind of way,
'Brown would probably have been more at home a century or more ago when politics was about morality, principles and ideas.' Not bad things to aspire to I think, just not what we have at the moment.
This morning on Radio 4 it said Nick Clegg had been advised not to ride his bike in case someone pushes him off.
Amen
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