London the fey

I went shoe shopping and had dinner yesterday with trystbat. A better guide to London, and those activities in particular, would be hard to imagine.

First, the shoes. Our destination, which I suggested but which I'd heard of through the Goth grapevine, was Irregular Choice. They specialize in sparkles, bright colors, and Hello Kitty. Tweeer footwear would be hard to imagine. So of course I had to check it out.

But that shop belongs on the street it's on, namely Carnaby Street. When I first saw the sparkly rainbow decorations, I figured it for a current or former gayborhood, of which London has had many across the centuries. trystbat, however, knew the correct historical context: it was the fashion center of Swinging '60s London, complete with bright colors and gender fuckery. Irregular Choice is one of the few non-chain, not-quite-mainstream stores on Carnaby Street that are still consistent with the spirit of that era.

I got the Pollywood. Pro tip: they use EU shoe sizes, and they're generous. I wear a 42 in their shoes, and a 43 from continental makers is usually closer to my size, i.e. US women's 11. They're shipping up some more sparkliness from their Brighton store later this week.

One complaint: the music in IC was loud enough that it made processing the natives' accents hard for my 53-year-old ears.

trystbat suggested a bar and restaurant called Sketch, a name you'd never find on a restaurant in an American big city. Their theme is visual art, and boy howdy do they deliver. Let's start with drinks: the bar, one of two that we could have chosen, had decoupage in place of wallpaper and slowly rotating, 2'-diameter mirrors at the edge of the ceiling to reflect lasers. The cocktails were right on if spendy*. Wait staff are not pushy about selling us more of them almost to a fault, which I'm assured is One Of Those Cultural Things; the key seems to be eye contact.

I had a psychedelic experience in the (unisex) restroom. When you go through the double doors, you're confronted with blinding pale pinkness. To ascend to the toilets, each contained in an individual person-sized, egg-shaped structure, you need to climb the split, curving stair case. (There was a dark bar between the feet of the two halves of the staircase.) There were apparently noise detectors in the eggs that would trigger the sounds of street noise. The sinks were kind of normal, thank goodness.

The main dining area is very... pink, with domed skylights which made me suspect that it had once been a place of worship. Witty, cartoonish art on the walls. Fantastic food. I had a very dry English (!) white wine with my turbot that had an excellent sauce. Thanks to the favorable exchange rate, I paid about what I'd expect to pay in a big American city for something like that. But of course, there is nothing like that anywhere in North America. London, you are so extra.

And I have trystbat to thank for cluing me into Sketch. I probably wouldn't even have gone looking for something like that on my own initiative, and it's way more fun when you're not alone.



*Not that I'd expect anything different. Somebody's probably still paying off that interior, in addition to making rent on a very large space in Soho, and paying their staff real wages.

Nun visits some of London's famous dead.

As recommended by trystbat (Right?) I went on the tour of the west side of Highgate Cemetery. Yes, the tour is worth the money.

But first! The east side of the cemetery is the one where they're still burying people, and the one where you can walk around without a guide as long as you have a ticket. Karl Marx is on the east side, but that's not who I came especially to see. I came to place a ballpoint pen, as custom dictates, into a flower pot on the grave of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I will admit to getting a little verklempt. He was a good guy and a great writer who died too damn young. I'm one of tens of millions who loved his work.

On to the west side! Here's the educational stuff:

• A graveyard is associated with a church. A cemetery is not. I had no idea!
• Highgate is seriously overgrown. It was completely neglected for much of the 20th century. It's the only place I've ever seen horsetail growing in the open, which says something about the climate in southern England. A Seattle summer will bake horsetail to death if it isn't shaded.
• The cemetery's Egyptian Avenue was the cemetery's way of capitalizing on mid-19th century Egyptomania, as surely the British Museum and its neighbors did, too. It's extra, because London is always extra.
• The first British surgeon to use anesthesia, Robert Liston, is buried in the catacombs (pronounced "catacooms" over here).
• I didn't know who John Radclyffe Hall was, but I knew her* most famous work: The Well of Loneliness. That novel, the subject of legal battles in the UK & US, was the first to depict homosexuality in a positive light. It's come in for criticism in recent years for depicting queerness as a whole lot of misery, but I have to wonder how fair that criticism is. Someone recently discovered hundreds of letters written to Radclyffe Hall from queers thanking her for her book.
• Probably the most-visited grave at the time it was new was that of bare knuckles boxer Tom Sayers. The working classes of London thought of him as a hero.
• Michael Faraday, devout "dissenter" Christian, autodidact, and arguably the most influential scientist who ever lived, is buried in front of a large if not ornate headstone that he told his wife he didn't want.
• Speaking of missing headstones, there are twenty thousand people in unmarked, common graves throughout Highgate. Some of them are underneath paths.
• In the 1840s when the cemetery was first proposed, Highgate was just a village. Its residents tried to stop the cemetery from happening there for fear of poisoned water. But when you've got the world's largest city right next door and it's desperate for burial space and a break from all the grave robbing, you can't fight (the neighboring) city hall.

I walked enough in the cemetery that as soon as I got off at my tube stop, I grabbed a sandwich from Pret** across the street, devoured it on Islington Green, went back to where I'm staying, and without much further ado fell asleep for an hour and a half. I think my feet have recovered.

Tomorrow: the Tate Modern. I've already planned the tube trip because, it seems, I'm a maniac. There's an honest-to-goodness pub on my way from Angel tube that's two blocks from where I'm sitting. Google reviews say it might be OK. So pub grub is also on the agenda.



*Our guide said that that pronoun is correct.
**trystbat and I concur that Pret A Manger needs to take the US by storm. It's begun on the east coast.