Restrictions 2.0 and life in London

So we're not actually in a lockdown, but as close as you can get without calling it a lockdown. Grocery stores are open, public transportation is still running (such as the Thames Clipper, a ferry service that didn't run during the last lockdown-type month in November), take-out is still an option, and places of worship are open with limitations on the numbers of attendees. But pretty much everything else is shut down again. Christmas Day, you can't meet with anyone outside your own household now, and even outside, where it was the "rule of 6," that has been limited to just meeting a single person outside. I see that food stalls are still open, such as cafes in parks where there aren't chairs for sitting, so people can't congregate there, so we'll probably end up doing that a lot, going for walks or bike rides in parks and then stopping for a coffee outdoors. It's all due to a new strain of the virus that appears to so far be contained in the UK but that is more contagious and spreads faster than the other strains we already have had spreading. So London and parts of Southeast England have gone into a new category of restrictions called tier 4. We're not sure how long it will last, but as before, the virus is unpredictable, which means that for now, it dictates our next steps unpredictably.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd share some more about life here. Before I get into that, I should say that I'm happy to provide this little window into life abroad for friends and family at home. I've come to realise that I'm able to help people see the world, even if through just my perspective, but perhaps in a way that allows people to travel through my stories and photos and perhaps forget about the Covid for a while.

Behind the Scenes

The other day, my husband took some clothing items in to get some alterations done. When we went to pick up the order, we were ushered into the back room where they do the actual sewing and pressing because someone was already being helped in the main part of the store, and it's quite small, so there wasn't a way to social distance there. It was just kind of neat seeing the way it all works, this quaint little place with a man in suspenders doing the sale and an Eastern European woman sewing up a storm in the back--she does excellent work, and we were very happy with the quality of the alterations! I figured my mom would love a sewing room like this, sans the computer and files for the business part of the back room. 

Shop Front Fun

One thing I've found entertaining, which is actually something I usually don't like to do, is window shopping. There are different things to see inside stores, and you can sometimes learn a lot about that neighbourhood or the type of society where such a store is thriving. You'll see everything from very local to posh, on a grander scale than at home, if for no other reason than that London is such a big city.

On the local side, I saw what looked to be a drycleaner store. I was standing in line at the post office, which appears to be operated by some Bangladeshi immigrants, and many of the shops surrounding it are either Bangladeshi-owned or at least South Asian. As you can see in the photo, the drycleaning definitely caters to a South Asian population since you can see some very fancy traditional clothing through the window. What surprised me was looking up at what the store purported to offer: IT services! It was hilarious! I'm sure they actually do offer those services, but nowhere does it indicate that they are also a drycleaner, yet you can clearly see in the window that they do offer this service. It just made me laugh because it's so like Indian and Pakistani places that you can find that tend to specialise in everything. Like I've seen in Pakistan a restaurant that specialises in Chinese, Pakistani, Italian, and Lebanese cuisine. At home, there was a Punjabi-owned autobody shop whose slogan read: "Specialising in foreign and domestic vehicles." Are there any other kinds of cars once you've covered the globe? Is that really a specialty when you cover all that territory? It's become a constant source of entertainment for our family--and I have to say that my dad actually did ream out the guy at the autobody shop, in a way that only one Punjabi can to another, to let him know that his slogan made no sense. Surprisingly, the guy did eventually change it! In any case, I love this kind of stuff.

Up close, the pattern of the robe
 has tiny skulls and crossbones 

At the other end of the spectrum are the posh stores you find on Jermyn Street. This is a haven for the true gentleman, and quite possibly the up-and-coming rapper who can afford to look posh but still wants to stick to his "streetwear" look, as evidenced by a mannequin I saw with a lovely tweed coat worn over a half-zip sweater and fleece jogging pants. Or it might even be a wealthy socialite who wants to dress posh and gentlemanly but thinks that putting a skull and crossbones pattern on his bespoke dressing gown (British term for custom-made robe/housecoat) will make him look edgy.  I find the whole notion of these stores offering bespoke loungewear kind of funny, and I wonder if anyone really still wears these. Perhaps they are indeed decreasing in popularity, as we noticed that many stores in this area have closed down permanently due to the pandemic, which perhaps only catalysed their demise. Without the same number of men going to the office, the need for such haute couture business wear (it's not just loungewear, but suits and all the accoutrements at some of the same shops) are on their way out. There are stores that specialise(d) in cuff links, cobbler-made shoes, and grooming products, not just suits and loungewear. Perhaps it's not totally surprising that there is no need to have stores having such focused specialties, as much as perhaps one shouldn't try to specialise in everything. 

What I also find a little interesting is the remnants of colonialism in some of these items. In the photos,

you will see the smoking cap, a Middle- or Near East-style cap with a tassel on it. I was interested in the origins of the hat, and it turns out that the smoking cap began to be used in the Victorian era and was intended to protect the man's hair from absorbing the smell of tobacco. Women would stitch the hats themselves and give as a gift to their husband, the idea being that, especially when worn with a smoking jacket, a man could go off and smoke and return to his lady without the smell of smoke upon him to upset her, according to the social norms of the day. In the one photo, you'll see a set of pyjamas and a robe with Chinese patterns. Both the smoking cap and the robe/PJ combo are remnants of the Victorian society's fascination with other cultures. They would bring designs and patterns into their own society in almost exaggerated ways, in what has been called "orientalist" and "chinoiserie." You'll notice this a lot in art from the era, wallpapers with rich Chinese patterns behind the subject of a portrait or silk and brocade articles of clothing on the person with these ornate patterns. The reason that it is colonial, however, is that this fascination wasn't because the Victorians valued the subject of their fascination but that they exoticised these cultures, viewed them almost as someone would find a freak show fascinating. It was different and new and exotic, and people wanted to partake in it, not learn more about the cultures that created them and feel that they were equals to be cared about or respected. Anyway, that's getting into some sociological analysis, but I do take interest in thinking about and examining even what these clothing styles mean. 

Meanwhile, the streets are decorated beautifully for Christmas, which is a perfect segue into my next topic!

Christmas Grocery Products

I've been interested to see the different kinds of products available in the grocery stores for Christmas. You definitely won't find any eggnog here. Spiced, mulled wine is the popular seasonal beverage, though not at the grocery store, but liqueur- and liquor-based creams seem to be what you find. Some of them I guess are meant for coffee, but with all the types of puddings they have here, which for North Americans, we would think of them as a steamed cake, the creams appear to be used for sauces for those puddings. I generally don't consume alcohol, so I haven't tried any of these, except for a brandy butter I had on a Christmas pudding the other day, and it was definitely a strong brandy flavour. I leave this post with photos of some of the options--and I didn't take a photo of it, but you can get a Bailey's cream, which is perhaps creamier than the Bailey's itself that you can buy in the liquor aisle.

    

A non-lockdown post, about Bath

We finally got to leave town for a little overnight trip. It's still not possible to travel too far--I mean, some places are open to travel, like some of the islands in the Caribbean, for example, but one needs to either self-isolate at some point in the journey or pay a lot of money for a rapid Covid test. So we are staying close to home for now, but at least we are able to get out a little more than last month. We decided to do a short trip to Bath. Many museums are still closed at the moment: the majority of ones in Bath have closed until the spring and summer of 2021, so you can't see everything you want to see there, but there is enough to do to take up a busy full day or a leisurely couple of days. 

I had been to Bath before, which you can read a little about from my blog archives ("The English Countryside") from 2006 when I visited my cousin in Swindon, but this was my husband's first time, and I was just as happy to go back since it's such a beautiful city.

I noted in 2006 that I thought it was a bit of a touristy city, and it is to a point, especially in the city centre where the Abbey and the ancient Roman baths are located, but you can easily walk away from that area and see Bath as a regular city, and it is indeed quite pretty. What I like is that the architecture is distinctly Georgian, which valued symmetry and architecture. According to Wikipedia, it's based on the classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome--which makes sense, given its Roman history, but it doesn't seem to have the emphasis on columns as much as what you would find in London. Some of the larger buildings have them, but the row houses don't seem to, unlike in London where many of the rowhouse structures have at least one, if not two, pillars on either side of the front door. I also like that Bath is a bit hilly, so you can see layers of the city.

When we arrived at the train station, we walked around a little bit and just looked in the shops. It was raining lightly, and it was only around 7ºC outside, so it was fairly chilly (yes, even for Canadians because of the damp cold), and we came across the Bath Abbey, which was open to the public for viewing--and free!

The Abbey was actually built over some of the ruins of the Roman temple and baths complex--as churches often do to cover up the relics of different forms of worship, I've noticed in various countries. It was built in the 7th Century as a Benedictine monastery and has gone through various re-builds and restorations to become a church, but it seems that the general appearance and structure is the same. There are gravestones all over the floor and sides of the abbey, and I was hoping to find a really old one from that early time period, but over time, the engravings have been worn away by centuries of footsteps walking on them, so the earliest one I could find was from the 17th Century. There is a restoration project underway to revive the old gravestones as much as possible, so it would be interesting to go back after that is complete to see what was done, if I'm still living in the UK by that time.

There was another gravestone from 1704 that I thought was really interesting because it used the Old English spellings with an "s" that looks like an "f." I thought it was perhaps a remnant from German because until a few years ago, German notation used a letter called an "eszett" to indicate what would be the equivalent of 2 s's in English (e.g. the word for street, strasse, was spelled Straße), but apparently that isn't the case. It has more to do with the the difference between capital and lower cases s's in Old English, according to what I read. Anyway, as someone with a linguistics background, these little findings are the kinds of things I love to discover when I travel. The other thing I wanted to point out about the abbey is that it's such a great thing to travel in Europe with a different camera from what I've always had in the past. My camera has a 42x zoom lens on it, so I can actually get close-up shots of the details on the high ceilings of all the abbeys, churches, and cathedrals I visit now. It's wonderful because these are details you can't even see with your naked eye, but I can study them in more detail now than I ever could before.

After the Abbey, we grabbed a bite to eat for lunch at a local pizza place--one of the few places serving a hot lunch that didn't require a reservation and also had enough space for people, and then we headed to the Holburne Museum for the afternoon. We mainly went there for the older paintings housed there, but there was an exhibit of the works of Grayson Perry, who seems to be a very complex and sad individual, based on what I saw of his works at the museum. Because he is a cross-dresser (and, I believe heterosexual), the topic of most of his works has a sexual nature to them as he focuses on exploring mainly his own identity. Much of it is graphic in nature, so I neither photographed those works nor will present them here, but it was interesting to see an artist whose main medium to communicate social commentary is pottery. It's a form that I haven't really seen a lot in my visits to galleries. Most of the rest of the gallery was old portraits from the 1700s or so. There were a couple that were of real interest to me. One of them was a portrait of someone with the last name Pulteney, 1777. The name stuck out because there are shops and streets with this name in Bath, meaning perhaps this was a very influential family, and certainly enough so to afford to commission a portrait of their family member. But also, it was even more significant to me that it was done by a female artist named Angelica Kauffmann--and in all my travels to European galleries, I don't think I have ever seen any female artists from that time period, or at least that used their given name rather than a male pseudonym. That was so fascinating to me. The other picture was one that I found out I could not take a photo of because it was on loan from a private collection, but fortunately, a description and photo of it from the museum exist online, so you can see it here. I was drawn to it as a snapshot in time of what life was like in India in colonial times. 

The hotel lobby

We then went to our hotel, Henrietta House, which was a beautiful building. I think it's a rowhouse converted into a hotel, and it is quite cozy and elegant. All the rooms have chandeliers, and they have updated the rooms to have modern, clean, tiled bathrooms and USB outlets in the walls next to the bed. It was a wonderful place to spend the night, and we were happy to put our backpacks down and spend some time warming up there before going out for supper to a great steak restaurant.

The next day, we were expecting lots of cold and wet weather. All week they had been forecasting snow showers and then sleet showers for London and Bath, but while there was a bit of rain in the early morning, it cleared up, and most of the day was a mix of beautiful sunshine and clouds! That was a really unexpected blessing. We booked tickets at the Roman Baths museum--which normally doesn't require pre-booking, but just for now during the pandemic--and we went through the museum with the little phone devices they have so you can take a guided self-tour. I hadn't paid attention last time I went that it was not only a bath house build around these thermal springs but also a temple complex with a temple devoted to the goddess Sulis Minerva, the water and wisdom goddess. Sulis is the Celtic goddess of healing and sacred waters, and Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom, so you get a sense of how the cultures at that time mixed and created syncretic religious beliefs and practices. There is actually a spa next to the Roman Baths that offers time in the thermal waters as you can't go into the Roman Baths anymore--too old and not maintained for human use, so would be dangerous. But until the pandemic is passed, I don't really want to share water with strangers like that. According to the self-guided tour, the Romans were very vigilant about bathing and cleanliness, and I thought it an interesting pre-cursor to how in England, regular bathing became frowned upon as it was believed to be unhealthy. I remember learning that in English class in grade 10 when we studied Romeo and Juliet because there are characters taking their annual bath at this public bath location. I don't have the time or space to explore the evolution of bathing practices, but it's something I do find interesting.

We grabbed some Cornish pasties for lunch and then walked up to the Circus and Royal Crescent to see those fantastic examples of Georgian architecture. We walked around the area a little bit before heading to the train station to come home. Even though it was sunnier than we expected, it was still cold, and it was also hard to find a bathroom to use since there aren't a lot of public toilets. It may have been a brief trip, but it was quite lovely, and we can't wait to go back when more things are open and enjoy Bath when it's a bit warmer.

The Royal Crescent

Walking around...

 We do have a trip to look forward to, which is an upcoming overnight mini-vacation in Bath, but as I mentioned in my last post, the country was in a partial lockdown, so there wasn't much that we could do, aside from walking around. Public transportation was still available, but we tried to limit our usage of that during the lockdown period. The lockdown is over, as of today, and until now, every weekend, I would look for an outdoor market that was still open, and we would walk or cycle there, grab a bite to eat at one of the street vendors, and just enjoy whatever there was that could be seen. I wrote last about Brick Lane and Spitalfields, and the following weekend, we decided to try out Brixton Village.

Colourful produce displays

I had taken the train to Brixton a couple of times to go to some stores that are just outside the tube station, and you could tell that the neighbourhood had quite a different feel, mainly for socioeconomic reasons. I wasn't sure what Brixton Village would be like. Many of the vendors listed that are normally found at the market were closed during the lockdown, but most of the restaurants and local grocers were still open, so we thought we'd see what was there. At least we knew we could get a meal! What we discovered was a heavy Afro-Caribbean and Colombian presence! There were grocers and restaurants offering Colombian food and groceries as well as Caribbean food and groceries. There was even one grocer selling some type of produce that I didn't even recognise. It wasn't labelled either. As my husband pointed out, they don't need to label it because it's only for people who know what it is and would know what to do with it! It was just wonderful. I even found a half-decent Mexican place. I was pretty excited, and I can't wait to go back when the market is in full swing again. I will do another post one day, but when I was researching Brixton after we went there, I discovered that there are all these murals all over the place, and many of them relate to Brixton's history of racial clashes and immigration. It's an interesting history, and I'll post more about it another time when I can get some photos of the murals. Now that I know about them, I want to cycle over there and see some of the murals in person. But for now, you can read about a brief history of the area here. 

The Tate by day

I posted on my social media accounts but didn't put it in my blog, that the Tate Museum, although being closed during the lockdown, was beautifully decorated for Diwali. Again, turning to good old Google, I learned that it wasn't just a decoration, but it was an art installation by feminist artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman. It looks beautiful by day with all the vinyl application to the museum, but it also lights up with all kinds of neon designs at night. It's very colourful and fun but has a lot to say. We had gone out last night for my husband to practise certain techniques of night photography with his camera, and we stopped at the Tate on the way home to get some photos. While I was getting some close-up photos, somehow my husband ended up meeting the artist herself! I didn't believe him until he pointed her out, and she was indeed walking around the sidewalk across the street. We had to pass by her to go home anyway, so we started talking to her and learned she had been to Canada about 20 years ago for some type of internship or study opportunity at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. I asked her if she uses neon as one of her typical media, but she said it was the first time she had used it. What a product! 

The Tate by night

She then told us that some of the display wasn't lit up properly, that Hanuman, the monkey god is supposed to be lit up on the upper right-hand corner as well as having a full red sun burst there. She said also that she felt bad for asking the museum to fix it, but I told her I thought that she intended her work to be viewed a certain way, and if it's not working, she deserves to have it presented the way she wants it as her own work. She agreed and said she thought so, too! This morning, I reflected on that and thought how interesting it was that even this lady who has a strong feminist message in her work would still feel guilty for asking for something like fixing her own project--for which she was paid and commissioned to do. I mean what an honour! Yet her apprehension to ask for it to be fixed seemed so ironic to me. The one thing I wish I would have thought to do was get a photo with her! Oh well--what can you do! 

Today, we went to Holland Park. It's somewhere that's probably more beautiful in the spring and summer than it is right now, but we still enjoyed walking around the grounds. There's a small mansion there, known as Cope Castle, that used to be the home of Sir Walter Cope. It changed hands once and then was no longer used after being damaged in WWII. One safe part of the place is currently being used as a youth hostel, but the majority of the building has been left to the elements, and the gardens are still maintained for use as a lovely garden park. There was one garden wall with some lively tiling on it, but I think that addition is fairly modern as they didn't look like they were super old.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to our little jaunt out of town. It'll be nice to have a change of scenery, even for just the short time we're away. Below are a handful of photos from the park today that don't fit well in the text above.