Impressions of London (24/09/10)

Rain. Sun on the French side of the channel but rain and cloud when the train came out in England. It has been raining since.

I am sitting in a pub, Chandos, near Leicester Square, waiting to meet with P- and B- and their children, whom I haven't seen in over ten years. There is a pub lounge upstairs, they may be up there but I want to finish my (incredibly cheap) beer before I go up to check. They are quite possibly up there but if not, I'll have to find another place to roost when I come back down, will probably have to buy another drink as well. Still have some beer to go.

The transition from Montreal to Paris to London: All the English men in suits in the Eurostar waiting lounge, shoes that click like high heels on the their feet. The sudden complexity of English accents throws me. I keep thinking that London is full of foreigners (which it is) but often when I listen more closely I realize most are speaking English.

Where J- lives is a predominantly Turkish and Ghanaian area. The grocery store with a wall of olives to choose from and another wall with teas so exotic I am not even tempted. The woman behind the bakery counter tries unsuccessfully to teach me 'thank you' in Turkish. Esh-dashesh?

London retains an aura of soot and grime that decades of rain have not been able to erase. I feel the weight of coal here.

Beer almost finished. I hope they're up there. I'll be drunk if I have to come back down and order another beer before they arrive. Maybe I'll order a Sprite or something.

I walked most of the way here from Bethnel Green. I'd gone to the Museum of Childhood to see a photo exhibit of dolls' faces. Turns out there were only half a dozen pictures so I spent the rest of the time looking at children's toys in the museum and listening to teachers and parents reprimand their charges.

Have gone for a look upstairs. No dice. Have come back down and gotten a juice. Luckily for me, no one has taken my table near the door. No watch. Not quite sure of the time. Two thirty, maybe? Perhaps closer to three? I have nowhere else I have to be. What a great feeling.

One of those days

There are days when I do everything wrong, when I end up crying in the bathroom at work and yelling at small animals, when my bike chain falls off and my new pants get covered in grease, when I lose my keys and my wallet and my sanity. Those are bad days. Then there are the days where I keep hurting myself accidentally, slice of the finger while cutting tomatoes, stubbed toe as I walk from one room to another, bruised shin as low furniture darts out to attack me, twisted neck as I dream in awkward positions. When I have an accident, bruising day, I remind myself to pay more attention, to be more aware of wayward furniture and deceptively sharp knives. It usually passes within a few days and I return to a fairly pain-free existence.

Today was D's turn to face the wrath of the accident gods. To start, he did a faceplant in the grocery store at nine a.m. this morning, giving himself a nice fat lip. Many tears later, we went to the park. D ran out into the road (no, he wasn't hit by a car) and had a meltdown when I reprimanded him, throwing himself to the ground and scraping his knee. More tears. On return from the park, he ran towards the door at top speed, fell, managed to shove his finger into the door which then promptly shut, leaving his finger wedged in between. More tears and this time, howls of disbelief and rage. If he were more articulate, he might have said, "Why me?!"

Then as he farted around next to the screen of the patio door, he got stung by a wasp. Pain and shock and more tears. "The bee bit me!" And then an eventual drop into a hot afternoon nap, two throbbing fingers, a scraped knee, and a fat lip. Poor little fella.

It's not even three o'clock yet.

Wash n' wear

As a rule I wash new clothes before wearing them. Whether they come in a package or off the rack, they go into the machine before I put them on. While new could imply clean, it doesn't guarantee it. The smell of new clothes often makes me think of a factory in far off lands, huge rolls of cotton blends lining the wall, cut scraps on the floor, women bent over sewing machines, hair tied back. And then being put in a pile, loaded onto a truck, then a boat, then another truck. Weeks pass, maybe months. The dust settles, insects pass by, crates creak, steel bangs. Always best to wash after such a journey.

If I have told you the above it is to highlight that sometimes there are exceptions. Tonight, for example. As I paid for my purchase this evening, I knew that the second I got home I was going to put them on, washing be damned. I just bought the most comfortable purple sweatpants on the planet. Maybe purple is putting it too strongly, mauve. Old school sweatpants from one of those stores that is embracing all things eighties (there were also fluorescent shoes and Mickey Mouse off-the-shoulder extra large t-shirts) with tight ankles and straight legs. And pockets for pure lazy slouching.

They are awesome for their undeniable comfort. I may never take them off again.

There is a poem about growing old and wearing purple. Since I feel I am going through an early mid-life crisis (youthful dreams gone to dust, post-baby fat now here to stay) these may be the perfect companion.

Thing is, I am traveling soon and to places far more stylish than Montreal (c'est pas possible!) and the purple pants may just have to join me on my adventures. Europe may never be the same.

Camping in the US of A

Things I didn't know about Americans (or had forgotten):

1) There is apparently no motorcycle helmet law in the US. People barrel down highways on their motorcycles at breakneck speeds, without a helmet.
2) You can buy guns everywhere. And they advertise: Guns! Guns! Guns!
3) Americans are friendly, but it is an aggressive kind of friendly, it dares you not to be friendly in return, just see what happens to you then, because gosh-darnit, they carry guns. * No casual 'hellos" or nods of the head for these folk, no sirree. We got "well, you have a really great day, now!" and "how are you today, folks?" And not just from the older, middle aged crowd. Teenagers that wouldn't have even made eye contact in Canada, gave us shiny toothed grins and elaborate salutations. My son would stop on the path, confused, after yet another friendly American had greeted us, and ask "who is that?" expecting as one might, that someone so friendly must be a relation or at least selling something. * The return to frosty Canada a bit of a shock. No 'hellos' here. In fact, you're lucky if someone acknowledges your existence. We are... more reserved.
4) Along with friendly, Americans have a sense of self-assurance that has long been discussed in literature (the Brits and other assorted Europeans being the first to remark upon it) but I had never really noticed it until this most recent visit. I can barely put my finger on it, but it is a way of moving through the landscape, a sense of perfect fit; this is me and I am alright and am well liked and cared for and all is well. Not a glimmer of self-doubt to be seen.

Or not in the campgrounds of Acadia National Park, anyways.

Tea

There are mornings when life seems glum and boring and grey. Today was one of those mornings. Rainy and cool, my son whining and throwing whatever he could get his hands on, me stomping about and yelling like an ogre. There was no food in the cupboard and my laundry lay limp on the line, the air wet.

To escape we went down to the backyard where D ate green tomatoes and I glowered at the neighbours' yards and the trash in the alley. Sinking self pity sucked at my toes.

Then my neighbour, the one who lives below us and only complained once in the whole year that we have lived here about the noise, offered me a cup of tea. My heart sang. Warm chai with two biscuits. I briefly hypothesized that the optimism and determination of the Indian subcontinent was due to so much tasty tea but then remembered that Indians are known for their fatalism.

D and I sat on the fire escape stairs and talked about the joys of sharing, more specifically, how glad we were that the neighbour had shared with us.

She barely speaks a word of English my neighbour, but she made my day.

And then the sun came out, my clothes dried and I made pasta salad for lunch.

You can bite me, Mr. Pip

It appears, from the the cover, to be quite promising: short listed for the Man Booker, winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. Not only that but it came recommended. "You must read this book," said my aunt, pressing Lloyd Jones's Mr. Pip (2007) into my hands. Were my expectations too high, am I giving up too early (I admit, I am only about halfway through)? Am I really just a jaded and cynical book reader, hater of Paolo Coehlo and all that is simplistic and pure?

What, exactly is my problem with Mr. Pip?

Well, let me tell you.

First off, one has to be very, very careful in taking on the voice of a young woman of colour especially when one is not in fact a person of colour nor for that matter a woman. Lloyd Jones is neither. A tricky place to start considering the long and illustrious history of sexism, colonialism, oppression and patriarchy weighing on his shoulders. This does not seem to bother our dear Mr. Lloyd who has as a protagonist a quasi-pubescent girl from somewhere on a pacific island. Mr. Lloyd doesn't seem to see a problem in having a main character who is mind-bogglingly innocent and who seems to have grown up, in the nineties no less, completely isolated from any sense of global culture (what, they have generators and airplanes but no one's ever bothered to get a television?). I have been to some far flung villages, too. No running water, no cars or scooters, no doctors or candy, but the people were a lot more worldly than Mr. Lloyd's land of dopey islanders.

So that's a start, but to make matters worse, Lloyd contrives to have the story revolve around the last white man on the island. A strange and marginal character named Mr. Watts, who somehow becomes the local teacher during the beginnings of a civil war. Why this foreign yokel should become the teacher when all he does is pull his wife around in a cart, can only be explained because he is white, and therefore the holder of great wisdom. I kid you not. Of course, Mr. Watts is faux-humble and then reads to the kids, who admire him above all else and are ashamed of their parents, from Dickens' "Great Expectations". The kids of course (of course!) love the book, never having read one before themselves, and admire Mr. Watts even more. And friends, none of this is written with even a hint of irony, not a trace of neo-colonialist shame, not a smidgen of self-doubt. Mr. Watts is great. Everyone thinks so, except the parents and they are superstitious losers anyways.

The island's parents come into the school, one after the other, to share their own educational wisdom. This is of course Mr. Watts' idea and he looks on most benevolently. The stories they tell are sweet and innocent (ahhh, them native folks) and they are all crushingly embarrassed or shy or humble. Noble savage, anyone? The kids squirm in shame and I am left to wonder why the parents wouldn't just tell these stories at home or in their proper context rather than in the white man's school. Really!

Now, don't get me wrong. Some of my favourite authors are white men who have strayed too long in the tropics: Kapuscinski, Graham Greene, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux. But their writing always has a sort of self-consciousness to it. Their characters may be self-important losers but the reader is made aware of the discrepancies, the fault-lines, the power dynamics, the fragility of being a white man in a non-white world. Mr. Watts, while sometime shown to be frail and at times a victim, remains a character without any sense (internally, from within the novel to externally, through Jones' prose) of power, responsibility, or sense of himself as a white man in a non-white environment.

Instead, everything is syruply straightforward. Island full of innocent native folk, wise and genteel white man educates island's children, everyone loves Great Expectations (hey, I had to read it in high school and found it so boring I couldn't get past the first twenty pages and bluffed my way through the exam), and then rebels come and ask, "who's this Pip character?'" because they've seen his name written on the beach. Yes, the rebels are stupider than the villagers, and that's saying something.

Mr. Lloyd, please. Give your characters some credit.

(to be continued and perhaps amended once I have actually finished the book)

An old dog and some tricks

I might never say it out loud but in my internal narrative, I would tell you that I am plagued by dirty bathtubs. Every apartment I have ever moved into has a dirty bathtub. Perhaps the bathtub was not disgusting, painted-in-shades of yellow when I moved in but by the time I left, it was a stained, horrendous, sticky-footed mess. The state of my bathtubs has been a source of private shame. I pull the shower curtain when I have visitors. I exclaim loudly about the state of Montreal apartments to all who will listen.

Please understand, I am not a pig. I have spent hours, ok, minutes, at a time, scrubbing away at grimy bathtubs. I have used fluorescent orange products flogged by bald muscle-men. I have emptied boxes of Ajax, hoping that those magical blue granules would somehow dig a hole to the enamel below. I have soaked my tub in bleach, vinegar, baking soda, dish-soap. You name it, I have tried it.

This being my own, half-conscious narrative, I blamed it on the water, the tub itself, the lack of proper cleaning products or some unexplained tub cleaning technique that everyone else had cottoned onto but that I never learnt. I had mainly given up on solving the dirty bathtub situation except for a half-hearted swipe every now and then. The dirty bathtub thread takes up little space in my ongoing inner analysis of everything and anything. Only when I sit on the toilet and am obliged to take in the ever darkening circle of hell that is my bathtub, do I contemplate my failure to figure this one out, one of life's great mysteries.

A recent coincidence of events has changed everything.

First, sitting on the toilet, staring at the tub, I asked myself, "what do other people do?" Because I have looked and most friends', strangers' and clients' bathtubs are cleaner than mine. Second, my mother having a surfeit of metal pot scrubbers, left one by my sink one recent afternoon. And then, friends, the Eureka moment.

Today after work, I cleaned my tub with the metal scrubbie. And like that, it was clean, gleaming, pristine, glowing.

Jesus, it took me long enough.