greetings from London

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

 

I thought it was high time to check in to let you know that I have not

died/gone in to hibernation for winter/picked up a dreaded tropical

disease/fallen off the face of the planet etc.

 

I have been incredibly busy for the last couple of months. On 1st October I

started my 'little' part-time job correcting English language homework for

students doing a correspondence course. I am really loving the work and also

the feeling that after 12 months of being unemployed, that at last someone has

given me a chance to work again. However, having said that, I can assure you

that it is not and never could be a money making proposition. While I am on

unemployment benefits my benefit is reduced by what I earn. That doesn't

concern me in the least as I would rather correct homework for my money than sit

at home doing nothing. It would most certainly not be a workable proposition if

I was in the situation where I needed to earn money to survive. The college's

version is that each paper I correct should take me about 10 minutes. In

reality, to give the students any real help the papers have to be gone through

thoroughly. Even the good ones take at least an hour

but most take much longer. As I am paid the princely sum of Euro 1.60 per

paper I am averaging less than Euro 1 per hour - hardly a living wage!!!!!

 

Before I can correct an exercise I have to work through it myself and prepare

model answers. That takes up to 2 hours per lesson and there are 92 lessons in

total. The first time after starting the correcting work I visited Chris in

England I had to bring 6 heavy text and workbooks with me so I was determined to

finish all the model answers before trip number two. That reduces what needs to

be carried about to one large arch file - still heavy but nowhere near as heavy

as all the books.

 

I am currently enjoying my second freebie Holiday in as many months with Chris

I arrived in London last Wednesday and, like last time, I have been doing plenty

of walking. Apart from the day I arrived I have done 20,000+ steps every day.

It's a bit harder to do as much walking at this time of year as it is more or

less completely dark by 4 p.m and there is no way known \i would venture into

the big parks alone after dark, even though it is still technically the

afternoon.

 

On Thursday I set off with big intentions of visiting two museums but the day

turned out delightfully differently from how I had planned it. I set off for

museum number 1, The Ragged School museum, which is only a short train ride away

from where Chris lives. To get to the museum I knew I had to walk some distance

from the station so I was delighted to discover that there was a lovely park I

could walk through. The most direct route to the museum would have been to cut

through the park diagonally but I decided to walk right to the end of the park

and walk around the far end of it. That meant having to walk past another very

small park along the bank of Regents Canal to get to the museum. I was

interested to see what I thought was a very tall brick chimney sitting in

splendid isolation near the edge of the park so I decided to do a bit of a

detour to see if there was a plaque or a sign explaining what it was. I was out

of luck there. I walked a bit further along the

path to a seat where I was able to get a good view to take a photo of the

'chimney'. A few people walked past but they all looked as if they were recent

immigrants to the country so I thought that the chances of them knowing much

about the local history would be rather slim. Then a lady carrying her shopping

bags was walking down the path and I figured she must be a local as the path

really leads nowhere apart from the houses and flats in the area. It turns out

she didn't know the answer to my question but we ended up chatting about

anything and everything for 1 1/2 hours. After we'd been chatting for over an

hour she casually mentioned that she suffers from depression. She told me that

most people don't want to know her when she mentions that so she was thrilled

when I didn't drop her like a ton of bricks. We got talking about so many

things such as how we react to other people's perceptions of us and how they

vary form our own understanding of ourselves. Not bad

for two people who had met such a short time ago!!! It was so lovely chatting

with Hazel and it made my day special - far more special than if I had managed

to get to both museums.

 

After we parted company with each other I walked the short distance to the

Ragged School Museum.

 

http://www.raggedsc hoolmuseum. org.uk/nextgen/ about/contact. shtml

 

In the 19th Century there were about 1500 Ragged Schools in London to provide

education (and very often food) to the poor children of the area. Looking at

some of the photos on display reminded me of photos we see nowadays of children

in Third World countries. There was one photo showing about 200 of the 1,000

students standing outside in December. Only a handful (or should that be a

footful?!?) of them were wearing shoes and their clothes didn't look very warm

either. This particular school was the largest of all the Ragged Schools and

was set up by the famous philanthropist Dr. Barnado.

 

I really enjoy the smaller, more intimate museums. OK, so they may not have

any 'big name' treasures but I really love absorbing the atmosphere. All the

volunteer staff have been working at the museum for many years and it had a

lovely homely atmosphere about it. When I arrived I was shown a few of the

things on the ground floor. One of them was an old black and white photo of a

lady with something which looked like a pipe or straw in her mouth and pointing

upwards. The chap who showed me the photo told me that the lady's grandson was

in the building that day. I took myself off to the tiny tea room in the

basement and several of the volunteers were chatting with each other and I was

included in the conversation. One of the volunteers sat down at my table. It

turns out that he is the grandson of the lady in the photo. The chap, Joe, is

85 but has a wonderful memory and was able to tell me so much REAL history of

life in the East End in the late 19th and early

20th century. The photo of his grandmother showed her going about her work as

'waker-upper' . Every morning at 4 a.m she would start going around the local

streets shooting peas through the pipe to wake people up in time to go to work.

For this she received the princely sum of sixpence a week.

 

Joe was also able to tell me about my 'chimney' which is actually a vent for

a sewer which runs under the Regents Canal.

 

I left the museum feeling as I had shared my afternoon with a dedicated group

of people, mostly locals, who truly care about preserving their heritage. Joe

even gave me a lesson in Cockney rhyming slang.

 

I was due to meet Chris in central London at 7 p.m. as she had booked us

tickets to see a performance of Shakespeare' s Macbeth. I didn't have enough

time left to 'do' another museum but it would have been way to early to go the

the theatre. I caught a bus into London and very slowly wandered down Regent

Street enjoying all the Christmas illuminations. Hamleys, reputed to be the

largest toy store in the world (Toys R Us eat your heart out!!) even had mock

snow drifting down from the roof and it created a wonderful Christmassy effect.

I noticed that one of the clothing stores had an in-house Starbucks so I went in

there, ordered a cup of tea, and proceeded to find myself an out of the way

corner. The reason for wanting to be out of the way was so I could take

advantage of their facilities to sneakily consume the sandwich I had brought

from home!!

 

When I met Chris I was rather alarmed to discover that the production we were

about to see was not 'traditional' but rather a modern interpretation. The

words were exactly as |Shakespeare had written them but the characters were in

modern dress, many of them were wearing Nazi uniforms and the three 'witches'

were represented by three military nurses. Despite my initial misgivings, I soon

realised how refreshing it can be to see something very familiar from a new

viewpoint. It made me realise just how much of Shakespeare' s incredible

character observation applies to us still. To be taken out of the 'comfort

zone' of having Macbeth set in Scotland with the witches on the heath made me

think much more about what the play is REALLY about rather than concentration on

the setting and scenery.

 

On Friday I went to the Geffrye Museum, another of London's smaller museums

but this one is much bigger and much better known than the Ragged School Museum.

 

http://www.geffrye- museum.org. uk/

 

I haven't checked to see if the virtual tour on the website works but if it

does then I heartily recommend that you have a look.

 

The museum is situated in a lovely building which was, as with the Ragged

School, set up for charitable purposes. It was an almshouse and provided

accommodation for the poor. The displays consist of a series of rooms from

various periods dating back hundreds of years up to the present day. The rooms

represent what the living rooms of middle class families would have looked like

through the ages. It is fascinating to follow the changes through the

centuries. Another added touch which I found delightful was that the rooms were

all decorated for Christmas as they would have been at the time. One of the

reasons I feel more 'comfortable' with the smaller museums is that you don't

have to leave feeling that you have had to ignore a huge proportion of their

collections.

 

After the Geffrye Museum I headed off to central London. There was recently a

fascinating documentary series on the BBC about the 800,000,000 Pound refit of

St Pancras railway station to prepare it for its new role as the London terminal

of the Eurostar high-speed train from France. The original building was in

danger of being lost for ever about 40 years ago when there was a proposal to

pull it down for an office development. Many influential people, prominent

among them being the poet John Betjeman, fought long and hard to make sure the

building was saved. It is now A listed which meant that the improvements had to

be done very carefully and sympathetically. As I was so fascinated by the TV

documentary (not least because the person in charge of a workforce of over 500

builders and contractors was a slight looking young woman of about 30) I wanted

to see the finished product. I was not disappointed.

 

http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ St_Pancras_ railway_station

 

Virtually next door to St Pancras is the British Library which houses one of

the world's greatest collections of books. It is not the most aesthetically

pleasing building from the outside but when you are inside you forget all about

those initial impressions.

 

http://www.bl. uk/

 

I mainly concentrated on the rooms containing the museums most treasured items

and I could easily have spent much more time there. I was particularly

fascinated by their extensive collection of very old religious texts -

Christian, Jewish, Islamic and others. The calligraphy and illustrations are so

magnificent that it is hard to imagine how long even one page must have taken to

produce.

 

Also in the 'treasures' area was a room devoted to the Magna Carta - the

closet thing the current UK has ever had to a written constitution. Contrary to

popular belief, there was never one document called the Magna Carta.

 

http://www.bl. uk/onlinegallery /themes/histtext s/magnacarta. html

 

No-one knows how many there were as there were many documents sent to advise

the officials in various areas of the conditions to which the King had agreed.

One of the few original documents still with its seal intact was very badly

damaged by fire many years ago when it was held in a private collection.

 

In a case of 'from the sublime to the ridiculous' my next port of call after

leaving the rarefied atmosphere of the British Library was to Notting Hill where

my destination was - shhhhh, don't tell anyone - a bookshop totally devoted to

cookbooks. Although our current financial circumstances and space

considerations have forced me to curtail my purchases of cookbooks it doesn't

cost anything to look and dream does it?! It really did feel good to be

surrounded by so many cookbooks but I must admit that I would have liked it even

more if they had had second-hand books too. My main areas of interest now is in

charity cookbooks and if they are second hand they seem even more special.

 

Today, believe it or not, I have been to Birmingham in the north of the

country. Chris is away at a conference this weekend and I have a sneaking

suspicion that she felt a bit guilty about leaving me on my own. On Wednesday

evening she casually mentioned that the BBC Good Food Fair was on in Birmingham.

I took the bait hook, line and sinker and said something about how I had seen

and read a lot about the fairs. She then said 'well, how would you like to go?'

and proceeded to hand me the money for the entrance ticket and the train fare.

There was no way she was going to take no for an answer and I have learnt from

experience that it isn't worth arguing with her.

 

http://www.bbcgoodf oodshow.com/ bbcb/show_ link1.asp

 

The entrance price included a show of your choice in what they called the

Supertheatre. I chose to see an episode of Ready Steady Cook which I love

watching on TV. I must admit that I am not Ainsley Harriott's biggest fan as he

sometimes overdoes the enthusiasm a bit but he certainly knows how to work an

audience. One of the contestants today managed to have a rather nasty accident

with some cream he was whipping and sent it flying everywhere and Ainsley's

response was very quick-witted and amusing.

 

I lost count of how many of the several hundred stalls I visited and the

samples of cheeses, chutneys, yoghurts, juices etc I consumed. However, all I

bought was a cup of tea to have with my home-made lunch and also three

magazines. Yesterday I was toying with the idea of buying the BBC Good Food

Vegetarian Christmas magazine but it seemed a bit 'light on' for recipes for a

magazine costing 3 Pounds. Believe it or not, at the fair, there was a stand

with current issues of various cooking magazines being sold at 3 for 2 Pounds.

The magazine I had been looking at yesterday was included in the selection as

were a couple of others with quite a good selection of vegetarian recipes so I

lashed out and bought 3 for myself.

 

I will be in London until 12th December so who knows how many more adventures

I will have. So far each day has been wonderful but they have been very

different from each other.

 

One thing I am really looking forward to is a tour of the BBC studios in

London. http://www.bbc. co.uk/tours/ tvc.shtml

 

That is on Monday but there is quite a story about actually booking it. The

tours can only be booked by phone and it was much cheaper to do so from home as

we have a special deal where calls to UK cost only 3 cents per minute. So I

rang.

I had to laugh. The chap who answered the phone asked me about the

time/date I wanted then for my name and a contact number. He then gave me a

booking number to quote when I pick up my ticket. In my innocence I imagined

that I would pay when I arrived but it turned out to be a 'credit card only'

arrangement. This was the first inkling I had that prepayment would be required

so at that point I mentioned that it was a concession rate as I am over 60.

OOOOOPS!! This upset the chap immensely. He sighed deeply then said quite

sternly " that means I'll have to start this booking all over again " . Here's

hoping I don't run into said Terry on Monday - he would probably give me stern

telling off for my negligence and for wasting his valuable time!

 

Maybe I am being a bit unreasonable but if it is so important for them to know

at the outset whether or not it is a concession booking why don't they ask that

before asking for name and telephone details?

 

Run-ins with disgruntled telephone operators notwithstanding, I'm really

looking forward to doing the tour.

 

Another visit I am looking forward to is a return trip to Southwark Cathedral.

 

http://www.southwar k.anglican. org/cathedral/

 

I visited there last time I was in London and was lucky enough to meet up with

one of the most fascinating and interesting guides I have ever come across. I

suspect that what she doesn't know about the Cathedral would fit on the back of

a postage stamp with room to spare but she doesn't make her tours dull and

boring. I have arranged to meet up with her next Tuesday for a personal tour so

I feel very privileged to be able to do that.

 

Quite near the Cathedral is an area of parkland which has recently been

regenerated. There is going to be a European-style Christmas fair and market

there every day up to 22nd December. I really loved the Christmas market I went

to in Oberhausen in Germany a couple of years ago so I am looking forward to

visiting this one. It is the first time it has been held so I imagine that it

might be lacking a bit in size and atmosphere compared with the big markets in

Germany but at is very definitely a step in the right direction.

 

Well, I think that's just about me done. My fingers are tired!!

 

Hugs from Marie

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from & #45; the World & #39;s favourite mail.