Starting Slow in London

Last week I was having trouble sleeping through the night. I was waking up for three or four hours each night. The last several days, I’ve been catching up, often sleeping well past 9:00 am, and generally having a sluggish start to my day. But, that’s just the microcosm. On a larger level, the start to our three months in London has been pretty slow.

The first thing that slowed us down was COVID. As you may recall, a few days before our flight to England, I came out of isolation after having tested negative twice. Yay! However, when we arrived at our apartment, the first thing we had to do was take a COVID test…and mine showed just a tiny bit of positivity. Argh! We talked to NHS on the phone, but they refused to believe that it was the tail end of my previous infection, so I had another 6 days of staying inside here. The only good news about this is that we learned that NHS will just overnight you a pack of 7 rapid COVID tests any time you want. (And today we saw folks on the street handing out boxloads of COVID tests. Free. Just on a random street corner. Why isn’t the US doing this? Oh right…) Anyhow, Jessica was a good sport and did the grocery shopping and such while I just chilled on the couch for another week. She didn’t isolate from me this time, since we knew I wasn’t actually contagious at this point, but I did stay inside, playing by the rules. So, that chewed up our first week here.

The second thing slowing us down since getting to London is also COVID. The Omicron surge has definitely peaked here already, and case numbers seem to be dropping, but it’s still pretty out of control. I feel pretty safe (vaxxed, boosted, and recently recovered), but Jessica still has never had COVID and we’re not totally sure how immune I’d be to reinfection from Omicron. Moreover, Jessica found this report from the Office for National Statistics that indicates that about 5% of the population of England actually has COVID at the moment. That’s a pretty ridiculously high percentage. So, given that, we’re basically sticking to the outdoors, an occasional trip to the grocery store, more walking, less transit, and a quick visit to one relatively empty museum.

During that first week spent in lockdown, I got to know our little apartment pretty intimately, from the weird leather rug to the strange squeaking sounds made by the refrigerator (which at first I thought was someone yelling “Woo!” at a party on another floor, then decided was maybe someone using a drill in another apartment, before finally realizing it was a sound coming from our kitchen). It’s a nice place, but…small. Oh well. I spent a fair bit of time playing games with Jessica, including testing some potential expansion material for Space Station Phoenix, my game that’s coming out this spring. And I played some games over the internet with friends–thanks Sam and Scott for entertaining me! At least there’s a decent view out the window on the rare days when there’s sunlight.

Over my isolation week, I also continued my quest for a math credential, but it seems I can’t take the next test I need to pass while in London. There are Pearson test centers here, but they don’t carry the specific test I want. I spent nearly 6 hours on the phone with various people in both the UK and US as they repeatedly failed to understand what was preventing me from signing up for the exam. I think I’ve learned that it would actually be easy to make the test available, but it’s impossible to get the right two parts of the Pearson organization (the ones who manage the CSET test in the US and the ones who manage the test center in London) to talk to each other. They keep sending me emails saying they can help me, but I know not to fall for that trick–it’ll just be another several hours on the phone. So, I’ll just keep studying and take it when I’m back home. Alas…

Anyhow, since leaving isolation, we’ve started to explore London a bit. We’re living right along the Regent’s Canal, on the border between Islington and Hackney. It’s just a bit outside the Circle Line, but still in Zone 1 (for those familiar with the London Underground system), basically just a little outside the more famous bits of central London. We can walk to the center of London easily, but our location is just a little funky in terms of transit access. You see, the problem–and the beauty–of our location is the canal.

We live right at the corner of the Regent’s Canal and a little side canal called Wenlock basin. To get to “the Angel” in Islington–with like a dozen supermarkets, a farmer’s market, and the nearest tube stop–we have to walk several blocks out of the way to cross a bridge to get to the other side of the canal before we can start heading the right direction. But, the canal is lovely. There are ducks and swans…and a ton of narrowboats. People have been living on boats here for a century, but that population has exploded lately given housing prices and economic inequality (feels just like home…grrr…). The narrowboats are cute, with a ton of different styles, some with gardens or solar panels on top, and even one that is a floating bookstore.

The construction of and along the canal is fascinating too. We’ve enjoyed watching the locks operate, and our normal walking route to the Angel takes over the Islington Tunnel, a half-mile long tunnel where the canal goes under Islington Hill and pops out near King’s Cross. We found there are markers showing the tunnel’s route. Probably the most fascinating thing we learned was about how most of the train lines coming into King’s Cross run underneath the canal, so during WWII they installed a “dry lock” there so that when the German’s tried to bomb it to flood the train tunnels, it wouldn’t have water in that part.

Just down the street from our building is Shepherdess Walk Park. We pass by this lovely little mosaic section to get to the tunnel we take under the rowhouses behind it on the way to the bridge over the canal.

You may have noticed that a few of the pictures above featured blue sky. Well, that was a brief period–mostly while I was locked inside. Since I’ve been out, it’s gotten colder and greyer. Most days this week there’s been exactly zero sun. Yesterday, the high was under 40F. Ick. Luckily, it hasn’t been rainy, so I’ll consider it a win over the even worse January we had the last time Jessica and I were in London: 1999. Remembering that time, our first long walk across London took us past the place where we both (illegally) lived in her incredibly tiny dorm room…

While we were there, we checked out Westminster Cathedral (not Westminster Abbey), the central Catholic church in London, which is right around the corner and that I’m pretty sure we ignored when we were there 23 years ago. It’s gorgeous, done in a much more Orthodox style than many Catholic churches, with incredible mosaic ceilings throughout the side chapels.

While we haven’t been eating in restaurants (well, actually, we ate at one ramen place, sitting outdoors, and froze our butts off), we have decided that markets are the place to be. They’re a bit more crowded than is maybe 100% COVID-safe, but they have so many amazing food vendors and enough other things going on to keep us pretty well entertained and well fed while staying mostly outdoors.

The first market we went to was Borough Hall, where Jess had to choose just one cheese to buy from among a couple dozen different amazing-looking cheese stalls. We also bought some awesome pastries for breakfast the next day, a nicely-spiced hot cider, and some ridiculously good jerk chicken. Yum. The place was just overrun with good-looking stuff to eat. We’ll be back.

Later that afternoon, we wandered through the Whitechapel Market. It was a bit sparser–more of a traditional street market and less of a bourgy tastefest–but some of the vendors there had some pretty unusual stuff on sale, including granadillas (a fruit we’ve only ever seen in Peru–a delicious floral-smelling version of a passion fruit). The market is situated in an area that is largely South Asian, so we did manage to score our first samosas and some panipuri. Yum again.

And the next day we went out to Camden Town, one of the craziest weekend markets. We spent a few great weekends there back in 1999. It seems a touch tamer and less anarchic than it did back then–less punky, fewer tents and more permanent structures, etc.–but there’s still some really fun art and such there, and a pretty wild mix of foods available as well. If nothing else, all the markets have a liveliness and energy that’s hard to match given the weather currently. And the different culture of each (bourgy, South Asian, hipster) is a fun variety. There’s lots more on our list for upcoming weekends…

The one museum we went to was pleasantly empty on a weekday afternoon: The Museum of London. We wanted to start there to get an overview of London’s history. It did that, but without really a ton of detail. Actually, there was a ton, but an inordinate amount of it was focused on pre-Roman and Roman times. I’m not going to say I highly recommend the place, but it was alright. Regardless, a few of my favorite bits there:

• Sexually ambiguous ancient wooden idols. Evidently, the hole seems to be vaginal, but also could have a peg inserted to be a penis. The museum linked this to Odin’s sexual ambiguity in some legends.
• Troves of pre-Roman bronze coins found in the area.
• A bit of the Roman wall around the city of London. Though the tower bit here is a medieval addition, the section on the left is Roman.
• The “Common Seal” of London and it’s wax imprint. The original seal was made in 1219, but this is the replacement from after the original was melted in the Great Fire of 1666.
• We spent a bunch of time examining Charles Booth’s map of London from the late 1800s. He set out to map London house by house. He had a whole rubric for how to label places by their wealth level. Here you can see Jessica pointing to the empty spot where the building we’re living in now stands. But, you can see from the blankness there that it was largely industrial–our building is apartments built into a former print shop, I believe. You can also see that our neighborhood a century ago was a mix of “middle class,” very poor,” and “semi-criminal.” Evidently that was an acceptable thing to label a neighborhod back then.
• And the topper was Paul Simonon’s smashed bass — made famous on the cover of the Clash’s “London Calling.”

So, I’m just going to go ahead and wrap this up with a few of the odds and ends (some more odd than others) we’ve come across in our wanderings so far…

• London definitely has some new buildings. There’s skyscrapers going up all over the place. More on architecture, in general, another day, but two that standout: (1) The Shard, the tallest building in Western Europe, and (2) The Fenchurch Building–also known as the Walkie Talkie, with a fascinating and unique shape. Also, note in the foreground of the photo of the Shard is City Hall. And, my favorite building name is the one for the rounded structure at the far right in the photo with the Fenchurch Building: The Gherkin.

• We crossed the iconic tower bridge. The red brick building you see through the gate is the location of the office I worked in back in 1999. It had an amazing view over the Tower of London.

• Near Tower Bridge is Hay’s Galleria–formerly a wharf–now home to this crazy cool steampunky sculpture…

• Speaking of sculptures…this one at the corner of Trafalgar Square is nuts! It’s called “The End” and features giant whipped cream and a cherry with a fly and a drone (like the kind people fly annoyingly around parks and such) hovering on it. It is “a monument to hubris and impending collapse,” and it’s sponsored by the Mayor of London. Hmmm… The drone has a livestream camera you can watch at www.theend.today if you’re ever wondering what’s happening in London.

• We ran across these guys on horseback in St. James Park. Later the same day, we saw similarly dressed fellows–but with different colored tassels and coats–on the opposite side of Buckingham Palace, near Wellington Arch. There’s all sorts of weird British royal-related tradition stuff happening around here. Not sure what to make of it, but the spectacle is occasionally entertaining. (Note: they were not there for the movie being filmed–one of several places we’ve seen such things already.)

• And then there was the ridiculously gluttonous squirrel tried to prevent us from leaving the park on our way to get groceries. Seriously, he ran right in our path multiple times.

• Saddest of all was this: We came across this fun group of folks in Regent’s Park singing “We are the 99%” (see video). We figured they were good lefty folks and weren’t surprised to see the massive police presence around them. But, when they launched into their next tune, we realized they were actually anti-vaxxers and we had perhaps been too close for comfort.

On a final note, I’ve been recording all our walks on my Outdoor Active app. I missed a few bits here and there due to absent-mindedness, and one long chunk of canal walking due to technical errors, but this gives you a sense of where we’ve been so far (the blue dot being our flat).

And just for fun, here’s a zoom in on the silliest bit: our route back and forth through Borough Hall Market. (Also, note that over the 11km–about 7 miles–we covered that day, there was a total of about a dozen meters of vertical change. It’s pretty damn flat here.)

That doesn’t quite cover everything we’ve been up to, but it’s a good start. I’ll be back soon with more thoughts and adventures. In the meantime, feel free to send suggestions, thoughts, or questions either by email or in the comments below…