DAY TEN

 

Yesterday was Day 10 of the blog.  Should have some sort of celebration.  Awkward how that falls into the middle of a week, but it’s still something.  As I’m writing this, it’s about 6:30 in the a.m. here in London and I’m waiting to board a bus heading to Bath, the homeplace of Jane Austen (not for a long time since, however) and, as the name implies, where the Romans had their bathhouses.  No one else is awake yet.  Irresponsible.

You may remember I left you on Day 9 with the fact that we were to take a walking tour of the Bloomsbury area, which we did.  Our tour guide was knowledgeable but socially awkward.  She was about the size of a larger Jawa and so, instead of having to crane her neck back to look at each of us in the face as she spoke, she looked straight ahead at our bellybuttons.  My navel had never been spoken too before, and I think it quite enjoyed itself.  Myself, I enjoyed the walk around a rather pretty part of London (I compare it to the more residential Brooklyn area of New York; Westminster, where I’m living, is more like a city), but I didn’t much care for the subject matter.  We saw a bunch of houses and parks where Virginia Woolf and her crowd used to knock about.  One of the teachers is a big female lit researcher, and so she was over the moon about it.  Never much cared for Woolf myself.  Those artists were called “The Bloomsbury Group” and apparently they used to be quite the promiscuous few.  Saying about them: “[The Bloomsbury Group] lived in squares, wrote in circles, and loved in triangles.”

After the walk we had class where the theatre critic for one of the newspapers came and spoke to us about our theatre experiences and her’s.  It was interesting to hear her professional opinion on the plays that we had seen.  That night we had another potluck dinner (I think it’s to be a weekly thing, now) and Jason made vegetarian chili.  It was unlike any chili I’ve had, but it was pretty good.  He didn’t have any of the ingredients that America would have offered him, but he made do.  At the meeting we talked about Blithe Spirit (I think I’m the only person who liked it beginning to end) and Jane asked us all whether we would rather visit St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey as a place of worship.  A classmate named Lindsay summed it up perfectly: “I would rather have an Easter service at St. Paul’s, but I would want Christmas at Westminster.”

We all stayed in last night after the potluck, because we had to be out early this morning, so that about covers it for yesterday.  There is, however, one thing I wanted to note before I leave you all to it.  If it seems at all like I’m just whinging and complaining about everything this side of the Atlantic, it’s not that I’m not having a good time.  I am having a good time: I’ve enjoyed most everything I’ve experienced here.  It’s just my writing style. Ask Ben, he’ll know how to explain.  If I seem overly critical it’s because I think I really must be a stodgy octogenarian trapped inside the body of a 21 year old.  That’s right, my inner monologue is Jonathan Toomey.  That’s a Christmas story reference, folks.  Look it up.

Cheers to whinging!

— Henry

P.S.  This week’s cover is a statue of Gandhi sitting in one of the squares at Bloomsbury.  The guide said that when Gandhi lived in England he either studied or lived in Bloomsbury.  Anyway, the peculiar thing is that the model for this statue wasn’t Gandhi himself.  I suppose the sculptors of Bloomsbury aren’t the high profile celebrities they believe they are, because Gandhi wouldn’t model for the statue and so they had to hire someone who they imagined looked the part — i.e. a wrinkly, old Indian man.  So the wise old man kneeling there isn’t the inspirational world leader, but rather an elderly factory worker from somewhere around Bloomsbury.  And now you know.