Saturday, January 17, 2oo9
London

I am still having difficulty sleeping through the night. Today, I awoke at 4 am and spent an hour or so cleaning up my Inbox. As soon as my Inbox messages exceed 1000, I get rid of them by the hundreds. I also began reading Kamala Markandaya’s posthumous novel Bombay Tiger, published only in India and gifted to me by my friend Firdaus Gandavia in Bombay last week. It is a heavy tome comprising hundreds of pages, so will take me until the end of the month to complete, no doubt. The interesting introduction by Charles Larson, a personal friend of the author for over thirty years, has brought to light many little-known facts about this very reclusive author and though I was one of those rare scholars who had the privilege to meet her 22 years ago in London and was given the opportunity to work with her while doing doctoral research at Oxford, there are so many facts about her life that remained unknown even to me.

Over a carb-heavy breakfast (I am afraid I simply cannot resist the croissants and pains au chocolat that call my name so insistently from the bakery aisle), I watched the Alibi channel that features only murder mysteries and detective stories. I have become familiar through it with the Hamish Macbeth series starring Robert Carlyle (of The Full Monty fame) that is set in picturesque Scotland and with the Father Dowling Mysteries which is an American series set in Chicago! Then, I had a little nap on the couch before I forced myself to wake up, take a shower and head out for my lunch appointment with Rosa and Matt Fradley.

Only I made such a blunder. It was not today that I was supposed to meet them but next Saturday! When I arrived at our appointed spot at noon, they were nowhere to be seen. A short call on my cell phone cleared up the confusion. But no harm, no foul. I had carried my book 24 Great Walks in London with me, so I simply selected a walk in Mayfair and off I went. I will now see them next week at Shepherd’s Market, a tiny tucked-away cobbled square right behind Piccadilly which is full of old pubs and small neighborly shops.

This walk was by far the least interesting of the many self-guided walks I have taken so far–in fact, it was positively dull. The walk on New Bond Street took me past some of the fanciest designer shops and I did stray into a couple to try on merchandise that at the discounts being offered seem too good to be true–Cartier and Burberry’s, for instance. Then, I arrived at the Old Bond Street Underground Station where the walk officially began.

I passed by the house of composer Handel (now the Handel House Museum) but did not go inside. It is a rather nondescript brick building right besides the Jo Malone salon where I had my unforgettable facial the other day–and it is said to be haunted by the ghost of a perfumed woman who could be one of the two sopranos who vied for roles in Handel’s operas. Right next door, for a while lived the famous guitarist Jimi Hendrix, and he too is reported to have seen a female ghost there.

On Vere Street, I stopped to see the inside of pretty St. Peter’s Church which is rather ornate. The streets behind Oxford Street are basically residential–lined with Georgian terraced houses punctuated with the occasional mews. These lanes that once hid stables in which the horses of the owners of these fancy homes were kept have been converted rather ingeniously into expensive contemporary housing, the ground floor stables being used as garages today while the upper rooms that once housed the syces and grooms are now occupied by yuppies who enjoy the proximity to their places of work in London that such housing offers.

In one of the mews is concealed the home of a Dr. Steven Ward, an osteopath, who in the 1960s, obtained a lucrative second income by introducing influential society men to young and attractive girls. One of these was a 17-year old named Christine Keeler who moved in with Ward and was visited here by two men–a Russian diplomat named Eugene Ivanov and an Englishman named John Profumo who just happened to be the English War Minister at the time. This liaison posed a potential security threat and resulted in the infamous Profumo Scandal.

A few streets ahead, I arrived at No. 2 Wimpole Street where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle leased a consulting room in 1861 as an ophthalmologist and awaited his patients’ arrival. When none turned up, he began to spend his time writing short stories about a dapper detective named Sherlock Holmes which he sold to the local publications. These caught the public imagination and made Holmes a household name in Victorian England and Doyle one of the most successful writers of the time.

From this point, my rambles became rather pointless. I passed by a garden called the Paddington Street Gardens where I stopped to eat a sandwich lunch (I had picked up a sandwich earlier from the Waitrose on Marylebon High Street). This was once a burial ground and 80,000 people are buried under the well manicured lawns (though you would never guess this) and mature trees–now, of course, devoid of their foliage. On Manchester Street, I passed by the home of a Joanna Southcott who in 1814 fooled the world into believing that she was going to deliver the Messiah though she was 64 years old. 22 doctors pronounced her pregnant but when 9 months passed and she did not deliver her child, the medics continued their vigil by her bed side until she died three months later. The false pregnancy turned out to be internal flatulence and a glandular enlargement of her breasts! Thank God for modern-day sonograms!!!

Soon I was crossing into busy Baker Street and arriving at the home of the world’s most famous detective–Sherlock Holmes– at 221 B. This is the only location in London that actually has a blue plaque depicting the home of a fictitious character. So many readers kept arriving at 221 B Baker Street looking for the famous home, then occupied by the Abbey Bank that it was necessary to mark the location in some way. The bank even had to employ a full-time secretary to deal with the correspondence that flooded its premises from faithful fans. Today, the venue has been converted into The Sherlock Homes Museum complete with interiors and a great deal of memorabilia from the Age of Victoria. There is no charge for browsing through the very interesting souvenir shop and I did just that.

By then, my feet were almost caving in under me and I made my way to a bus stop and got back home as soon as I could so that I could rest my weary feet and indulge in a foot massage. I intended to do nothing more strenuous than watch TV for the rest of the evening as I had enough exertion for one day.

In fact, I think that I shall also take it easy tomorrow and but for lunch with my next door neighbors, Tim and Barbara, I’m glad that I have nothing lined up.