Tag Archive | Cambridge

Another Death, Lunch with Rosa and Matt and Camden Lock Market

Jan24

Saturday, January 24, 2009
London

I love Saturdays–the very word conjures up for me the promise of long and lovely lazy hours of leisure. And Holborn takes its Saturdays seriously–in that it remains in a state of slumber until almost mid-day. The quietness of these weekend mornings gives me the chance to catch up on all sorts of pending chores and today I cleaned my bathroom and transcribed the interview I did with Frank Bradbury before I breakfasted, took a shower and left the house.

I had made noon plans with Matt and Rosa Fradley whom, if you can believe it, I had met in New York when they took my Highlights Tour at the Met. Because they liked my morning tour so much, they took my afternoon tour as well…and before we knew it, we were exchanging email information. Over the past year, we have been in touch in cyberspace and since my arrival in London, they have been very helpful indeed.

When Rosa informed me that they would be in London to see a show and wondered if I was free to join them for lunch,I jumped at the opportunity to see them again. We decided to meet at a pub called Ye Grapes in Shepherd’s Market, which is a tiny hidden square at Green Park. I bussed it there, arriving at my destination ten minutes later than I expected. Over sweet Strongbow cider, we hugged and kissed and exchanged news–not the least of which is their move to Singapore in August where Rosa has been posted for work (she is involved with a Japanese firm of pharmaceutical researchers in Cambridge) and Matt has actually found a job as a Physics High School teacher in the British school there. They are just delighted at the prospect of moving to Singapore which they both love and are eager to explore. I enjoyed their company very much and time flew as we chatted nineteen to the dozen,.

An hour later, we adjourned to a small sandwich bar nearby to have lunch-their treat–which was very kind and thoughtful of them indeed. Rosa and I chose the House Salad which was a very hearty platter combining roasted vegetables, roasted chicken, bacon, lettuce and a spicy dressing served with ciabata bread. Matt went for a chicken breast sandwich that also looked substantial. Because I am a slow eater, they said their goodbyes to me an hour later to make it in time for their 3 pm show of Cirque de Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall.

I lingered a little while longer at the eatery, then because it was such a gorgeous day, I decided to take the bus to go and see the Camden Lock Market. I figured that when you get a great day in London, you’ve got to grab it with both hands–and who knows when I will be in London again at the weekend, considering all the European travel I am doing.

The No. 24 bus took me straight there from Trafalgar Square but by the time I got to Camden Town, about 20 minutes later, I actually regretted the impulse that drove me there. The place was just teeming with visitors. From the upper deck of the bus, they looked like giant black ants all swarming together towards the same coveted prize. I had half a mind not to alight at all at the Market, but then I thought better of it. Having come that far, I decided to stay the course, take a look around the stalls and beat a hasty retreat. This place would then figure on my “Been There Done That” List!

The Camden Lock Market used to actually be located along the Camden Lock as the name implies. However, a few months ago, a devastating fire destroyed the area and the stall owners moved their kiosks to the current premises. I found all of the merchandise terribly unappealing–there was bohemian clothing and jewelry and tons of food stalls with Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian food…but after the delightful lunch I had just eaten, nothing took my fancy. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get out of there and as soon as I spied a Number 24 bus heading in the direction of home, I ran to the bus stop and jumped into it, so glad to put as much distance as I could between this market and myself.

When I was on the bus heading home, I got the sudden news from Llew of the death of my godfather in Bombay, my Uncle Alex, who had been ailing for a very long time and was in very poor shape when I last saw him two weeks ago. In fact, I had been praying hard that God would grant him a merciful release from his suffering and when I received the news, it was not without a substantial measure of relief. I called my parents in Bombay immediately and received more details about his passing. As the bus wound its way home, I recalled many incidents of our lives together from my childhood to the very last meeting I had with him.

I called my cousin Cheryl Crane in Kent as soon as I reached home and gave her the sad news and then made my way by bus to St. Anselm’s and St. Cecelia’s Church at Holborn for the 6 pm mass as I have made plans to visit Rochester tomorrow with my friend Stephanie and I know that I will, therefore, miss Sunday mass. The mass was short and quick–the shortest I can recall in this country–just 40 minutes long, and then I was out buying myself some cold medication from Boots across the road and some mint and lemon so I could fix myself some herb tea and comfort my hoarse throat and runny nose.

Back home, I curled up on the couch, after a long conversation with Llew, to watch The Break-Up with Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughn as Love Film.com has resumed the delivery of my films again. It was a rather cute date-night chick flick and was good for a lark! I ate up the leftovers sitting in my refrigerator as I need to clear it all off before I leave for Berlin on Tuesday. I sipped my lemon medication slowly, then took all my other pills and went straight to bed.

Tomorrow I have a day trip to Rochester to anticipate and I need to awake early so that I can get to Wimbledon in time to meet Stephanie who will drive us there in her brand new Lexus. I just can’t wait…

Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4, Treasures of the British Library and Holiday Concert at St. Paul’s

Dec16

December 16, 2008
Tuesday

Antony Andrews is still as gorgeous as ever. Ask me how I know that Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is still as cute as a button and I’ll tell you that I had the good fortune of seeing him today at a star-studded gala Holiday Concert at St. Paul’s Cathedral in aid of the Cancer Research Fund. I was a guest of Bishop Michael and Cynthia Colclough and in the line-up of celebrity readers were Dame Aileen Atkins whom I saw recently at the West End in The Female of the Species and John Sargent whom the entire UK is buzzing about after his success in Strictly Come Dancing. Apart from Atkins and Andrews, however, I have to admit that I did not recognize the names of any of the other local celebrities.

This evening crowned for me the series of fabulous Advent and pre-Christmas events in the Cathedral that have truly put me in the festive spirit and allowed me to meet so many interesting folks–all guests of the Colcloughs. Tonight was extra-special because in the audience was Princess Alexandra, the Hon. Lady Ogilvy, a cousin-in-law of the Queen and a patron of the Cancer Research Foundation who swished out of the cathedral just a few feet in front of me in a resplendent gold brocade coat and fabulous glittering necklace. There was also Connie Fisher who is currently playing Maria in the London stage version of The Sound of Music and Rupert Penry Jones who read Sir John Betjeman’s poem Advent 1955. The best readings were by Atkins who did a hysterically funny version of Shirley Valentine by Willy Russel and Andrews’ extraordinarily moving reading of Captain R.J. Armes’ account of an encounter between British and German forces at the trenches during World War I in a piece entitled Christmas Truce. Punctuated by carols performed by the Vicars’ and Boys’ choirs and a number of sing-a-long songs in which the audience joined, the evening made for a fine concert indeed.

Outside on the steps of St. Paul’s, you’ d think you’d regressed to the Victorian Age for suddenly a number of characters stood before us–each seemingly had walked out from a different page of Dickens’ novels. A Beadle grandly announced the distribution of mince pies to all who cared for one. More Victorian characters on stilts entertained the crowd as they dribbled out of the cathedral, a Victorian policeman did the rounds on his Penny Farthing bicycle while blowing frantically on his antiquated whistle and Victorian vendors bearing large trays of mince pies and baskets full of chocolates distributed them around generously acquiring more supplies from a Victorian fruit cart that was parked nearby. It was all thoroughly jolly indeed and did actually make me feel as if Christmas is around the corner–which, of course it is! In keeping with the coming holiday, I made my way to the side of the Cathedral and the pathway that leads to what my neighbor Barbara calls the “Wobbly Bridge” (it’s actually the Millennium Bridge that began to wobble dangerously the day it was inaugurated!). There I took pictures in front of a towering tree strung over with aquamarine lights.

This event brought the curtain down on an eventful and busy day. After I drafted our Almeida Family Christmas 2008 letter while it was still dark outside my window, I took the bus to King’s Cross Station with the objective of seeking out Platform 9 3/4 which features in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. This is the station from which Harry and his classmates board the train that takes them to Hogwart’s School for Wizards. Though I have read only the first book and seen the first movie in the series–Harry Potter and the Scorcerer’s Stone–my students are passionate devotees of the series and it was at their behest that I went pottering about King’s Cross Station as so many fans have done before me. In fact, now that my students have enthused me, I have decided to spend the next semester reading the rest of the series. Because so many readers have poured into the station looking for this platform, the City authorities decided to create one. I followed signs to Platforms 9, 10, and 11 and lo and behold! There was Platform 9 3/4 and a luggage cart that was in the very process of disappearing into the wall–in exactly the same way that Harry Potter and his friends find their way to the train. Of course, I had to take a picture pushing the luggage cart at this charming site. Only in London, kids, only in London…

Next, I walked along the fabulous red exterior of Sir John Betjeman’s beloved St. Pancras Station (now almost covered with scaffolding as construction to refurbish it into a five star hotel continues). It was my intention to get to the British Library to renew my Reader’s ID Card which recently expired. I had thought that producing the expired card would do the trick, but it turns out that I have to produce documents all over again proving my place of residence. Oh well, I guess I will just have to go back there tomorrow. It’s a good thing the British Library is so easy to get to on the bus.

Being at the British Library, I decided to do something I have been wanting to do for a long while–pour over the special manuscripts contained in the exhibition Ritblat Gallery under the rubric “Treasures of the British Library”. I had last perused these treasures 22 years ago when they were located in the British Museum–in the marvelous domed Reading Room in which Karl Marx scribbled his Das Kapital! In these new premises at King’s Cross, the manuscripts are exhibited in extremely dim cases in order to prevent the ink from fading completely by exposure to light. I spent an hour and a half looking at old maps drawn by cartographers in the 1300s, an excellent Shakespeare section which contained his First Folio of 1623 and a number of works by his contemporaries. There was even a leaf from a play that was jointly authored by a number of Elizabethan playwrights that is actually believed to be in Shakespeare’s own handwriting! How cool is that!!!

In the Music section, I was delighted to see scraps of original paper on which The Beatles scribbled so many of the lyrics of their most famous songs. One of them was by John Lennon who actually used the back of his son Julian’s 1st birthday card! The best part of all is that accompanying the cases which contain the manuscripts are audio extracts from musical compositions, recitations of poetry, etc. I was actually able to listen to several Beatles’ songs and then poetry as read by the poets themselves! It was quite engaging to listen to W.B. Yeats read his own poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in his thick Irish brogue just as Seamus Heany read from his poem ‘Mint’ and James Joyce read an extract from his own Finnegan’s Wake. All of these writers had distinctly Irish accents which is natural, I suppose, since they were born and raised in Ireland. I heard Virginia Woolf’s voice as well in an extract from a BBC radio conversation. It was these bits that I found most fascinating.

Of course, in the literary section there were also original manuscripts of such classics as Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (I had seen the manuscript of his Jude the Obscure at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last month), Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre and early stories that Jane Austen had penned as a child to entertain her family. There was also Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim written in his own handwriting (and bearing evidence of multiple attempts at revision) as well as letters from Rupert Brooke to a woman whom very few scholars knew about until recently. An hour and a half later, I had only seen half the collection and decided that I would return tomorrow as I have to go to the Reader Registration Desk again anyway. I really did want to finish perusing these manuscripts before I left for the States and I am glad I managed to squeeze it in.

Then, I went to NYU to print out some interviews (the Internet was SOOOOOO sluggish and SOOOOOO maddening this morning ) and then I was out of there and walking towards the Waitrose at Brunswick Center to buy a few food items for my Mum in Bombay. Then, off to Tesco’s to buy Llew some of the luxury Muesli he likes–only I found that the Holborn Viaduct branch does not carry it which meant I had to ride the bus to Bank Underground Station where I found it.

With only a couple of days to go before I leave for the States, I am shopping frantically and trying to organize my packing. I have to pack one suitcase to carry to the States and leave one packed suitcase here in my flat. After spending Christmas with my family in Southport, Connecticut, I will board a flight from JFK on the morning of December 26, arrive at Heathrow that evening, spent one night in my London flat before I leave for Heathrow again the next morning, December 27, to board another flight to Bombay. The packed suitcase will then go with me to Bombay. Complicated enough for you????

The last two days have been spent running last-minute errands, transcribing taped interviews and printing them out, filling in grade sheets and handing them in, making phone calls and sending out email messages in order to set in place appointments with my Anglo-Indian subjects for the end of January and the beginning of February. I am proud to say that in the process of two months, despite being afflicted with plantar fasciitis, I managed to do 15 interviews with people who were based in the far-flung reaches of London. It is my hope to do several more in the early months of the new year. In the evenings, I’ve been trying to get some packing done.

Last night, I watched Greyfriar’s Bobby, a poignant movie about a little Skye Terrier that mourned for 14 years on the grave of his master after he died in the late 1800s. The city of Edinburgh made the dog an honorary Friend of the City and gave him free run of the streets. There is a statue of the dog that came to be known as ‘Greyfriar’s Bobby’ (as it lay on his master’s grave in Greyfriar’s cemetery) in Edinburgh today to honor the values of loyalty and faithfulness. My friend Delyse Fernandez had told me about this movie a couple of years ago and I was able to order it on Love Film. Com.

As my first semester comes to a close and I pull my suitcases shut, I cannot help but think what an eventful four months these have been and how dearly I have come to adore this city and how intimately I have grown to know it . I can sincerely say that I have taken fullest advantage of the many benefits that this posting has afforded me. It truly feels as if I have been on vacation for the past eight months and as I start to think of the arrival of my friend Jenny-Lou Seqeuira on Thursday, I know I have one last leg of my Fall semester here in London to anticipate with pleasure.

Belfast’s Queen’s University–and Homeward Bound

Dec10

Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Belfast-London

On another bleak morning, I awoke to potter around my backpack, shower, dress and check out of the Youth Hostel where I had spent four rather interesting and very comfortable nights. If you do not mind your bed sailing each time the occupant of the upper bunk moves, if you can deal with the occasional outbreak of snores, if you do not object to late-night chatter, you will find no better value than that offered by Hosteling International. I feel as if I have come upon the girl I used to be, 25 years younger, reclaiming my grad student days when I backpacked all over Europe and used Youth Hostels for affordable housing as I scoured the Continent.

I ordered a waffle for breakfast–large, warm, sprinkled with powdered sugar and drizzled (make that bathed) with chocolate sauce. It was so yummy to look but so disappointing. It was studded with tiny black bits of plastic and I can only conclude that they were pieces of the non-stick coating on the waffle pan that had detached themselves as the waffle was baking and had stuck to the dough and baked right into it. Yuck!!! There went my breakfast!

In the aftermath of a shower and under an overcast sky, I set out to explore Queens Quarter, that part of the city of Belfast that is dominated by the red-brick Tudor structure (reminiscent of Magdalen College, Oxford) of Queens University whose most famous alumnus is Seamus Heany, the Literature Nobel Laureate. Charles Langford who designed the university building used, as his model, the great medieval colleges of Europe and created a site for learning based on the cloisters situated around a quadrangle. Needless to say, a library and a dining hall would be part of the design.

It is lovely to visit educational institutions when they are still in session. The place buzzes with intellectual energy as students mill around–backpacks thrown carelessly across their backs, books in hand–making their way from one class to the next, one lecture hall to the other. I joined the throngs and arrived at the Black and White Hall with its dominant sculpture of Galileo by Pio Fredi. In the quadrangle a large canopied tent was being cleared and dismantled–remnants of a formal party held last night perhaps. I wandered into the Great Hall whose walls were covered with oil-painted portraits of the many eminent men and women who have called the university their alma mater. There was a High Table and a stone fireplace right behind it and a rather eye catching ceiling but it had none of the aura of the medieval halls of Oxford or Cambridge–perhaps because it lacked their venerable age. On exploring the library, I found that I had strayed into a ‘Coffee Morning’ at which several faculty and administrative staff had gathered for a mid-morning chinwag. There were mince pies and shortbread and coffee at hand and people were nibbling while purchasing tickets for a dozen food hampers that would be raffled later that day. English hampers come into their own twice a year–at summer picnics and at Christmas when they are filled with the most exotic eats like cornichons and candied stem ginger.

Across the street, I visited the book store and spent an idle quarter hour browsing through its offerings. I almost bought a signed copy of an autobiography by Cheri Blair for Llew but thought better of it. I was certain it would be badly misshapen by the time it made its way home in my backpack and I know how anal Llew is about the condition of a book–it must remain pristine if he is to value it! So there went that idea!

Then, I was back at the Hostel, retrieving my backpack from storage, taking the Bus 600 to George Best Airport (the only airport in which Ryanair lands that is within the very heart of the city as opposed to the other airports that are always several godforsaken miles away). I was there in 15 minutes, and with my boarding pass and security formalities all done (after the ordeal I went through at Stanstead airport, I was taking no chances with time), I had loads of it to kill in an airport that was singularly lacking in enticements such as duty-free shopping–but then I wasn’t really leaving the country, so I could not expect to travel duty-free. It just felt as if I had visited another country because I had crossed the Sea!!!

On the flight, once I had settled down again in the bulk head seat, who should I see climbing up the stairs but Marina! Of course, she sat right by me and we kept each other company throughout. I was delighted to fly right over the Isle of Man and then to see Liverpool clearly reveal itself itself below me, the Mersey snaking its sluggish way, a hefty river indeed, and the Three Graces standing solidly on its banks. I still thrill to the view of the world from so many thousands of feet above sea level–it is about as unique a perspective on our world as one could ever have!

We reached before schedule, much to Ryanair’s pride, and I caught the early Easybus back home to Baker Street. Nothing much to report expect that I had dozens of email messages to trawl through and a camera full of 120 pictures to download before I was able to unwind and call it a night after eating a sandwich and a mince pie and washing it all down with cider.

Tomorrow I give a final exam and have a stack of papers to grade before I can focus on my next trip–home to Southport and the ones I most love!

Return to Oxford!

Dec2

Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Oxford

On another day on which I felt as if I was in the North Pole rather than in London, I headed at 7.15 am to catch the 8 am Megabus to Oxford. I was excited. I hadn’t returned to Oxford since I arrived here in September as I was waiting for some official meetings to fall into place before I made the trip. As it turned out, I discovered, on visiting the Oxford Tourism website, that the famed Ashmolean Museum was due to close for a year on December 23. This meant that if I didn’t grab a look-see while I could, I would not have the chance to review its collection at all. There was no time to be lost. I hastened to make the arrangements that would ensure that the people I wanted to meet were free to see me and then before you could say ‘Elias Ashmole’, I was booking a ticket to get going.

I was a little apprehensive about finding the Megabus terminus; but then when I stopped to ask the Oxford Tube driver where it was, he informed me that Megabus and Oxford Tube were partners in the Stagecoach company and I could hop into his bus with a Megabus ticket. Well, that took the stress off my mind and into the bus I went, climbing to the upper deck and making myself comfortable on the front seat while it wasn’t quite dawn yet outside that huge picture window.

I had the upper deck almost to myself for the length of the two hours it took us to get to Oxford. I cannot recall having made a visit in the autumn before and the farms and fields we passed en route looked almost forlorn in the watery sunshine. Because–thank God for little mercies–the sun was actually trying valiantly to poke through the clouds and often did succeed, the landscape was prevented from appearing completely desolate.

That same forlornness dogged me throughout the day for Oxford’s trees without their foliage are a rather sad sight indeed. The bus dropped me off at the High and without wasting any time at all, I walked through Radcliff Square to the Tourist Information Bureau on Broad Street to find out if there were any special activities in the town that day that I ought not to miss.

Then, I hastened to the Ashmolean Museum having just two and a half hours in which to take in the Highlights of its collection. Though it is an imposing Neo-Classical building, the Ashmolean has none of the grandeur of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and when I walked past the doors, that lack of splendor became even more evident. For the lobby of the Fitzwilliam is jaw-droppingly opulent while the Ashmolean is far more subdued. The lower floor still holds the Greek and Roman works, but you need to climb a curving staircase to get to the first and second floors for the bulk of the collection.

It was with feelings of disappointment that I discovered that construction work had already begun, which placed the items in disarray. But rather quickly, that disappointment turned to relief for I made the discovery that the ‘Treasures of the Ashmolean’ had all been grouped together and were on display in just four rooms. This meant that instead of having to search through the vast expanses of the building for the highlights, all I needed to do was focus on those few rooms and I could see them all.

Of course, I started with the Alfred Jewel which inspired an entire episode in the Inspector Morse series entitled ‘The Wolverhampton Tongue’. This item, said to be at least a thousand years old, is smaller than my little finger. It is the ornament that would have adorned a small instrument used to point to letters on a manuscript when one was reading from it. It is truly exquisite in its detail, featuring the head of a man holding a few flowers in his hand. I was then taken by a mantle that once belonged to Powhatan, father of Pocahontas. How that item arrived from the New World to the Ashmolean is anyone’s guess…but there it was, made of deerskin and adorned all over with tiny white cowrie shells. In terms of paintings, there was Pietro di Cosimo’s The Forest Fire which Marina Vaizey enumerates among her 100 Masterpieces of Art and it is remarkable because in its depiction of animals, it is the first significant painting in the history of Western Art that does not make man the central figure of a canvas but places him in a rather minor role. Another very important work was Paolo Uccelo’s The Hunt, a rather detailed and very lovely painting on wood that was meant to adorn the side of a marriage or dowry chest. The portraits of Elias Ashmole (who donated his collection to the University to start the Museum in the 18th century) is placed in an elaborate frame that was carved by the great Grinling Gibbons himself whose work I have admired ever since I saw his mantle carvings at Hampton Court Palace a few years ago. There were several other exquisite pieces featuring textiles, glass, jewelry, sculpture, furniture, etc. and because they were all grouped together, it was so easy to view the collection. I felt extremely fortunate to have been able to see these works especially since I cannot recall having seen any of them even though my journal entries of 22 years ago tell me that I did spend one morning at the Ashmolean.

At 12.30 pm, having satisfied myself that I had seen everything of importance, I walked along Woodstock Road towards St. Antony’s College where I had a 1.oo pm appointment with Julie Irving who administers the Senior Associate Member Program at the college. I hadn’t met her before though we had been in email contact for a long while. She volunteered to introduce me to Dr. Nandini Gooptu, a historian at the college with whom I had recently made contact. We met at the Buttery and I spent an hour with Nandini over a beef casserole and pecan pie lunch talking about her work and my intended research project on Anglo-Indians on which I intend to work when I take on the position of Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s next summer.

An hour later, I was taking a tour of the college in the company of Julie who introduced me to a number of the senior staff such as the Warden, Margaret McMillan and her assistant Penny. I also saw the Library, the dining hall, the computer facilities, the Porter’s Lodge where SAMs have their pigeon-holes for mail, and a lot of other places of interest. Though I will be working at St. Antony’s as an independent scholar next summer, I will be in contact with a lot of administrative staff and it was nice to get to know them.

When my work at St. Antony’s was done, I decided to seek out Norham Road where I would very likely be staying for a few weeks in a bed and breakfast while I am attached to St. Antony’s. The owner of the B&B, a lady by the name of Elizabeth Longrigg, had been in correspondence with me and I thought it made sense to check out her house while I had the opportunity. Norham Road looked particularly deserted on this freezing December afternoon and with rain having fallen while I was in the Ashmolean, the streets were slick and shiny.

A few minutes later, Elizabeth Longrigg who happens to be a retired Oxford academic, an expert in Anglo-Saxon, Old and Middle English, was giving me a tour of her home and showing me the two rooms I could have if I decided to stay at her place. It had the old world feel of a Victorian home, was filled with all sorts of family memorabilia, furniture that looked as if it had been in the house forever, a very large and spacious dining room where a Continental breakfast was served every morning and two small rooms–a tiny sun room with a delightful view overlooking the main street and a larger room on the second floor. Both rooms had lovely roll top desks and good reading lamps because, as Elizabeth informed me, she only takes on academics as lodgers–academics whose research interests bring them to Oxford on short or long stays. After I had taken a peak at the garden which looked extremely bleak on this sunless afternoon–for the sun had hidden itself away by then–I walked towards Wellington Square with the idea of looking up Lisa Denny, an old acquaintance I had known when I had attended an international graduate program at Oxford 22 years ago.

Liza Denny is still attached to the Department of External Studies which now calls itself the Department of Continuing Education. I had found her name and telephone extension through the Oxford University Directory and though she did not remember me, she was warm and welcoming and introduced me to her colleague in the department. She also gave me information about next summer’s program at Exeter College and suggested I get in touch with the current director. When I told her that I would be resident at St. Antony’s, Oxford, next summer, she invited me to get involved in the program as a participant perhaps by giving a lecture. I was quite delighted and told her that I would follow up with her suggestion.

By the time I got out of Rewley House, semi-darkness had wrapped itself around the city. Since the colleges are open to visitors between 2 and 5 pm, I decided, for old times sake, to go to Exeter to tour the college. I don’t know whether it was nostalgia, the dreadful weather or the fact that I do not feel like a student any longer…but suddenly, I was gripped by the most fervent longing for my Oxford friends Firdaus, Annalisa and Josephine and, as I strolled through the Fellow’s Garden, for Brigita Hower with whom I have completely lost touch.

As I walked through the Margary Quadrangle and saw the room I once occupied bathed in light , I felt such an aching for those unforgettably beautiful Oxford days of my youth. It certainly did not made me feel any better, when I passed through a room on the ground floor, and actually saw Jeri Johnson who used to be a Tutor to both Annalisa and Firdaus. She was seated in the midst of a meeting with another lady and a gentleman whom I did not recognize.They were all clothed in the academic garb of Oxford dons and were deep in conversation. There she was, looking for all the world as if I had just turned the clock back 22 years. But for the fact that her hair has silvered entirely all over her head, she does not look a jot different from the way she did more than two decades ago.

It was very difficult for me to meet up with these ghosts from the past–first Lisa Denny, then Jeri Johnson. Because she was in a meeting, I could not, of course, make contact with Jeri, but I did step instead into the chapel where an organ rehearsal was on and as I allowed the deep sonorous tones to wash over me, I recalled those days when I had sat there enthralled by a concert that had been put on by so many talented young American musicians so many years ago. Where were they all, I wondered? How had the years treated them? Had they become academics as Annalisa and I had done or had they strayed into varied fields as Firdaus and Jo had?

With my friends in my thoughts, I stepped out into the quad and sat for a while on a bench, overlooking the lawn upon which I had once sprawled, taking in the familiar sights of the steeple of the chapel, the clock on the walls of the Dining Hall, the doors leading to the Undercroft and the Junior Common Room. Then, while I was in the midst of my reverie, darkness descended upon the medieval city and the occasional high pitched cries of modern-day undergrads reached my ears from afar.

But the cold made it impossible for me to tarry much longer with my memories. Though it was only 5 pm, I decided to try to catch the earlier bus back to London. It would have been impossible to see anything else by that point. There was no evensong service at St. Mary The Virgin Church that I could have attended. I had intended to browse through Blackwell’s Bookstore for some literature on the shooting of the Inspector Morse mysteries. But, by then, my feet were aching and I’d had enough. When, coincidentally, the same driver from my morning’s ride, pulled up and agreed to take me on the earlier bus, I sank into the same upper deck front seats rather gratefully and tried to doze off on the ride back.

Something was missing about my visit to Oxford and for the longest time I wasn’t sure what it was. And then it dawned on me–it was the presence of my friends that I missed so much. For all of us, those days at Exeter had been some of the most memorable ones of our lives and it is impossible for me to return to Oxford without dwelling on those precious moments of our youth. How marvelous, I thought, that the one thing we gifted each other all those years ago has lasted unbroken over the miles and over the years–the gift of our friendship.

An Early Thanksgiving Celebration

Nov26

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
London

My day began with a visit to my physiotherapist who says that she is very pleased with my progress. What she says does not please her is my impatience at wanting to get “back to normal” again. She tells me that it will be a while before I am back to normal, whatever that means. As long as I am not in pain, can go about my day with no discomfort or alternations in schedule, she says that I should consider myself well. The occasional tightness in my feet is a result of many factors, she explained. My posture, primarily, even when I am seated might have an impact. The nerves are a strange entity, she says, and while inflammation is subsiding in the tendons, the nerves may play up and cause me to feel twinges of pain or a bit of discomfort or tightness. All of this, she tries to convince me, are positive signs and not all pain should be construed as a negative thing.

In keeping with her advice, I am trying to focus on my progress and not on all the strange symptoms that seem to change daily. Meanwhile, she has changed my exercises and wants to me to do all kinds of contortions that involve a loosening of the muscles in my knees, thighs and butt as all of these affect the nerves in the foot, she says. Meanwhile also, she informs me that she is leaving for a two month vacation in her native New Zealand and wants to put me on to another physiotherapist in her absence. When I suggested a podiatrist instead, she was not enthusiastic, though she did not dissuade me either. She told me that if I simply continue all the exercises she has recommended, I will definitely get better provided I am patient and stay positive. I have now decided to find a podiatrist within my medical insurance network.

Right after my appointment with Megan, I took the bus to Trafalgar Square and spent an hour in the 20th century section of the National Portrait Gallery which I found the least interesting epoch in the gallery. Half of the section was closed anyway to accommodate the retrospective on the work of Annie Liebowitz for which the Gallery is charging a hefty entrance fee of 11 pounds. I decided to pass as I am bound to see her work in the States.

I got home instead to transcribe another interview I did with Doreen Samaroo and to rest before I started off on my evening’s jaunt.

When I told my English friends in Southport, Connecticut (John and Diana Thomson, William and Caroline Symington, for instance) that I was headed to London for a year, they put me on to their contacts in London to enable me to create a small circle of friends with whom I could socialize once I arrived here. The Thomsons’ contact, Janie Thomson Yang, and I have become good friends and have already done a few very exciting things together (the opening of a new art exhibition followed by dinner in Mayfair, dinner in Primrose Hill when Llew was here, Syon House and Park) and yesterday, I spent a lovely evening with the Symington’s contacts, Robert and Caroline Cummings.

Robert Cummings is, in fact, the Director of Boston University’s Study Abroad Program in London–a position he took on 4 years ago. He is himself an art historian (and, for my docent friends who are reading this), once taught Thomas Campbell who has just been appointed as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the place of Phillipe de Montebello. Robert is exceedingly proud of his former student’s new appointment, by the way.

Anyway, Robert sent me an email, a couple of weeks ago, inviting me to a music recital at 43 Harrington Gardens, a lovely mansion that is called Boston House. Supper, he said, would follow “in someplace inexpensive”. I accepted the invitation immediately, thinking what a great idea it would be to mark Thanksgiving in some concrete fashion (though I do intend to accompany my students tomorrow to the special service at 11 am for Americans at St. Paul’s Cathedral. This will also allow us to take in the monument to the fallen Indians in the cathedral–including thousands of Anglo-Indians–who served in the British army in India.)

The bus ride was one of the most excruciating things I have ever taken and I have promised myself not to take them during peak hours and when I have to make an event at a fixed time. Also with night falling so rapidly and the freezing weather showing no signs of abatement, it is no fun looking for bus stops from which to take connecting buses, especially since I am unfamiliar with the routes. So, back to the Tube it will be for me in such circumstances.

I reached the concert late but managed to catch enough of the program to realize that these BU students are hugely talented. They presented a program of chamber music that included a variety of composers and instruments in a setting that was gorgeous. First of all, the interior of the building has been recently refurbished and glows with a colonial splendour. Secondly, the room in which the concert was held was recently wall-papered (was that a William Morris design I recognized?) and the old wooden panelling shone in the light from the brass chandeliers. The program of music ended with the community singing “Old B.U.”, a song that Robert found on Ebay when surfing the web. It is an old college ditty that was ‘lost’ to time until it surfaced on Ebay! He had a group of students rehearse it, distributed photocopied sheets and invited the audience to join in a stirring rendition. It was a load of fun.

Cheese and wine and tiny pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting were served in the hall during the intermission and at the end of the program during which time Robert introduced me to his guests, I met a number of lovely people (which was the whole point of my attendance–I really am eager to make friends) who immediately included me in their circle and told me they must meet me again! I was pleased to see that they joined us for supper when I got to know Robert’s wife, Caroline, a horticulturist by profession who designs residential gardens. I asked her if she was familiar with the English mystery series called Rosemary and Thyme and she said she had not, but would make an effort to see it. This series features two female landscape designers and gardeners who run their own business together and end up solving a murder mystery in each episode. Their knowledge of plants and gardens in some shape or form leads them to the main clue that helps them crack the murder. In addition to designing gardens, Caroline is also a independent movie buff and runs an indie film club close to her home in the country in Buckinghamshire. Needless to say, we had a LOT to talk about during dinner!

Dinner, by the way, was in a lovely restaurant (the “someplace inexpensive”) called the Langan Coq D’Or (which translates from the French into the Golden Rooster of Langan!). Apart from Robert and Caroline, there was the lovely Swiss lady from Geneva Marilyn Rixhon (with whom I clicked immediately) and her Belgian husband Phillipe with their 13 year old daughter, the truly delightful Emma-Louise. There was also Loulou Cooke and her mother Helen whom I only got to a know a little bit during our ride home on the Tube as we were seated too far away across the round dining table.

I enjoyed every bit of our dinner. A few of the folks at our table ordered ‘starters’–Caroline passed around her Beef Tartare with Celeriac Remoulade as a sort of amuse bouche–it was superb and according to Marilyn, flavored with truffle oil–ah, no wonder it was so good!). In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme and since I will not be eating turkey tomorrow, I decided to pick something from the menu that I thought came closest to American turkey–English partridge!! Indeed my dish was called Pan Roasted Partridge with Bacon and Chestnuts and it was superb–a sort of partridge au vin. It had been simmered in a rich gravy composed of red wine and roast drippings and the bacon gave it the richest flavor–throw bacon into anything, I always say, and it tastes fantastic!–and the whole chestnuts had a very unexpected texture indeed. Despite the fact that it was so delicious, my portion was so huge (somewhat unusual again for London, isn’t it?) that I could only eat half of it and, since I am told that requesting a doggie bag is not kosher in the UK, I did not. Well, there went half my partridge and it broke my heart that it would be consigned to the rubbish bin. But when in London, eh?

Before we left the restaurant, Robert presented me with the business cards of the restaurant that featured paintings by David Hockney–it turns out that he and the Langan who opened this series of restaurants scattered all over London, were very close friends. The cards are tremendously eye-catching and will make a nice addition to the memorabilia that I am collecting for my scrapbook based on all my doings in London this year.

On the Tube on the way back home, I got to know Loulou and her mother Helen a little more as we had little chance to chat during dinner. Loulou is involved in a number of charities. Her husband, she informed me, used to date Caroline during their years together in Cambridge and remained friends over the decades. She has a home in Farringdon, not far away from my flat at all, as well as a home in the country where she resides most of the time. Her mother Helen specially came down on the train from Labor, North Yorkshire, where she lives, for the concert and a bit of Christmas shopping and, of course, to spend a day with her daughter, Loulou. By the end of our Tube ride, before I hopped off at Holborn, Helen told me that if I ever re-visit the Yorkshire Dales which I told her I loved so much, I must come and see her! Loulou and I made plans to meet for coffee while Marilyn and I said we would definitely get together before I depart for the States for my own winter break.

It was a glorious evening and truly put me into the Thanksgiving spirit. Llew has informed me that close friends of ours from Toronto, Canada, Tony and Sylvia Pinto and Trevor and Loretta D’Silva will be visiting us in Southport, Connecticut, over the Thanksgiving weekend. Llew has decided to make his signature dish, “Turkey Indian-style” for them. Chriselle will be spending Thanksgiving weekend with Chris and his family, the Harrises, in the Hamptons. I, of course, will be here in London where there is no sign at all of any Thanksgiving festivity but I will be at the service at St. Paul’s, then will go out to dinner in the evening with my American colleague Karen and her husband Douglas who, I hope, is fully recovered from the annoying bug that the two of them picked up in Turkey. We should find a typically American restaurant that will serve us roast turkey and stuffing with gravy and cranberry sauce and corn bread and pumpkin pie but…I guess if we’re looking for something traditional tomorrow, we might have to settle for good ole’ English pub grub instead.

Ealing Interviews and Thoughts on the National Portrait Gallery

Nov24

Monday, November 24, 2008
Ealing, London

I’m becoming quite adept at messing around on buses! Today I spent about four hours on them! Two getting to Ealing and about an hour and half getting back to Central London. It is the easiest thing in the world to find out how to get from Point A to Point B on the buses using London Transport’s excellent website with the handy Journal Planner facility. You merely put in your starting and ending points and the instruction that you only wish to use buses (not the Tube or the River or the Docklands Light Railways–all of which fall within the network) and within seconds, you receive return instructions on how to map your route.

I also managed to review a series of first draft essays that my students had handed in to me…so my time on the bus was also rather productive on a day which was cold and wet and overcast and would have made walking on the streets rather unpleasant.

I am rapidly learning the bus routes and the easiest ways to make connections and, in the process, I am seeing London in a unique and very inexpensive way indeed. For example, today for the first time. I actually passed by Kensington Palace. I had no idea where this was located though I had heard of it following the death of Princess Diana as it was allotted to her as part of her divorce settlement from Prince Charles. Then, suddenly, there it was…a beautiful brown mansion set in a sea of expansive green lawn. I do intend to tour it before I leave England; but my To-See List is expanding in proportion to the diminishing days that I have at my disposal to accomplish it all!

I had scheduled two interviews today with Anglo-Indian sisters Doreen Samaroo and Cheryl Whittle. Since they live in Ealing and Southall respectively, Doreen preferred me to meet with her at Ealing. I did get to Doreen’s place at 11.30 am and spent almost two hours interviewing the sisters. They spoke to me so candidly and with so much emotion. It truly was a pleasure talking to them and I am grateful to all these individuals who are opening themselves to me, a total stranger, with so much warmth and ease. As is the case with the entire community, Doreen was warm and hospitable and offered me a selection of Indian snacks (samosas and pakoras) and her “homemade Anglo-Indian ribbon cake” and a comforting cup of coffee that sustained me through the long bus journey back.

Arriving in Central London, I hopped off at Trafalgar Square and headed straight to the National Portrait Gallery to continue my perusal of the portraits on display there. This time round, I started on the first floor with the 19th century and spent an hour and a half in the company of the Victorians, the men all mustachioed, the ladies in their high necks, stiff crinolines and ringlets. Victoria and Albert were, of course, well represented in portraits, sculpture and etchings, their love story providing the backdrop for some of the conventional and revolutionary relationships of the day–Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Browning for instance, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and the married George Henry Lewes, etc. I found the entire backdrop of history against which the literature, music, science and technology of the era was created deeply fascinating and I read the curator’s notes with the greatest interest. So many names from my own Indian heritage were there to be contemplated: Thomas Babington Macaulay (architect of English education on the Indian sub-continent), Clement Atlee and Ramsay McDonald (20th century Prince Ministers who thwarted Congress vision for Home Rule), Rudyard Kipling whose literary creativity took inspiration from the folk lore of Northern India.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, I was profoundly absorbed by the Bloomsbury Group in whose former stomping ground, I now teach and live and work. What a wonderfully rare synergy existed among all those deeply creative people in that one era and in that one spot!There was Virginia Woolf”s portrait by her sister Vanessa Ball, Lytton Strachey’s by Dora Carrington, Clive Bell by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant. Having just returned from Cambridge where I learned about the Group’s beginnings at Trinity College, I scrutinized each portrait carefully trying to recapture in my mind the marvelously close affinity they enjoyed that began when they were undergrads and continued for the rest of their adult lives. From the Apostles’ Club at Cambridge to The Memoir Club at Bloomsbury (the Group met at the Bells’ home at 46 Gordon Square which I must now try to find on my map and then locate), they contributed such a wealth of artistic, intellectual and literary creativity to the last century! Yet so many of them were deeply troubled. Virginia Woolf and Carrington committed suicide, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey struggled with their homosexuality, Vanessa Bell had a long term relationship with Duncan Grant though she married Clive Bell. What, I wonder, precluded them from finding personal happiness? Was not their professional success adequate? Clearly their wealth and privilege, class and education did not enable them to find fulfillment. These were my thoughts as I perused those works–some oils on canvas, some pastels, some pen and inks, some photographs. They were all deeply moving and kept me enthralled.

I now have the 20th century to cover and I will be done with the National Portrait Gallery–perhaps later this week I will fit it in. Then, I can turn my attention to the Victoria and Albert Museum (whose Highlights I have seen before) and the Dulwich Picture Gallery which I have never seen.

By 5.15pm, having taken care to rest my feet in-between viewings and before leaving the Gallery, I caught the bus to Bloomsbury to attend a faculty meeting at NYU. We were felicitating Prof. Hagai Segal who won the award for Best teacher of the Year for the last year. Over beer and wine and a selection of sandwiches and pastries, we congratulated him, then turned our attention to a number of issues in a lively meeting that included many varying points of view.

My dinner having been eaten at the meeting, I took the bus and was home in ten minutes. Just a quick look at my email and then the writing of this blog was all that was left before I could chat with Llew for a few minute’s before retiring for the night.

Hangin’ Around Indoors

Nov23

Sunday, November 23, 2008
London

I awoke to the sight of snowflakes falling softly upon the sleeping city. Holborn remains undisturbed until well into mid-morning on weekends. As I stayed in bed with steaming cups of coffee and my PC, hammering away at pending email and writing, I realized that it was the perfect day to stay indoors and catch up with chores. For the next couple of hours, I cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, tidied the papers overflowing around my night stand, filed so many bits and pieces on my Anglo-Indian research and felt exceedingly pleased with my accomplishments in the domestic department.

As the day crept on, I finished creating the pages for my Greece trip on my website, then sat down and spent a couple of hours transcribing an interview with Dorothy Dady that I had completed several weeks ago. Somehow, the thought of not having to venture out into slush and freezing rain was very comforting to me. It would also do my feet and my legs good, I thought, to treat them to complete rest after the busy day I had trekking all over Cambridge yesterday. Of course, I did my exercises as I am trying to be extremely religious about those.

At lunch time, I sat down to a very proper British dish–fish pie–which was just what the doctor ordered on this wintry day. I also did a batch of laundry which left my place smelling nice and fresh as my washer-dryer is in my kitchen. Overall, I felt as pleased at Punch as I surveyed my sparkling flat and I realized that I do not miss Felcy at all as I can quite easily undertake my own cleaning, thank you very much.

In the evening, because I was mentally exhausted from transcribing the interview, I sat to watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film, that won Julian Schnabel the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival last year. From the first frame to the last, I was deeply absorbed and, by the end of it, deeply moved as well. Schnabel has taken the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (known as Jean-Do), Director of Elle magazine in Paris, who had a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and afflicted with “locked-in syndrome”. This is a condition in which the patient is fully conscious and sees and hears everything but cannot speak, move or swallow. Through the patient working of a speech and physiotherapist, Jean-Do learns now to communicate by the use of his eye which he is able to blink. He uses this device to actually write a book, which he ‘dictates’ by way of his blinks to his stenographer. The book was published and in it he acknowledged the role played by all the women in his life who helped him, with love and care and concern during his therapy. He died ten days later.

The triumph of the movie lies not just in the extraordinary resilience and initiative of this writer who did not allow his physical condition to limit his mental capabilities but in Schnabel’s masterful film making–he uses a novel method in which the viewer becomes Jean-Do facing the various people who populate his life on a daily basis. In-between, we are afforded glimpses into his life prior to his stroke, his relationship with Celeste, the mother of his children (though not his wife as they never married), with his father and with his love, Inez. Also sensitively documented is his relationship with the personnel at the hospital who nursed him through the excruciating months of his stay with them in Berck-sur-Mer near Calais. The film is made in French (with English subtitles) and uses several of the real people who helped Jean-Do during his own life, in minor roles. I was so keen to see this film when it came to our Community Theater in Fairfield, Connecticut, but somehow had missed it. Seeing it through Love-Films meant that it did not have the same impact as seeing it in the cinema, but I was enraptured throughout.

The snow stopped just as soon as it started but it left the day feeling sombre and silent. I was glad I was able to curl up and enjoy it from within the comfort of my flat which, incredibly, despite the bitter chill outside, does not need any heating at all. Of course, I was very warm all summer long, but now I am grateful for the insulation that will probably keep me feeling as warm as toast all through the winter.

The Other Place–Calling on Cambridge

Nov22

Saturday, November 22, 2008
Cambridge

For me, Cambridge is ‘The Other Place’, i.e. not Oxford. As my friend Annalisa says, “You can either be an Oxford Person or a Cambridge Person” and we are Oxford Persons! Still, having last been to Cambridge 22 years ago, on a brief day trip with some Oxford classmates, I warranted the town deserved another look. Besides, there was so little I remembered of it and, looking at the pictures I took then, I felt sorely tempted to revisit those parts of it upon which my youthful footsteps had once trod. So, when I discovered that National Express had a special funfare of just 3 pounds one way, I grabbed the opportunity and booked my ticket online.

It invariably happens that when I have to take a day trip some place, I do not sleep well the previous night–partly because I am terrified that I will oversleep and miss my bus (or ‘coach’ as they say here). So I tossed and turned all night, then fell asleep in the early hours and awoke, not at 6.30 am as I had intended but closer to seven. Tearing out of bed, I actually managed a shower (though not breakfast) and raced out of my building at 7.20 am–just five minutes behind schedule. I need not have worried. With everyone else curled up tightly in bed, the bus flew through the streets and dropped me off at Victoria Coach Station well in time for my coach.

I used the two hour journey to read up on the town and acquaint myself with its highlights so that I would use my day as productively as possible. Since I had a 7 pm return ticket, I would have about eight hours to spend in the town. While it was a bitterly cold day (it was 2 degrees–temperatures in Celsius always sound worse than the corresponding Fahrenheit figures), the sun shone bright and skies were clear and on the way into Cambridge, two things came to my mind: the nursery rhyme that goes “the sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn (that’s Little Boy Blue, I believe) for I saw little woolly dots speckle the stubbled fields and then my thoughts turned to Keats and his Ode to Autumn in which two lines go:

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…

Before long, we were pulling into Cambridge, the approach as nice as the town itself, lined with lovely Tudor cottages and stone churches. The coach parked by a large field and the driver pointed out to me the route I could take to get to the main shops. I consulted my map and decided to head first to the Fitzwilliam Museum which I hadn’t seen before. This made a lot of sense since it was a frigid day, I was grateful to escape indoors, and most colleges open to visitors only after 1 pm anyway…leaving me with a few hours to see the collection.

Treasures of the Fitzwilliam:
Using the campus of Downing College as a short-cut, I arrived at the Fitzwilliam and gasped. Seriously, nothing had prepared me for the majesty of the building. I felt as if I were in Greece all over again. It is an impressive Neo-Classical building, complete with carved frieze on the pediment and Corinthian columns and it spreads itself out expansively across three blocks. But the exterior is only the least of it. Mount the main stairs, cross the grand threshold of the main entrance and you drop dead in your tracks. The foyer is straight out of a Robert Adam’s mansion. It is opulent with stone statues, shell topped niches, gorgeous plasterwork and gilding, more molding than you imagine and marble everywhere. It reminded me very much of the Baroque interior of the Kunthistorisches Museum in Vienna and I simply couldn’t tear myself away to see the collection. So right off, if one has to make a comparison between Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum with which, of course, I am very familiar, I would, at the risk of sounding disloyal, say that Cambridge wins on the museum-front.

The Fitzwilliam might be small by international standards, but I realized by the time I saw the first gallery, that it is a stupendous collection and would take me much more than the 2-3 hours I allotted to see it. So, as usual, I decided to look at everything cursorily, but carefully only at its ‘highlights’. The receptionist tried to turn me towards the ‘special’ exhibits, but I decided to see Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape, Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, Reuben’s The Death of Hippolyta, Monet’s Springtime, Renoir’s La Place Clichy (delightful indeed), the finest collection of works by George Stubbs that I have seen anywhere, Will Lott’s Stour-side farm seen from a different angle in a painting by Constable (as opposed to the famous one of it in The Haywain at the National), several stunners by Tintoretto including The Adoration of the Shepherds and some Picassos. I also feated my eyes upon Ford Madox Brown’s circular painting The Last of England which Marina Versey considers one of a hundred Masterpieces of Art in her book of the same name. I also realized that by focusing on the paintings, I was completely ignoring the amazing collection of antiques in the form of furniture, urns, sculpture, carpets, etc. that adorned the rooms–but to see all those I’d have to spend days. Also, with my feet still weak, there is only so much I can do…so.

Apart from these Old Master paintings, the Fitzwilliam has a magnificent bookcase that supposedly belonged to Handel. These contain 20 large leather-bound volumes, his own original manuscripts. It was astounding! Asking around, I discovered that my favorite poem of all time, Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale was not in its normal position, but tucked away in a room that contained manuscripts that had been acquired by Sidney Cockerell, the museum’s most illustrious director. There it was, the piece of work that Keats’ reportedly scribbled in the garden of his home in Hampstead upon hearing a nightingale sing its throat out on a tree by the backdoor. I have to admit that I teared up on looking at it and thinking of his short, sad, wasted life cut down in the prime of its youth and productivity by tuberculosis and his anguish and desire for the lovely Fanny Brawne next door, whom he would never wed. I had the same reaction while gazing upon this sepia-ed scrap of paper that I had seen at Keats’ House in Hampstead, several years ago, when I had actually stood upon the spot where my beloved poem was composed.

Going in search of this treasure then brought me to another clutch of priceless works: a number of superbly illuminated medieval religious manuscripts–apart from the obvious Bibles and Psalters, there was Firdausi’s Shahnama in Persian (I gazed at it in awe), and a number of letters and poems from other famous poets–the Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were very well represented though most of them were at Oxford (William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetii and Edward Burne-Jones) and a number of original first-editions from Morris’ reputed Kelmscott Press. And, then, of course, I was quite blown by the original manuscripts of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure–imagine, his own hand-written work, then the first page proofs, with Hardy’s notes in the margin and then the first edition of the book itself! How could I possibly leave these cases without drowning in emotion? Cockerell famously and justifiably declared, at the end of his tenure as Director, “I found it (the museum) a pigsty and turned it into a palace”. It was just too much for me and, naturally, I spent far more time than I had intended in this magnificent place.

I did have a look at the Special exhibit on “The Gold of the Golden Fleece”, an exhibit that displayed the gold jewelry and other artifacts that have been unearthed by the discovery of several graves on the shores of the Black Sea in modern-day Georgia, an area that Jason of the famous Greek epic, Jason and the Argonauts, is supposed to have reached in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Then, I was tired, very tired and hungry, and I found sustenance in the museum’s cafetaria over a lovely pot of golden Darjeeling that cheered me up no end and allowed me time for some people-watching and eavesdropping. A lady at the next table, apparently a Cambridge don, was complaining to her companion about a truant student who had stopped attending her seminar!

Exploring the Colleges:
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are unique in that they are composed of a number of colleges, each of which boasts its own ‘campus’, most consisting of the following: a quadrangle or “Quad” around which the college is built–this, in turn, usually consists of a Chapel, a Dining ‘Hall’, the Master’s Lodge, narrow spiral stairways leading to the rooms occupied by the dons where tutorials are usually held (small very intimate intellectual exchanges between the professor and students) and students’ rooms. Beyond this main quad, lie a number of smaller quads or gardens, such as the Fellows Garden, the Junior and Senior Common Rooms with their gardens, etc. Depending on the time in history when these colleges were built (usually under royal patronage), their architecture differs. Each one is a gem and visiting them is always a delight for me. Not only do I feel steeped in intellectualism which always stirs me, but being built around the medieval principles of the monastic life (most of the earliest scholars were, in fact, monks who were preparing to serve the church through a curriculum that focused on Latin and Theology), they fill me with a sentiment of deep religiosity.

At about 1 pm, my exploration of the colleges began as I walked along Trumpington Road, my feet having rested adequately. This brought me first to the small and very charming Peterhouse College whose most famous alumnus is the poet Thomas Gray (Elegy in a Country Churchyard). A few weeks ago, one of my Anglo-Indian interviewees, Randall Evans, had informed me that the church and graveyard of St. Giles in Stoke Poges which inspired the poem was not too far from Slough where he lived. The best part of my exploration of Peterhouse was getting to see the 13th century restored Hall where, because it was term time, lunch was still being served to a lone student who sat in the semi-darkness and munched. This Hall and the one belonging to Clare College are the only two I was able to visit and since it is a long time since I did see the inside of a medieval college hall with its medieval portraits painted on wood and inserted into pockets on the walls, High Table with its chairs all askew, and the marvelous timbered ceiling, I was taken back in time to my own meals at Exeter College Hall in Oxford where I had lingered over lunch in similar fashion. I also went out into the gardens to explore the extensive grounds that border the Fitzwilliam.

Across the street, I entered the quad of Pembroke College with its lovely landscaped gardens, Big Ben-like Tower and the adorable Christopher Wren Chapel where a rehearsal was on for a recital to be performed later that day. Wren’s uncle, Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, had spent 18 years locked up in the Tower of London, courtesy of Oliver Cromwell, and had vowed that when released, he would build a chapel in his college. And build it his nephew did. Against the red-brick walls of a section of the college, the Baroque Chapel makes a fine architectural contrast.

Following my map, I then walked down Silver Lane, to arrive at the fabulous red brick gateway to Queens’ College, founded by two medieval queens and named after them: Margaret of Anjou (wife of Henry VI) and Elizabeth of Woodville (wife of Edward IV) in 1448 and 1465 respectively. Their heads, carved in stone and painted, are found on one of the gateways that link the many quads of this lovely college which is most notably associated with the Dutch scholar and reformer Erasmus, who lived in a tower here from 1510 to 1514. This college in whose unusual cloistered quad, I rested for a long time, is remarkable for the Tudor facade of the President’s (or Master’s) Lodge and the fact that you can walk across the River Cam on one of the oldest bridges built across it–Mathematical Bridge–that was originally constructed without any nuts or bolts. Naturally, I walked across it, and for a moment, thought I was back in Venice. I caught my first glimpse of the Cam then, of course, flowing serenely on this brilliant morning, with a few punts gliding by, their passengers, well wrapped in red blankets. On the opposing bank, autumn with its gilded foliage, allowed me to see a medieval corner of England bathed in its golden beauty as coppered leaves burnished the landscape.

Then, I was out on the King’s Parade following signs to the tourist office as I badly needed a better map. This took me past a fascinating clock embedded into the walls of Corpus Christi College which featured a colossal gold Pendulum, pushed along by a fierce-looking grasshopper. Entering that lane, I found myself in a warren of little streets and into Market Square where one of Cambridge’s famous Christmas Arts and Crafts markets was being held. I resisted the temptation to browse as I knew that the colleges were open for three hours only and I still wanted to see King’s and Trinity before the light faded following sunset.

King’s College, built by Henry VIII and full of memorials recalling his stormy reign, is famous for its Chapel, the one with the extraordinary facade, which when viewed across the River Cam, provides one of the most easily recognized scenes in the world. The college quad is larger than most, but it is towards the Chapel that most visitors are drawn. I decided to look at it from the outside only as I intended to attend Evensong at 5. 30 pm. when I would be able to see the famed interior. So I strolled towards The Backs–that manicured strip of grass so-called because the backs of the colleges can be viewed from this perspective, to the banks of the Cam where, while I would have loved to have been punted along, I would have chosen a warmer day for such a special excursion.

I hastened out of Kings’, past the impressive carved stone entrance to the Old Examination Hall and the back of Gonville and Caius (pronounced ‘keys’) College and eventually, I was at the entrance of Trinity College with the cheeky sculpture of Henry VIII adorning its main portal–cheeky because some former students took off the sword that he carried in his right hand and replaced it with the leg of a table which has, inexplicably, stayed there ever since! Once past the entrance, one can’t help but gasp because the Quad, a whole two acres of it, is so gigantic and so crammed with interest that you know not where to look. I hurried across it, to the next quad hoping to enter the Wren Library which contains the original manuscript of A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh. Alas, the Wren Library is not open on weekends. I had to content myself with a picture of the front facade with its sculpture-crowned roof, and return to King’s Parade.

I had not yet seen the Bridge of Sighs and with the light fading quickly, I wanted to catch a glimpse of it before it was too late. I hurried off to St. John’s College and was enchanted by the mass of Tudor and Jacobean architecture that separates its various quads, each characterized by a towering red brick gatehouse. The clearly-marked ‘Tourist Route’ took me to the Chapel where another rehearsal was in progress, and then I was hurrying along to Kitchen Bridge which offers the best views of the Bridge of Sighs. I did shoot a few last pictures at the very same spot where I had posed 22 years ago and, of course, I was filled with nostalgia. By this point, my feet were sore again and I badly needed to rest and get out of the cold for a bit. A student directed me to a low modern building where I used a rest room and rested in a parlor and ate a few biscuits and then, to my delight, on leaving the College premises to make my way back to King’s College Chapel for Evensong, I actually walked over the Bridge of Sighs! It was so wonderful to be able to do that and to straddle the Cam over this lovely covered bridge that links two parts of the college together.

Evensong at King’s College Chapel:
Of course, though it wasn’t quite 5 pm yet, night had fallen and the festive lights were switched on all over Cambridge turning the town into a fairy land. Tracing my steps back to King’s College, I joined the line of visitors who were there early for the best seats. As always happens when I am in a queue, I got into conversation with the two ladies in front of me, visiting from Surrey and Australia respectively. They said they recognized me by the pompom on my hat from having taken my picture earlier near the Chapel!

Within ten minutes, on a night when the temperature went down to 2 degrees Celsius, we were inside the Chapel and, once again, I was struck speechless. There it was–the famous fan vaulting that Wren so admired. He is reputed to have said of King’s College Chapel that he could have built it if someone had told him where to place the first stone! The high ceiling towers above the narrow nave. To approach the main altar, you pass through the wooden carved choir screen that was donated by Henry VIII to the chapel. This church was built by his grandfather Henry VI but was embellished by his father Henry VII and himself when he was still the Pope’s Defender of the Faith and it remained a Catholic church until the Dissolution and its conversion to an Anglican chapel.

The chapel was lit only by candle light and its soft flickering glow gilded the stone walls. Inside, I was amazed to notice that each carved altar seat bore the signature of Henry VIII–HR–for Henry Rex, or in Latin, Henry the King. The altarpiece is famed for the painting The Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Reubens and I resolved to examine it closer at the end of the service.

I found a seat on a back bench, then had to pinch myself to believe that I was actually here in King’s College, Cambridge, listening to its internationally-renowned choir sing a service in the great chapel itself. When he built the chapel, Henry VI stipulated that a choir consisting of 6 lay clerks and 16 boy choristers–educated at the college school–should sing daily at service. This custom continues at term time. Hence, I was lucky enough to catch one such service. Seating was done in an extremely orderly fashion and it was very easy to follow the service with the books placed at each pew. Then, the clergy and the choir streamed in and took their places and worship began through word and music and in that candle-bathed ambiance, there is only one word by which to describe it–magical! This is the same choir that sells tickets to its shows all over the world, that presents TV performances that everyone in England has seen, and here I was listening to them in an atmosphere that was transforming and intensely prayerful.

One of the things that struck, about the service were the two Readings from Scripture. I have never in my life heard anything read like this. The Lectors weren’t reading, they were dramatizing. I thought they were on stage and I in an audience listening to an Elocution performance. Word by word, they presented the Scripture with such high drama and much modulation of voice and tone. As a Lector in my own parish church in the States, I have to say that this was over-the-top and certainly not something to which I am accustomed. But then perhaps the high dramatic space within which the Word was being read accounted for this elaborate manner of presentation.

At any rate, I was absolutely thrilled that I was able to crown what had been an extraordinary day with this extraordinary service and when it was over, and I filed out of the church (having taken a closer look at the altarpiece), I wished I could linger longer amidst the enchanted Christmassy world of Cambridge. There was one more thing I’d have liked to see: Magdalen (pronounced ‘maudlin’) College whose library contains the collection of 18th century diaries penned by Samuel Pepys, of whom I happen to be a latter-day disciple; but lack of time didn’t allow for that. Besides, there is always one thing they say you should leave unfinished, to ensure that you will return.

So instead I paid a visit to the loo at the deluxe University Arms Hotel before crossing the Green and boarding the coach at 7 pm. that took me back to London. I hopped off at Stratford from where I decided to take Bus 25 home to Holborn, but had to wait for almost half an hour before a bus condescended to show up and then it took me 40 minutes on the bus. I had no idea how far away Stratford was from Central London, but this bus pass is allowing me to see and learn about parts of London into which I would never have ventured.

Despite a supremely busy day, surprisingly, I did not feel physically tired though my feet were very sore indeed. A good soak and a massage and a few exercises and a bit of Moov applied to them and, on a wing and a prayer, I got into bed, looking for an early night but chatting with Llew for a bit before I finally hit the sack.

The Other Place was a revelation and I realize that as I see places with the more mature eyes of my advanced years, I am appreciating and enjoying them far more than I ever did during my gawky youthful ones.

Face to Face with an Auto-Icon

Nov21

Friday, November 21, 2008
London

NYU-London has the rather unusual custom of ‘making up’ days lost to holidays. Because we recently had a week’s long Fall Break which caused my students to miss one class, we had a ‘make-up’ class today. This meant that I taught for 2 straight days in a row, something of a change for me–though I better get used to this as I have a Monday and Tuesday schedule for next semester.

So, it was something of a ho-hum kind of day–nothing very exciting happened. I taught my classes and but for the fact that I used my lunch break to go out in search of a true oddity at University College, London, there’s not much to report.

But the oddity was horribly odd indeed. I went to see the “auto-icon” of Jeremy Bentham whose name you might recognize as the 19th century philosopher/economist who came up with the theory that the greatest happiness of the greatest number would make for the greatest harmony in society. He was one of the founders of University College, London, and since he wanted to remain a part of the institution long after he passed away, he decreed in his will that his body (read skeleton) should be placed in a prominent part of the university where all could see it and that he should be dressed in one of the suits he usually wore. The Dean of our program, the newly re-christened Liberal Studies Program at New York University, Fred Schwarzbach, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of London, told me about Bentham’s bizarre will way back in September and I had been promising myself that I would take a stroll there to see it for myself.

I had to ask around to find my way to the right spot. I stopped one of the UCL undergrads walking by me andd said, “Excuse me…can you tell me where the auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham is?” She responded in all seriousness, “Well, I don’t know where that is…I know where HE is”. Oh well!

I expected to see a body lying in a coffin or, at any rate, in a horizontal position. Imagine my shock when I found Bentham’s skeleton, all fleshed out, of course, clothed in one of the stipulated suits, sitting in the foyer of the college’s grand Neo-Classical building complete with dome and quadrangle, in what looks like a telephone booth with a small tea table by his side. Apparently, the head which for some reason, was detachable, used to be used by students as a football and the governors of the college finally thought it fit to place it in a safe in the college. The head that now sits on Bentham’s body in the booth is a wax replica–the kind of thing that you see at Madame Tussaud’s. At any rate, I only stayed there for a couple of minutes, read the extract from Bentham’s will and the explanatory note put up by UCL and fled because it gave me the creeps. Between the day I spent in Barnes and this afternoon, I seem to have had too many close encounters with ghosts, dead bodies, coffins and graveyards.

After teaching my two classes today, I took the bus and went to the National Portrait Gallery at Trafalgar Square where I spent an hour and a half completing my perusal of the portraits on the second floor. In a museum in which art works are arranged chronologically, I have now gone as far as the 19th century and shall start with the contemporary sections on my visits in the next couple of weeks. It is hugely enlightening to read the curator’s notes that provide wonderful information on the sitters and the painters. My Writing students are working on an assignment that requires them to research and respond to three portraits in the museum and my visits have allowed me to study the ones on which they have chosen to focus.

I also realized, after having looked at them more closely that the Annie Liebovitz portraits of the Queen are not in black and white (as first appeared to me) but in faint color–they look as if they are in black and white because her expressions are so forbidding, so lacking in any color (pun intended!). There is a special retrospective on Liebovitz’s portraits at the Museum at the moment and I intend to spend an evening studying them carefully.

It is expected to turn bitterly cold overnight–of course, that would have to happen on the eve of the day I have chosen to visit Cambridge. Still, I refuse to allow this to chill my enthusiasm. I shall bundle up and be gone at the crack of dawn in time to catch my 8.30 am coach at Victoria. I intend to use the journey to read up on Cambridge from the pages that I have photocopied from many guide books and if the weather promises to be as biting as the forecasters have predicted,I shall probably spend a great deal of time in the Fitzwilliam Museum rather than on the banks of the River Cam! This will not be half bad as the last time I was in Cambridge, 22 years ago, I did not have the opportunity to visit the Fitzwilliam because I had dallied too long in the Backs! Well, even if I had to wait for 22 years, I am sure the contents of the museum will make it seem worth the long wait.

Hauntingly Beautiful Barnes!

Nov19

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Barnes

I awoke to a sunshiny morning and felt the day just hollerin’ mah name! Unable to resist, I finished grading another batch of student essays, caught up with my parents in Bombay, mapped out a route I would take to Barnes exclusively using the buses and set out with map, hat, camera, water and packed lunch.

It has now become something of an adventure to find my way to my destination using only buses. My monthly bus pass (purchased yesterday) allows me to use the bus network anywhere in London. That is pretty incredible and I decided that I must squeeze maximum value of out it. So since I am teaching both tomorrow and on Thursday this week and am going to spend Saturday in Cambridge, I figured today would be the best date to make use of it.

So off I went. I took Bus 19 from Gray’s Inn Lane and Theobald’s Road to Piccadilly Road from where I transferred to Bus 22 going to Putney. The driver was so kind and so informative. When I told him that I was headed to Barnes, he told me to hop off at Putney Bridge and catch Bus 485 from The Embankment (this is the Thames Embankment at Putney). This bus took me to Barnes Pond from where my walk began. I used Frommer’s 24 Great Walks in London and had the glories of a stunning fall day all to myself to celebrate the season, the weather, nature and the joy of being alive and (almost) recovered from Plantar Fascittis.

I had been to Barnes before, a few years ago, on an exploration of the Thames. I remembered how charming this little village was and how difficult it was to believe that I was not twelve miles outside London. This time round, my forays began at Barnes Pond where the few yellow leaves still clinging to the trees made the scene magical. It was as if a bag of gold flakes had been shaken over the trees to bring them some holiday sparkle. As the ducks and the swans skimmed the surface of the pond in which a few stray weeping willows were also reflected, I thought of Shakespeare’s sonnet:

That time of year that mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or few, or none do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

It was so heartachingly beautiful and my heart sang in ecstasy at the warmth and splendour of the season. Temperature-wise, it was cold…colder than I had expected–I have yet to learn how to interpret Celsius temperatures–what does 9 degrees mean? I had worn a long sleeved cotton shirt, a cashmere cardigan and a suede jacket and I had thought those would be sufficient. But how mistaken I was. I really ought to have worn my down jacket, a scarf and my gloves too. Oh well…live and learn. NO regrets, though. Once I strode briskly along, I warmed up a little bit. And oh, I was also grateful for my new Ecco shoes which fit like a dream and made me feel as if I were walking on a cloud.

Across Barnes Green, I arrived at the memorial to rock singer Marc Bolan who was huge when I was in high school. He died suddenly in the 1970s when his girl friend who was driving a car back from a party, lost control. Bolan died instantly, his side of the car taking the ferocity of the blow. The memorial is placed on the exact spot in which he died. It is a quiet, almost hidden spot and is deeply moving. Placed there on the 25th anniversary of his death, it is also stirring for those of us who are Bolan’s contemporaries. He died just before he turned thirty and it made me realize how death has frozen him in age and time–he will forever remain young. Wasn’t it Laurence Binyon who wrote in his poem “For the Fallen” these lines when talking about England’s tragically lost war dead?

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

I thought of those lines at Bolan’s memorial, then, in thoughtful silence, resumed my walk across Barnes Common. I was the only walker on this rather chilly day and I have to admit that I started to feel jittery about halfway across it. It didn’t help that my walking notes informed me that I was entering the least frequented part of the Common, a part of London in which the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin lay in wait with his accomplice for people crossing the Common then attacked and robbed them. A little later on the same walk was a part of the Common in which a lone walker once reported being waylaid by a frightful creature who scaled the iron railings that bordered the park and landed in front of him with a thud. For years after that, walkers all over the vicinity reported sightings of a hideous creature who appeared fearsomely and scared the living daylights out of them. I decided that I would not walk alone in such deserted stretches again–at least not on days when most people are tucked up cozily by roaring fires at home!

Just when my thoughts threatened to make me feel deeply uneasy, I reached the end of the deserted stretch and found a bench on which to eat my sandwich lunch. A few people passed by, clad warmly to walk their dogs, their garb including the traditional olive-green very English “wellies”. When my feet had rest sufficiently, I resumed the walk again, this time arriving at Milbourne House, the home that 18th century novelist Henry Fielding had purchased just before he became a success with the pulication of his novel Tom Jones. Surprisingly, no one I asked knew where Milbourne House was though it stared them in the face not two hundred yards away!

Around the corner from the antiquated Essex Lodge, I walked along Barnes High Street with its rather smart shops to The Terrace, a quieter embankment which I recalled having walked over the last time I was in Barnes. There was Barnes Bridge with a pretty part of Hammersmith evident in the distance at the opposite end. I walked beneath it, passed the house once occupied by composer Gustav Holst and arrived at the historic White Hart Pub for which the White Hart Lane is named.

This street contains a number of very enticing stores selling one-of-a-kind items. Two of my favorite stores are on this street–The Dining Room Shop and Tobias and the Angel. The former was so crammed with shoppers that I wondered if there was a pre-Christmas sale on! They fell all over the merchandise which consists of antiques for the dining table including crystal and glassware, china and linen. There were baubles and ornaments of every variety and a whole load of items that would make handsome gifts–no wonder everyone and her sister was there! Best part of all was the fragrance in the store and whether these came from the bags of pot pourri (“still only ten pounds”) or the candles that lent their golden glow to the room, I am uncertain. Business was brisk and items were flying off the shelves. What I did know was that though I did not intend to shop, I could hardly tear myself away.

But then just next door, “The Angel” sat in her shop which exuded the mouthwatering aroma of freshly baked mince pies. This store features handmade ornaments, mainly made of fabric and scraps of vintage material. It also sells antiques with a ‘country’ feel–lamp shades and pitchers and bowls and and accessories such as scented pouches filled with dried lavender. Though I have little doubt that all these things are handmade, I find it hard to reconcile the prices which are just outrageous. While I saw many browsers such as myself, I saw few buyers–which, I suppose, speaks for itself.

I then rounded a lane and found my way to the Roman Catholic Church of Mary Magdalen where in the adjoining graveyard was the strangest memorial in the world! This one commemorates the death of Richard Burton…no, not the actor, but the author, linguist and translator of The Arabian Nights. As a tribute to the long years he spent in Arabia, his memorial is a Bedouin tent! If you climb the ladder at the back–which I did–and peer into the glass window, you can actually see the ornate coffins of himself and his wife, Isabelle Arundel. I was so spooked by this sight that I quickly scrambled down the ladder and rushed out of the graveyard!
But then as I was leaving, in the midst of all those aged gravestones, mossy with the passage of time (Burton died in the 1880s), I passed a freshly-dug grave whose marble headstone was sprinkled over with pure white marble pieces. “This can’t be an old grave”, I thought. And so I paused to read the headstone and I swear, you could have knocked me down with a feather. The grave contained the body of a man who had been born in 1904 and had died in 1933. In the very same grave was buried his wife, a woman named Edith, who was born in 1905 and who had died in March of this year! Yes, she died at the age of 103 having spent 75 years as a widow!!! I couldn’t help but stare and imagine all those years that she lived alone, without another companion in her life. Somehow, the sight left me feeling terribly despondent while, at the same time, stirred by her extraordinary devotion to her husband.

Soon, I was crossing the street to get into yet another churchyard–this one the church of St. Mary the Virgin at Mortlake. Dating from the mid-1500s, the church is notable for its graveyard which won the award for Best Maintained Graveyard in 2001–imagine that! They actually do award prizes of this kind! A plaque inside explained the history of the grave sites. The oldest dates from the 1600s and many of them contain the remains of figures who were prominent in their respective fields in their day and age. I also visited the inside of the church which was eerily quiet and empty and had me rushing off in a hurry.

Then, before the sun quite set, I decided to find my way back home on the buses. I did so enjoy the long bus ride coming in and it was better on my return. The discovery of new spaces always interests me and the villages on the banks of the Thames are especially pretty containing as they do some very pricey real estate and very fancy shops that cater to the upscale tastes of this segment of suburban London.

I hope now to explore Putney and Chiswick and Hampstead and over the course of the month, before I return to the US and India for my winter break, I will have covered some pretty fascinating pockets of the city.

Back home, with my feet and my legs protesting loudly, I worked on a feature article for the Christmas issue of The Examiner, a Catholic weekly in Bombay, to which I have contributed a Christmas essay for the past six years. Naturally, since this is my first Christmas in England, I decided to pen a piece about my impressions which have been ‘cooking’ for several weeks in my head. I entitled the essay “Yuletide in Ole’ Blighty”.

I have finished the first draft and will start to improve on it over the next couple of days before I send it off for publication.