Tuesday, May 5 – a London Work / Life Experiment

We got up uncharacteristically early ( although not as early as Lucinda, who likes to get into central London before the Tube crowds get thick and stinky), and prepared for what might be a normal weekday (for us, at least). Christine geared up to take a Contemporary class at “The Place”, a dance studio near King's Cross, and I threw a shoulder bag of electronics gear together for a day at my client's factory in Croydon, the opposite direction. To complete the commuter experience, I threw on my headphones and painted the walk-tube-walk-tram-walk with a completely incongruous sonic landscape of live funk a la Maceo Parker. It was hard not to smile the whole way.

I got off the (remarkably clean, smooth and enjoyable) tram at a very small station on the northern outskirts of Croydon, not far from their Ikea, which features a huge old brick smokestack decorated up top in their trademark blue-and-yellow. (Why is it that Ikea stores are always located in places with virtually no sidewalks? I thought Swedes walked everywhere.) Without Maceo and his band gleefully shouting “Soul power!” in my ears, Croydon could've been quite depressing. Hopeful rat traps had been tossed into weed- and litter-choked forgotten landscaping along leaning fences and graffiti-covered walls. Cars and trucks roared past me as if desperate to be somewhere else, so I adjusted myself onto what appeared to be the world's least-used cycle path.

One day in a 9-to-5 environment was enough to remind me why I had long since chosen to abandon that world, but the industrial/suburban flavour of the decidedly cynical UK psyche added something I was all to happy to leave behind when 5 o'clock thankfully showed up. I still had lots to do there to keep me busy for the remainder of the week, but Christine and I had great plans for the evening, so I threw the headphones back on and scuttled to the tram.

Christine has the ability to completely vanish in the smallest spaces in a matter of seconds. It's amazing. We can plan to meet up after we each grab an item from adjacent grocery store aisles, then spend fifteen minutes aimlessly looking for each other. No strategy has ever been able to counteract this effect. This makes it all the more brave that we had agreed to meet at the entrance to a museum we'd never been to and knew little about, several streets away from a London tube station neither of us had ever been to, sometime within a half-hour time fame. Ridiculous. Impossible. A disaster waiting to happen. But as I came around what I'd hoped was the right corner, there she was, beaming, at the head of a long queue to get into the most amazing little museum we'd ever seen.

Sir John Soane was a architect, freemason, classicist and avid antiquities collector whose will contained a clause that his museum-like home be left exactly as it was the day he died, which eventually came about in 1837. And apart from cataloguing the house's amazing contents and putting the tea things away, that's exactly what the bright-eyed old character's executors did. One day a month, the house is lit entirely by candles as the limited number of guests make their way through the house, marvelling at the bulging collection of ancient books, stonework, sketches, carvings, paintings, clocks, manuscripts, etc. But far from being an intellectual's arm's-length collection of curiosities, the house virtually explodes all around you with the boundless and joyful enthusiasm Sir John obviously had for the creative output of all humankind. Full marble columns are piled in the house's tiny remaining outdoor space. Constantly needing to expand to accommodate the growing collection, the house itself is punched up and out everywhere, with forward-looking skylights throwing a natural dusky glow on the near-chaos within. The limestone sarcophagus of King Seti I is at the bottom of a towering three-story atrium, lined with a jaw-dropping array of unlabelled artifacts from multiple millenia. A centuries-old and impossibly creak-free floating spiral staircase joins room after room in the world's least-boring museum. The place is almost too remarkable to describe, and seeing it in candlelight was an extraordinary experience. Google on Sir John Soane's Museum, or better still, make a promise to yourself to go there someday. Like most London's museums, admission is free or by donation. Amazing.

Luckily for us, it was two-for-one meat pie night at the Ship Pub just down the street. For all we knew, EVERY Tuesday had been two-for-one pie night since the place opened its doors in 1549 (yes: 1549). There's nothing like having dinner in a real pub. TV sports off in the corner are far less intrusive when you're surrounded by wood, brass and worn-out rose-coloured fabric. The pies were fabulous, especially washed down with a pint each, and we made our way back out to Balham just radiant from a great evening.

When our tube rattled its way to Balham's Undergrond station, a tired voice honked from the train's metallic speaker's that we wouldn't be stopping there, as the station would be closed early for a couple of months for maintenance. Hmm. Sure enough, as we loped past the platform, we could see a handful of droopy grey workers resigning themselves to the fact they'd be spending their evenings there for a while. We exchanged worried glances, having no idea what the actual distance between stations was at that far end of the Northern line, and scurried off at Tooting Bec (how'd you like to say you lived in a place called “Tooting Bec”?). Most of Tooting Bec was either sleeping at home or throwing up within a few yards of us, but someone told us which bus to take, and the red double-decker thankfully appeared just before a witch-like woman staggered to our end of the bus queue.

If you've seen the night bus from Harry Potter, this was it. We sat up top to intensify the experience, pushing aside some old potato chip bags to clear the frontmost seat. I filmed part of the ride, and if I ever become technically savvy, I'll post it wherever people post those sorts of things. The short of it was that we weren't very far from our Balham digs at all, and amused ourselves on our way home by reciting, “Wot you sy yoh nym woz?” and “I didn't”, over and over again.