I’m starting to figure out the busses. A whole bunch of them stop at the Liverpool Street Station and I took one to St. Paul’s today so that I could go to the Tate Modern. I was going there to join, so I can see the new Pop Art exhibit that opens next week and because it may be my favorite museum in London. I also went for some personal inspiration. More about that below. On the way back, I strolled through Borough Market which was a bit of mob scene at lunch time on a Friday. There are some interesting cooking possibilities there. Grouse (which I had at a restaurant the other night), quail, pigeon, partridge in the bird family, and things like ostrich, zebra and some other exotic meat. I took a picture of the mushrooms that I meant to take the other day. See right. Then having been inspired by the Tate, I took the bus back to Shoreditch to the nearby art supply store.

I’ve been fiddling around trying to paint. It is all part of my goal to spend some time every day doing something creative. I haven’t really been inspired to write anything in a long form and sometimes the internet is so bad that I can’t even write on this blog, so I end up turning to visual art. I’ve been waiting around for deliveries quite a bit, so I’ve had some dead time (and I can’t watch baseball), so I’ve done two small paintings. I’m not sure that I really like them and I might go back to them at some point in the future (although I don’t really see what I can do to them). Anyway, here they are, for better or worse.

I went to the Commercial Tavern this afternoon for an ale and ended up talking to Barry from Perth. He is over here for a few months and was searching for a good pub in Shoreditch. We exchanged ideas. He was stunned to learn that I had not only been to Perth, but to Margaret River and Albany as well. Nothing earth-shaking, but it was pleasant sitting out on a bench on Commercial Street, sipping a beer, watching the world go by and chatting.

Judie is on her way back from Paris and the European Lawyer’s Retreat. I’m thinking finding an interesting place to eat tonight.

Let’s Go Mets! (Have I mentioned how incredible they are playing? Their sweep of the Nats was probably the best series they have played since the 80s.)

In some ways, this should have waited until we had been here longer and could better appreciate it. Judie and I spent last night at Mansion House and at a birthday party in a crypt at Guildhall. It was a peek into a part of London society that I didn’t expect to see:

It began when we met Phil Saunders at our going away party in Montclair. He came with Jenny Bakshi, a old friend and UU from Montclair whose son, Nick, was friends with Alex. It turns out that she is now seeing Phil, who is a barrister (solicitor?) with the City of London. He had arranged a hot air balloon regatta over London to raise money for the Lord Mayor’s charity fund (you can find it on You Tube) and invited us to come to the reception commemorating the event. Here is a picture of him with the Lord Mayor. (It appears that one of the perks of being the Lord Mayor, besides being able to live in the ornate and impressive Mansion House, is that you get to wear that big medal on your chest for all occasions such as this one.) Mansion House is a fairly gigantic edifice across the street from the Bank of England. It was built in the 1740s to house the Lord Mayor and renovated several times. It is large and, while not exactly beautiful, it does give the intended feeling of power. It contains a lovely collection Dutch and Flemish art from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which are hung all over the walls. Jenny took us in to see the Egyptian Room, a long ballroom with a high, vaulted ceiling, where major events are held. (There is nothing about it that is particularly Egyptian, but it is quite elegant.) Mansion House is not open to the public, so this was a special treat.

After this event, we were taken to the 60th birthday party of Sir Roger Gifford, a banker who was a former Lord Mayor. Handsome and charming fellow. The party was held in a large crypt under the old Guildhall, which is and has been for centuries the governing center of the City and was once the site of a large Roman amphitheater. Some of the crypts, which we walked through to get there, date back to Norman times, although the one for the party had been rebuilt after it was destroyed in the Blitz. Judie has been told that people in London often throw such parties for themselves and the purpose is both celebratory and commercial, as one invites business associates and presumably potential clients. That seemed to be the case with this event, which was populated by bankers and officials involved with the City government. It reminded me a little of the parties that I would go to while I was on the Town Council, in that everyone seemed to be either talking earnestly or looking around for someone that they should talk to and making sure that they made contact with everyone important. We met one of the City Alderman, a lawyer at one of the big law firms. The City, although small in size (one square mile), is divided into 25 wards, so she represented a district of only a few blocks.

As far as I can tell, the City of London Corporation, the local government, really doesn’t do all that much. The City owns pretty much all of the land under the City’s buildings and lots of property all over London, which it leases (usually very long-term leases) and overlooks. (This is part of what Phil does.) And it has its own police and fire departments and supports the arts at the Barbican. But it doesn’t seem like the alderman are kept very busy. They are elected in a unique way. There are relatively few actual residents of the City (although I think you need to be a resident to be Lord Mayor–or at least you used to), so they have system under which businesses are allowed to vote under a complicated formula according to their size. Thus, Bryan Cave can vote for the alderman in their ward. (I think it is the only place in the UK that does this.) So a lot of the alderman and Council’s job involves lobbying on behalf of the financial institutions and other companies in the City. As for the Lord Mayor, his role seems to be largest ceremonial, involving riding in coaches, dressing up in funny outfits, wearing judge’s wigs, raising money and going to events. There is a ceremony once a year when the new Lord Mayor takes office which includes the receipt of various items representing the tribute that he would once have received from the various guilds that ran the City and would have put his predecessors in to power. This happens during “The Lord Mayor’s Show”, a big parade in which he rides in a gold carriage carriage from the Guildhall, where the City’s offices are, to St.Paul’s to get blessed, to the Court’s to swear allegiance. It is the kid of pomp and circumstance that the Brits are great at and seem to love. The whole thing is televised on BBC.

We met a few people, probably the most interesting of whom were two Sheriffs, one of whom is the subject (or narrator?) of a TV series called “The Sheriffs are Coming”. Their main role is to evict squatters, collect on judgements and otherwise enforce court orders. They had some great stories, including how they went about removing the Occupy people from around St. Paul’s. A lot of their stories involved breaking doors down, which must be easier if you aren’t worried that someone will be on the other side with an arsenal of guns. The evening ended with a nice dinner with Phil and Jenny, who I think and hope we might get to see more of in the coming months. It turns out that Phil is not just the organizer of a fundraiser, he is a pilot (who somehow taught a blind person to fly) and balloon affectionado. (He has been to a similar ballon event in the town in Arizona (Lake Havasu) where the old London Bridge was moved. LBJ Had to personalize approve a small diversion of the Colorado River so that he bridge would have something to go over, we were told.) It turns out that it is relatively inexpensive to have a personalized balloon made and a number of companies have them, just for such events, as a marketing tool. I spoke with a woman from Fortnum & Masons about their balloon and the proper color to get it noticed (not blue or white).

Today, it was back to reality. Waiting for the cable guy.

This is something I may do going forward that would be more in the nature of the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary.

I was walking through the market near our flat yesterday and thought I heard Frank Sinatra music. I came around the corner and, under a tent there was this old guy with a  speaker set up and a small crowd watching. He was doing his between song patter to the crowd, and he sounded like you’re basic Cockney taxi driver. But then the canned music  started, the Sinatra music began and the accent changed to New Jersey.

We finally got our other four bags from Judie’s law firm, where they had been in storage since July. I pulled out my leather jacket, since it was starting to get chilly. I immediately went from street guys trying to sell me things to people coming up to me and ask me for directions.

Judie and I were eating the best masala dosas we had ever had when my phone rang (this was the first time this is ever happened when Judie wasn’t on the other end). It was Craig Hirshberg, who is visiting her daughter in London, inviting us to have dinner in three hours. So  we walked off the dosas and we ended up having an amazing dinner at a Hunan restaurant in SoHo.  I ordered duck tongue which was delicious, but I discovered, to my surprise that these little duck tongues actually have a bone or maybe it’s a cartilage going right through the middle. Anyway, now I can say I’ve eaten duck tongue. Judie said she was imagining little mute ducks walking around unable to quack.

Judie needed hangers so she could finally unpacked her clothes. So I trudged off to Argo’s to get her some. I’ve concluded that it is Kmart without the charm. It would be difficult to conceive any way to make the shopping experience more miserable. I’ve learned my lesson.

The Interim Minister at our UU Congregation at Montclair recently sent me an e-mail about the British and bureaucracies. The Brits didn’t invent bureaucracies. I’m certain that the Romans and Greeks had them and probably King Tut before that and I suspect that some neolithic cave man insisted that you provide him with two flints and a description of what you were going to paint before he let you into his cave. No, the British didn’t invent the bureaucracy, but they perfected it and, indeed, turned it into an art form.

Our saga trying to open a bank account continues. We tried, back in July to open an account, but were told that we needed a visa. You might ask why our immigration status is relevant when we are just trying to give them our money, but, fair enough, it is an international thing. So we get here Friday, a week ago, with our visas, only to find out that the banks are closed until Tuesday and, not only that, but you can’t just walk into a bank and open an account, you need to make an appointment. And the next appointment won’t be until September 8th. You might wonder why the British make it so hard to open an account. It is the nature of bureaucracy that such questions are unanswerable. As you peer through the fog of paperwork and procedures, you are simply advised that these are the rules that must be followed. No one knows why.

But Judie pulls Bryan Cave strings to get us an appointment on the 1st and we get there and are told that we can’t open an account because, although we have our visas and everything else we need, we don’t have our residence permits (the British equivalent of a Green Card–only here it is pink). Of course, the British government won’t give you the card in the US along with your visa. (I’m trying to come with a rationale for that.) No, you have to pick it up at a post office (and Judie and I are, mind bogglingly, assigned different post offices). They know that we are coming and presumably have created the cards, but for some reason the cards won’t be available until September 4th. We go to the bank with the letter from the Home Office, telling us to pick up the cards on or after the 4th, but that isn’t good enough, so we are yet again out of luck. However, at least they take all of our information, put it in the computer and give us an appointment near Judie’s office for Friday, when we will have the cards.

So today, we appear at the time and place, this time with everything we need, figuring that we can just cruise in and out. Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I stagger out of the branch. We have bank account number (Hooray), but we don’t have debit cards (they will arrive in the mail next Thursday or Friday, but they won’t actually be usable since the PIN numbers will arrive separately, days after that), and we don’t have credit cards (they’ll allegedly arrive in around 10 days) and we don’t have checks (who knows when they will arrive).

I’m not sure that this will interest anyone and all this whining reminds me of Bill Bryson’s writings, but I had to write it down to ease my frustration.