tube travel high & low culture

had to travel into town and i hadn't eaten, which meant i would have been in a pretty wierd state by the time i cycled in, so i got the tube, i was going out with felinity after so i was committing to several journeys, i saw it as a way to read more...

only a month or so back i used the tube every day, but since the advent of my bike, and also the attacks i've been distanced from that strange world down there...

firstly then reading, which is currently clea by lawrence durrell (more on that later), the book is wonderful, by now in the quartet you're really in his style, his way of switching between characters to express interesting ideas... it is also lighter, somehow less desperate than the other three...

so i'm really digging that...

then the tube, the way in fine...

the way from work to leicester square where i was meeting felinity @ rush hour was a bit mad... often glad not to be a regular rush hour traveler...

but the tube home from meeting felinity...

hmmmmmm...

just how i like it..

so i'm deeply in the book, but just a few stops before warren street (where i changed) i notice a man addressing the next carriage along, i can just see him but i have to ask my neighbour if he's really short or if he's kneeling down?

fortunately my neighbour has all the info, he says he's just knelt, he's talking about disabled access and women giving up their seats for disabled people...

whereupon A (for this turned out to be my neighbours name) asks me about the book i'm reading, and i'm happy to talk to him about it, deeply immersed in it as i am...

clea is the fourth book of the alexandria quartet, which i've been rereading this last month or so, it was cedric nash who introduced me to them properly, (although i'd actually met them by chance before in a bookshop, story told behind that link), and i'm grateful to him for that, as for many things...

the books are set in alexandria (you don't say) and the sense of place that you get from them is very tangible...

Walking about the streets of the summer capital once more, walking by spring sunlight, and a cloudless skirmishing blue sky - half-asleep and half-awake - I felt like the Adam of the medieval legends: the world-compounded body of a man whose flesh was soil, whose bones were stones, whose blood water, whose hair was grass, whose eyesight sunlight, whose breath was wind, and whose thoughts were clouds. And weightless now, as if after some long wasting illness, I found myself turned adrift again to float upon the shallows of Mareotis with it's tide-marks of appetites and desires refunded into the history of the place: an ancient city with all its cruelties intact, pinched upon a desert and a lake.

(not that this is saying bags about the city, but when i read it yesterday i wanted to record it, so many gems in these books)

anyway A is telling me i should go to alexandria, he is a photographer and he proceeded to tell me all kinds of stories about times when he has read such a book and then been driven to go there, photograph it, stories about lorca, fernando pessoa, jose saramago...

really interesting man, just the kind of random conversation that i love, he said he knew someone locally (we were talking for awhile, pausing at the point where our paths diverged, him out to warren street and me to the victoria line), who'd been to alexandria and loved it, knew people out there... this friend of his had said that you can get a boat to alexandria from crete...

much interesting talk, some great stories about pessoa & saramago, portuguese writers, apparently the year of the death of ricardo reis
by saramago is based on a one of pessoa's pseudonyms, (he wrote under many different names)... A travelled to lisbon to follow the trail...

thankyou universe, my first day properly back on the tube and i'm given this...

hmmmmm... (i'm repeating myself),

and then the film, the wedding crashers, me & felinity intended to see it on that day a week or so back, we knew that it was going to be an appropriate choice for us, vince vaughn & owen wilson... we'd seen dodgeball as a second choice months back and they do live in the same world, dodgeball & the wedding chrashers, although the wedding chrashers is miles better,

timeout had been lukewarm about this film & we weren't expecting much,

& yes, yes, YES PLEASE keep making these films... it was wrong in many ways, (in particular the cartoon gay character, but also overlong), but it made us laugh alot, and it so delivered the goods just when you needed it to, hollywood manipulation but when i like it this much i don't mind...

lovely to see felinity, as ever, so nice that the film was so perfectly us,

we ate in that dirt cheap (for westend) eat all you like chinese place, we walked through leicester square itself after the film and they've decked it out in a largely great way in homage to willy wonka, which i really, really want to see...

x