Notes From Elsewhere

I am out in the sun in the Quaker's (yes, the people who gave us the Oats) Garden of Peace reading a book by Diana Athill and munching now and then on some short sticks called, inapproprately, Prawn Roll. In my backpack beside me on the Quaker bench are kuih bahulu filled with a smidgen of Blueberry; pineapple tarts; and a load of other things that have made my back creak with stuff and the weight of years.

The air is warm, there are lawn mowers whirring, and a bevy of policemen and women have just come out from the back of the garden to peek into particular spots, and the Quaker café in the building is serving Fairtrade tea. Are the fuzz on the scent of the dried prawns in my 'rolls' that smell to them like something exotic?

This is a fascinating part of London, but alas, I don't stop here very often. Not a mile from here is the British Library already seriously running out of storage space in its gleaming new building, and then there's the new Eurostar terminal over there, built, like most transport terminals nowadays, as a retailing outlet. Even closer to me is the Wellcome Museum which now has a display in its plateglass window a long message that begins: Only one in ten of the cells in our body is human. The rest are microbes and symbiotic organisms*. I don't know if I should be proud or alarmed, but it does remind me of an old joke in the Beano (or Dandy) about a bicycle so old and rusty that it is held together only by dirt.

Of special interest to me within a few hundred yards of this spot is the Parish Church of St Pancras, not for its Greek style columns, but for the four caryatids supporting the portico leading to the crypt. The four women in Greek robes do lack something in the area of deportment, and they all wear a rather pained look; but there's a reason for that. When they were made and brought to the church to take their supporting roles, the measurements were all wrong, so a section had to be taken from their abdomen to fit them into place. Poor women, they have been slouching for more than 200 years. People who have travelled with me in this part of Euston Road will remember this caryatid spot for its “Oh, no!” moment. “Oh, no, he's not going to tell us that caryatid story again!” (I'm sorry, but I do moonlight as a non-Blue-Badge** London tourist guide, so it's my duty to tell you these things.).

Back to the Garden of Peace now where I've stopped munching on the Prawn Roll and am deeply immersed in Athill's meditation on an elderly life and eventual death. I love Athill (who took to writing quite late in life) for her beautiful prose, effortless intelligence, and candour. She spent most of her working life as a publisher's editor with André Deutsch (she actually helped found André Deutsch), and now, at the age of 91, she has won the Costa Prize for biography with her book that I'm reading now, “Somewhere Towards the End”. I love her insights on famous writers who had come through Deutsch: Anthony Burgess, for instance, was so terrified of death that he refused to go to bed but merely allowed sleep to overcome him as he was sitting down or working till late. In her earlier book, “Stet” she had some uncomplimentary things to say about the Hungarian-British writer George Mikes.

But why am I now sitting in the afternoon sun in this quiet haven on the edge of this very busy road with a book of Athill's amid the traffic fumes and the smell of freshly mown grass and a load of kuih bahulu and prawn rolls and jam tarts? Well, they are from KL for this good lady, sent through this good person, and I am just the content-filching courier man.

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*Quoted from memory.
** Can't afford the fee for the Blue Badge course; too steep.