One cannot begin to describe London, especially, when you’ve only just recently arrived. It’s been around five months since I moved here and London is exactly the kind of place you would think you had already been to even though it’s your first time here. Everything from the landmarks to the lifestyle, the characters you meet on the street, and the weather – oh, the weather – is thoroughly mapped out in the trappings of your imagination after years and years of exposure to scenes of red double-decker buses and the mechanical gyration of a white-haired monarch’s hand.
My initiation to London as a kid started with a little pink glossy book on the subject of the city’s park creatures. I learned all about the feeding and breeding of the crows, squirrels, pigeons and magpies, even before I was able to realise that none of these animals existed in most of the parks around me.
Pigeons I knew quite well from all the scratching on the roof tiles of our attic, the many winters of clogged gutters and my mother’s perpetual hatred for the creatures. And crows I had seen a few. Yet, I was living in the countryside and animals were just running around wild as I was when growing up. There were no parks in sight, not the kind that were depicted in my book anyway, and certainly no city animals with their city ways. My crows didn’t steal shiny precious property from careless humans, and my pigeons were definitely not to be fed. I longed to be able to see a squirrel but took little interest in magpies – which is a shame, I know now.
As I remember, my book provided no indication as to where those animals were actually coming from. It was only a few years later that I got to recognise those parks, when all the language centre kids went on a trip to London with our incredibly patient English teachers. But by the time I eventually saw a squirrel for myself, I was already more interested in dying my hair with green highlights, trying to stay awake all night drinking Red Bull and getting myself pictured along side a waxy and defiant Sid Vicious at Madame Tussaud’s. It was on that trip that I also first became acquainted with cold deli sandwiches, which are quite an important part of my life nowadays.
I thought for this my first letter, I would give you some detailed insights into my long sweaty commutes on the tube; the deserted west-side lane of red-brick houses, all the same, that delivers me home daily; or even the stained carpeted halls that make for my school’s flooring – a fairly old building in Northampton Square with a clock tower and an history of vocational training for London’s working-class over the past two centuries. Currently it caters mostly to international students hopeful of getting a job in the City.
To play it safe, however – I do hope to be your loyal penfriend – I thought otherwise and considered the frequent long-haul flights that connect this Western hub and your desire to travel. So I will try to be of service somehow.
So, one just reason among many others to visit London this year is a mission of pilgrimage to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the passing of William Shakespeare into the earth, heaven or hell, whichever land was best suited to welcome the ending of such comedy of errors that is life.
As forcefully put, this misplaced quote may just help to signal that when entering Her Majesty’s domains you are bound to inadvertently step on the conspicuous quotes of the English bard wherever you go. Salute the invention of Modern English, then, and indulge in many other nice things dear to Shakespeare and his fellows: debauchery, for one.
Had it not been for the rise of theatres in London’s south bank in the late 16th century, this city would probably have been engulfed by puritanism and, within its walls, self-consumed with all the punishments reserved for those playing fast and loose with the stringent morals of the time.
If you haven’t been here before, that’s what you’ll be told when visiting the Globe, the fiduciary heir to the immaterial heritage of the Elizabethan outdoor theatres that once crammed thousands in to watch Shakespeare’s plays. It is said to be an accurate reconstruction of the drama and business venture of Lord Chamberlain’s Men inaugurated in 1599, yet no one can tell for sure.
The Globe is the right place to look for tickets to one of many of Shakespeare’s plays. But the official commemorations extend to many other parts of London too, with exhibitions, performances, concerts, conferences, talks and the release of a few literary reinventions in fiction.
I am currently holding a Jeanette Winterson novel retelling “Winter’s Tale” in what I suspect is the setting of a mobsters-day New York. I will see it through during my long commutes before I recommend it to anyone. Later this year, Howard Jacobson is set to serve us his version of “The Merchant of Venice” and Margaret Atwood will deliver “The Tempest”, among other titles and authors. Still the best homage may be to pay a visit to bloody and wicked plays like “Macbeth” and “Titus Andronicus”, the finest on many accounts, and to enjoy having them read aloud.