London: Camden Walk, Southwark Cathedral, Chicago

Greg offered to take Dave and me on an early morning walk to Camden. “The Camden Stables, Locks and Market are just on the other side of Regent’s Park.” So we left at a leisurely pace at 8 am to walk directly through the park, make a quick turn down some stairs by a Chinese restaurant, and then through an underpass and along the canal. Joggers and cyclists were using the path. House boats, small barges really, line the side of the canal. “Seven days free,” says the sign under the bridge.

The market was being set up. Steaming vats of ethnic food were being stirred. I watched a woman roll a large bun that was to be deep-fried, and I remembered Billie Bates teaching me that technique of letting the dough roll around the palms of my hand years ago. So I thought about her for a while. Small retail merchants were lining the tops of their scaffolding with rain proof tarps and decorating the bottom of their stalls with fabric. We paused by Greg’s favourite booth, one that sells wares from South Africa. I already have the reed place mats from there.

Then we set out for home, for we had plans to pick up Wyona and Moiya and go to another space.

Borough Market is a fruit and vegetable wholesale market held under London Bridge. on Saturdays, the Borough Market transforms into a superb, gourmet retail market David, Moiya, Greg, Wyona and I visited the market and passed by an exquisite array of specialty foods: Roquefort cheese made with unpasteurized milk; paper thin slices of ham cut from the whole leg of a pig, the cloven hooves of which are held in a vices in front of you; succulent bread pudding steamed in sugar and cream is delivered to your hand in an 8 oz serving dish; fish and chips passed over the counter to you in a container the size of a shoe box; goat cheese, surrounded by a skin of leaves and hulls from the first press of olive oil is passed over the counter for you to taste. Wyona sets the standard. “Why would I come to a market and not buy anything.” The spectacular purchase that we enjoyed at our last supper together the next day was meat pies: one chicken, one beef Bourgogne, and one steak and kidney.

Southwark Cathedral is just at the corner of the Borough Market, one of the oldest and most beautiful gothic cathedrals, over 1000 years old, and a church that claims Shakespeare as one of its former parishioners. I sat for a while on its pews, then walked its corridors, especially admiring a hanging iron and brass chandelier that was indicative of the working out the marriage of the church and the state, having both a dove, a crown entwined in its design. I stopped to find the sword rest that is in the north transept and to enjoy a photocopied page of one of the registries of parish members in about the 1600’s.

But more interesting that the gothic ceiling vaulted to the heavens or the marble statues of the 20 saints at the front of the church was the female beggar was who doing her rounds among the tourists walking the transepts of the church. As I neared the exit door of the church, a young woman, her hair in a head scarf, socks on her feet and wearing a kind of Birkenstock as a shoe approached me. She carried a laminated card in her hand. The print big enough for me to see – maybe 24 point and nicely laid out on the paper.

Please help me. I have two children.

I shook my head.

She came closer, shaking the card in my face, waving it closer and closer to my eyes. I wondered how this was going to go down between us. I looked directly at her and her eyes met mine, each of us holding the gaze of the other.

She shook the card at me again. I could feel the chastisement. I had just come from Rome and the poor have been on my mind. I have seen beggars whose limbs are missing laying on the bridge the leads to the Vatican; a wizened, old woman with all of her fingers cut off at the second knuckle, that hand stretched out to me for money; a severely disabled man with only one leg and the foot of that leg bent up so as to be of no use to him, rocking back and forth, back and forth. A man from one of the shops would come out on occasion and put a lit cigarette in his hand.

While the woman was reminding me that my heart is heavy for the less fortunate our locked gaze was interrupted. A man in a black business suit came up behind us, with a loud voice singling her out. “I told you to leave. No more begging. You can’t do this.”

His voice got louder and louder. “I have told you to leave before. You keep on begging and I have told you you cannot do that. You can enjoy the quiet of the church. No begging. You go out the door. I will call the police. Do you understand? The police. They will take you to jail. The police. You leave.” By now his arms were gesticulating through the air.

She shuffled ahead of him, twisting her head back at intervals, give him angry looks over her shoulder.

When she got out the door, he kept walking behind her, escorting her out of the grassy courtyard his dialogue still berating her. People were sitting on church benches and eatng their lunches. He contined moving her onto the city sidewalk. He was still talking, and now his voice was the loudest of all and very slow. He was but hitting his own hand and saying, “Naughty. Naughty. Do you understand?”

Greg only saw the last part of the encounter and commented, “There is a paradox that is hard to understand here, tossing the beggar out of the church.” He and I talked for a while about what we had seen.

And now on an unrelated topic, we went to Chicago last night. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you a story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery. All those things we hold near and dear to our hearts..."

That musical ends up being one of my top picks – at least a place in my top ten. At the end of the show, when Roxy and Velma take the bouquets of red roses that are presented to them, remove a few of the flowers and toss them into the audience.

Twice when I have gone to Chicago, I have ended up taking home one of those roses, but that fact is not the charm of that show for me. The dark satire is what draws me to that show. Sassy, sexy and sublime. That is what the reviews call it and I do too.

I have a high need to be at the theatre 15 minutes ahead of the curtain going up. Greg shares that with me. Wyona knows that it is possible to get there just on time. She is usually our leader, which means that the fear factor of being late is there every evening we go out the door to catch the C2 or the 453 or the 88 Double Decker. Last night as we stood on the marble steps of 96/100 Camden street with just enough time to get there, but none to spare, Greg got out the tickets and looked at them again. “Oh, show starts at 8 pm and not at 7:30 pm as we had thought,” he said.

Kind of takes one of the thrills of the evening away when we had a half hour to spare.

No running for buses, hopping from one to another, whipping our maps out to see if we are on track, looking at our wrist watches to see how many minutes until the curtain goes up. But what a chance to walk leisurely to the Cambrdge Theatre at Seven Dials, a small and well-known road junction in the West End of London near Covent Garden where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly-circular space is a pillar bearing six (not seven) sundials.

Samuel Johnson says it best: "Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life ...."

Arta