Let me start here by saying that blogging somehow seems like some kind of chore here at the arse-end of 2015. I don’t know exactly when this became the case but it’s not just me; I’ve spoken to a few other people who agree that where they once felt like monthly, weekly, or in some cases daily blogging was just normal, now they struggle to do it at all. No-one calls Twitter micro-blogging any more (if they ever actually did) but that is where I am currently expelling my thoughts, wishes, dreams, and unsolicited opinions 140 characters at a time, pretty much 16 hours a day. That’s almost certainly why I have little appetite for actual blogging these days which, instead of fitting in around (read: “distracting me from”) my proper writing, takes a bit more time and effort. It’s a shame because the nature of Twitter means that things tend to be a bit more throwaway – a blip of information as opposed to a big chunk of it. I should be blogging more, I wish I was, but then I rarely have anything to blog about these days. It’s not like a head off to London and have a big pub meet with loads of Forteans and Landscape Punks and… Oh wait, yes, I did that at the weekend. I’ll tell you about that.
It took about 28 hours, but London I am finally in you!
— The Daily Grail (@DailyGrail) December 7, 2015
I’ve been writing for The Daily Grail for a while now, or more accurately I’ve been supposed to be writing for them but have ended up not posting anything for a number of months due to all the same blah blah blah lack of time to do anything I always end up moaning on about. Anyway, DG has been online for 17 years now and they’ve been publishing their yearly journal, Darklore, since 2007 (I’ve had articles in two of them so far, and I’ve got something in number nine which is out in the new year). I say “they”, but really DG is all down to one man, Mr. Greg Taylor. Greg is the creator of, driving force behind, Commander-in-Chief, head honcho, and grand poobah of DG. He’s also Australian, and lives in Australia. So, when Greg told myself and the other DG contributors that he and his family were coming over to England as part of a big European trip this December, it wasn’t long before someone started talking about a gang of us meeting up and just possibly having a few drinks together.
To London; to meet with @DailyGrail @gordon_white @johnreppion @cultauthor @grailseeker and many more. So if the Smoke’s odder today… sorry. — Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent (@catvincent) December 11, 2015
London is about 215 miles by road, 180ish by rail, away from Liverpool, where I live. To people who aren’t from the UK (especially Americans, it seems) that might not seem like much of a distance but to me it has always been “too far”. I’ve been to London maybe twenty five times in my entire life and more than half of those have been for work – pitches, or meetings, or conventions, or whatever. When people say “maybe we could meet up in London” I usually think something along the lines of “yeah, or I could go on holiday, or buy a months worth of groceries instead”. When that person has come all the way from Australia and is setting aside an entire day of their family holiday on the other hand, even my shell of grumpy bastardness has to begin to crack, surely? Add to that the fact that Greg is a genuinely nice, talented guy who has always been supportive and encouraging when it comes to my article writing, and it would a great excuse to have a few pints in the company of him and lots of other people I only knew from their writing and from online. It became almost immediately apparent that this particular London meet-up was something I couldn’t afford to miss.
Like a really shit Thomas de Quincey I set out on my journey from Liverpool to London. Confessions of a Sayers Pasty Eater.
— John Reppion (@johnreppion) December 11, 2015
I enjoy walking. Just in general, I like it. Whether I’m actually going to get or do something, or go somewhere, or just looking at stuff and ambling round on my own with my headphones on, I’m a person who takes pleasure in a walk. Having never been to London on my own – that is, without at least one person (usually Leah) who knows their way around better than me – I was slightly worried about navigating the tube system alone. All the different lines, all the different directions, people furious if you don’t keep to the right on the escalator, and so on. Then Leah said “just walk”. That’s what she does most of the time when she’s in London. Instead of going down into the underground, pushing along, squeezing onto a tube train, pushing her way off and out and up, she just walks the fifteen, or twenty, or twenty five minutes it takes to get from one bit to the next. So, I looked at where I was arriving, staying, meeting people, eating and drinking and sure enough it was all easily walkable. A short list of short journeys, the length of which I make most days just to get to the shop, or the park, or wherever.
Gower Street was, it turned out, the road I had to spend most of my time walking down to get where I was going. I know next to nothing about London geography, and I have never had the time or opportunity to do any kind of tour, guided or otherwise, of the city’s streets. While not precisely chosen at random, Gower Street was a thoroughfare I had no prior knowledge of; I can’t recall ever reading or hearing of it before yet it turned out to provide a ridiculously history and culture stuffed thirteen minutes or so of walking.
“First Anaesthetic plaque” by Chemical Engineer – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
The University College London (“London’s Global University”) with its Darwin lecture theatre and DMS Watson Science Library, its hospital, its museums; The Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, and The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, all these institutions on one short road. A plaque on the University College wall reads “Close to this place Richard Trevithick (Born 1771 – Died 1833) Pioneer of High Pressure Steam ran in the year 1808 the first steam locomotive to draw passengers.” Other blue plaques on the road are dedicated to the naturalist Charles Darwin (who lived at number 110), suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett (number 2), one outside Bonham Carter House (now a Gym called the 52 Club) commemorates the very first use of anaesthetic in England, given in that building on the 19th of December 1846. From 1976 until 1995 the headquarters of MI5 were at number 140. It was on Gower Street that The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in the winter of 1848–49, and so on, and so on. If you’re interested in the geography and history of London you’ve probably come across mappinglondon.co.uk. Have a guess where their physical base is. It’s the Department of of Geography, University College London, Gower Street. All this, I imagine in my Northern ignorance, is probably merely scraping the surface.
We met at Treadwells Books, 33 Store Street (just off Gower Street). I arrived at 3pm-ish to find John Higgs, Richard Andrews and Gordon White already lurking around the shop. Flesh blood and bone hands were shaken, real names and faces mentally connected to people who existed previously only as squares of pixels, pieces or writing, and “really lovely fella” mentions from others. We were joined by Greg Taylor himself and soon afterwards Cat Vincent. Cat is a regular in Treadwells, often giving talks in the basement (like this one: Science Fiction’s Gifts to Paganism) and introduced us to Treadwells proprietor Christina Oakley Harrington. There was a small, rotund dog wagging its way round the creaky floorboarded shop but I didn’t catch its name, sadly. After a short period of browsing, a few books bought, it was decided that we should head for a pub.
The Duke of York (est. 1791) is a pub in Fitzrovia – a district long associated with the likes of Augustus John, Quentin Crisp, Dylan Thomas, Aleister Crowley and George Orwell. If you Google the pub you get this cheery anecdote:
Ed Glinert gives an amazing story about the Duke of York on 47 Rathbone Street. On one occasion in 1943, Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynne were drinking there when a razor gang invaded, tipped beer on the floor, smashed glasses and menaced the customers. When Lynne protested about the waste of beer, they poured a large number of pints and challenged her to drink them, which she did. Such was their subsequent respect for her that they paid for the beer and offered Lynne protection from any other gangs. 1
We didn’t drink as if a razor gang had challenged us, but we had a few pints. I was mainly chatting to Greg and John at this point. Subjects covered included teaching and reading in prison, Tool, Jerusalem (the book which John is currently proofreading), The KLF, Robert Anton Wilson, The War on Drugs (the band), Passport to Magonia, the happy coincidences and confluences of circumstance that lead to certain book deals, Shpongle (and when it’s not appropriate to listen to them), and more. After an hour or so we were joined in our snug corner by David Southwell. More Guinness was ordered.
About 5pm we said goodbye to Gordon and headed for the Museum Tavern (est. 1723) on the corner of Museum street and Great Russell street. Now we were back in Bloomsbury where Dickens, Keats, Woolfe (and of course Aleister Crowley and George Orwell again) used to spend a bit of time. The Tavern itself was once Karl Marx’s local. On the walk over there I was telling John Higgs about a thing I’d read a while back (it was on the Daily Mail website, so excuse my lack of a link here) about London’s few remaining gaslights and the men who still lit them every night. Although I failed to notice it on the day, it turns out (if what I’ve read on the internet is true) that the exterior of the Museum Tavern is, in fact, gaslit.
There I had a chance to chat with Richard about lost wells rediscovered, landscape zodiac, and the uncanny path that lead him to and through his work. After eating some more than decent pub food (after six pints or so it seemed lovely, anyway) we were joined by Andrew Gough of The Heretic Magazine, a little later by Mike Jay, Mark Pilkington and Scott Wood. We ended up shifting round the table a few times to make sure people had a chance to speak to each other. Topics covered included Mark’s adventures in crop circle making, Greg’s crocodile infested childhood, Hookland, the use of the term Psychogeography (“the P word”) vs. Landscape Punk, Kvelertak, urban legends, trepanning for fun, pleasure and self improvement, past journeys to and residences in the capital, and much, much more.
We packed in at something close to 11pm (so just the seven hours of drinking, nothing major). Cat and David walked with me and we chatted quite a bit about Spirits of Place – the one day thing I’m organising in Liverpool this April (which I’ll start promoting properly in the New Year). David left us to catch a train home, Cat headed off for Kings Cross, and I popped into a late shop to grab some food and another couple of drinks to take back to my hotel.
As I sat on my bed, can in hand, listening to the honking drone of traffic and of Euston station through the as-open-as-it-would-open hotel window, the whole day already seemed more like something amazing I’d heard about than actually been present at. A weird meeting of all those weird folk, who do all that wonderful weird stuff. I count myself very lucky and very honoured to have been there with them.
Oh look, 2000 words. Perhaps that’s why I don’t write blogs any more.
(pub images taken by Greg Taylor and Andrew Gough)