Venice in London

One of the finest things about London, in this little stuffed opinion, is its geography. The streets wind and wander, the horizon rises to hills and drops to riverbanks, and the Circle Line is by no means circular. I have many favorite parts of London I enjoy visiting again and again, but like my on-again off-again 2006 New Year's resolution to buy a new comic I'd never read before, I find it's great joy to find a part of London I've never seen, to walk through unfamiliar streets of my favorite city in the world, or even discover how parts of London hook up together geographically, like a jigsaw puzzle you've been putting together without benefit of the cover picture. (Speaking of which, the only jigsaw puzzle I've ever been able to do this is a puzzle of the London Underground. A London-obsessed little stuffed bull, I am.)

With this in mind and clutching my much-studied London Walks brochure, I scott myself over to the Warwick Avenue tube stop, one stop into Zone 2 on the Bakerloo Line. More important, it's only one stop up from Paddington, just around the corner and less than a two minute walk from Gloucester Terrace, the first place I ever lived in London. And although I explored the area around Paddington and Bayswater extensively in those days, I've never walked along the Regent's Canal, so the London Walks Little Venice walking tour seemed an ideal morning excursion! I've been meaning to go on this walk for, oh, ages, and this was the perfect morning: cold but clear and crisp, no wind (and in fact the Regent's Canal was still as glass, so smooth that you could actually see the bottom six feet down), which the guide said with surprise never happens. As always, the London Walks guide was well-informed and entertaining, in this case Richard III, who walked with a sure stride and not the sideway lumping straddle that his humped namesake might suggest. (He's called Richard III because there are multiple Richards as tour guides at London Walks!) R3 guided us entertainly and genially throughout the posh and exotic Regent's Canal area, showing us the multimillion pound houses of the posh and well-off, everyone from Michael Bond (Paddington) to Joan Collins, Dave Stewart and even baby Angelica Huston. Richard was also remarkably well-informed on 20th century British comedy, showing us, among other places, the elegant former home of Griff Rhys Jones, star of Not the Nine O'Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones. This little stuffed bull thinks that a British comedy walk would be an excellent idea for London Walks, although I'm not ceretain if there's a place to center it around or indeed even if the general tourist foreign public would be interested in it. I'd pony up my six quid, though! On the tour, we also walked through the lovely and peaceful Regent's Canal and Little Venice area, the quiet (at least in the winter) tow-canal path running through the area all the way up to Camden (straight through Regent's Park Zoo). As usual, you learn a lot on walks like this: as with every London Walk they are keen on bringing the history of the area alive for you, including placing the area in historical context: it was built under the patronage of the Prince Regent, George IV. I tend to equate the Prince Regent in my head with Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third, so this helped me cement the real G4 in my beans-filled-head. It's also a great example of the idea that every name has a reason: it's not just sheer happenstance that it's called Regent's Canal, or Regent's Park, or Regent Street: all these were planned and built during the Regency period where the future George IV basically ran the country. Names have meaning and power, as Neil Gaiman would tell us; there's no better place to discover this than in London.

My favorite moment of the walking tour, however, took place not on the Canal but in the small but beautiful Greek-cross and cube-shaped Church of St. Mary Paddington Green, once the parish church of John Donne. As we sat in the pews Richard told us the history of the church (including an ill-advised attempt to fill in the crypts below with cement that led to intense building rot), and he finished up by reciting the lines from Donne's "For Whom The Bell Tolls":

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

And just as Richard finished reciting the poem, the church bells began ringing their chimes. A beautiful and sublime moment that really touched me.

From Little Venice we zip on the Tube to Leicester Square (via the Bakerloo Line to the Piccadilly Line) to stand in the very-short queue at the half-price Tkts booth for the night's entertainment (overheard from the tourist in front of me: "Do you have tickets for Spamalot?") and then back towards Charing Cross Road. The wandering of the morning and early afternoon is making my tummy rumble and grumble, and I've got a craving for a piping-hot Pizza Express luncheon. I can't find the surely-close-by Pizza Express, though, so I settle for one of its ubiquitous chain clones, Pizza Piazza. It's not bad, but it's definitely a step below Pizza Express in variety (although Piazza does pride itself on its organic menu). I decide to go for the all-day breakfast experience and pick the Matinna pizza, topped with two fried eggs. It's messy and yummy, and it fills in all the spaces that were yelling for food, so I consider the meal a success even tho' I can't quite figure out why they won't let me leave them a tip on my American Express card. (Later I realize that the gratuity was already added in, but it baffled me at the time.) Suitably fortified, I set out again for Charing Cross Road, and twenty seconds later pass a Pizza Express.

My next target is the comic book and SF multimedia superstore Forbidden Planet—I was thwarted yesterday in my attempt to visit the store when I got there and they were closed. (At 6 PM!) They're definitely open this afternoon, and I wander through the immense multi-story shop with my jaw agape clutching my wallet defensibly. It's about as far away from Gosh! as you can get and still be in the same industry in the same city: huge, sprawling, yet cramped and complicated at the same time. I remember the narrow and claustrophobic Forbidden Planet when it was based on Denmark Street, and you could easily fit six or seven of those inside this one. It's a far throw from the New York version of Forbidden Planet (which, I learn in a conversation with one of the clerks, isn't actually connected with this store at all anymore: it's a spin-off of Forbidden Planet International, which is a separate offshoot based in Scotland). There's cartons of comics and aisles of action figures and dumps of DVDs and buckets of books and towers of toys and other alliterative things that I could have spent pounds and pounds and pounds on if I wasn't trying to be smart with my money and not blow it all at once. In the end I settle for something I've been lookin' for: action figures of The Doctor and Rose. Rose comes with a spring-loaded K-9, which is a nice bonus and makes up for the fact that her action figure face doesn't do cute Billie Piper justice by any stretch of the imagination.

On my way back towards Charing Cross Road I duck into a shop I noticed yesterday on my trek to Forbidden Planet: what looks like another branch of the impossibly-difficult-to-find Magma on Earlham Street. Well, shucks. I chide myself when I saw it, if I'da known there was one just off Charing Cross Road instead of searching for the one in the maze of streets near Covent Garden I've have gone to this one instead. I step into this branch today and am surprised how identical it looks to the first one I was in a few days ago. Well, the smart or London-savvy among you may have figgered out what it took me another moment to realize: it was the exact same shop. I was on Earlham Street, which ends just on Shaftesbury Avenue right near Charing Cross Road. I smack my little stuffed forehead with a resounding thud and laugh at my own London discovery: that sometimes you are so intent on finding someplace in relation to a specific Tube station that you never realize it may be closer to someplace else you're familiar with. I fix the "new" location of Magma in my head and realize I've discovered yet another jigsaw puzzle piece in London: a place I knew but didn't know it "fit" another piece I was holding in my grubby little hoof. To stretch the jigsaw metaphor to a painful distance.

Pop-culture Wednesday is delightfully and appropriately capped by cashing in those half-price tickets we got in Leicester Square to see Rik Mayall in The New Statesman, a hilarious updating of his classic British comedy series broughrt up to the age of Tony Blair and Al-Qaeda. I've been a huge fan of Rik since (of course) The Young Ones, and he's definitely older and broader but still as howlingly-funny as he was in the eighties. The play concerns Mayall's amoral MP Alan B'Stard jockeying for political power during the final days of Tony Blair, duping everyone he comes into contact with including the scandalously stupid Condi Rice and an al Qaeda suicide bomber, finally tricking the CIA into bombing the BBC. It's all over-the-top and absolutely politically incorrect and yet you can't stop laughing like a loon through the whole thing. Mayall throws himself—physically, in some scenes—into his old familar role and yet he doesn't take hismelf too seriously: a few fluffs or unexpected stage mishaps led to hiliarious and well-received ad-libs by Mayall. In a way it reminds me a bit of Blackadder: absolutely despicably amoral man jockeying for power as he's surrounded by idiots. I larfed and larfed, and even if I didn't get every single contemporary British political joke reference, you could still laugh at the jokes even if you didn't know the context. Plus, chocolate fudge sticky toffee ice cream during the interval! You can't have a better night than that, and it's all capped off by taking the bus back to the hotel, which is always a lovely treat after a wonderful West End show.

I'm warm and cozy stuffed into my hotel bed tap-tap-tapping on my laptop and it's time to relax. I'll lie in bed, listening to Radio 4 for "Sailing By" to put me to sleep. G'night everybody...cheers from London!