My UK voyage was three days in Leeds bookended by two (and a half) days in London. I had never been to Leeds before, and loved the look of the city--Victorian-Industrial-Gothic, dilapidating sooty red brick against the alternately gray and bright sky. Charity shops populated by sweet old ladies selling books of erotic photographs from the 1920s. An empty overgrown trash-filled lot next to a highrise building, where, for two days in a row, I saw a lone horse, with no humans in sight. Leeds has urban magic. I didn't have nearly enough time to tap it, but I skimmed the surface and saw that it was there.
When I got disoriented on my way to the station, a zoologist helped me. I spent the train ride talking to a biochemist. And while in London I stayed with a lovely anthropologist,
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khalinche, who is a kindred spirit. She was in the process of moving from one East End apartment to another one, so I got to stay in both. I met her lovely friends, we went to see Arcadia (sigh! Tom Stoppard!), and I saw one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Unfortunately I was not in possession of my camera when this urban vision transpired, so I will have to just tell you about it. We were walking across the Thames (not sure which bridge?) and we saw, as we approached the crest of the bridge, that the moon was full and shimmering-bright amidst a thin aura of night clouds. This cluster of luminescence was positioned right in the middle of the London Eye, the big ferris wheel over the river. Like a lunar iris, overseeing the shimmering and illumination of the riverbank. It looked unreal, like a not-so-distant shore of a fairy tale, steampunk city.
My last morning in London we wandered around an overgrown Victorian cemetery, filled with thyme and ripe plums, little ponds covered with algae the color of spring, and leaves the color of perpetual autumn, we looked with futile longing at an abandoned mental hospital that was
right there but clearly impenetrable, at least not like that, on a whim. And on my way out, to catch the flight to Amsterdam, I came across a patch of pavement that was like a portal to Alice's wonderland, and had I had more time I would have done a tap dance on it and tried to commune with the Mad Hatter, but as it was, I just thought--whoever infused this city with magic, they hid it everywhere, in the tiniest details, and it seeps, seeps, seeps, in overgrown headstones, and a perfect ripe plum found amidst the graves, and ocular moon sightings, and a wild checkerboard, now home to rogue, determined plants that will grow anywhere and through anything.
sleepy
sleepy
