The hotel is a historic mansion divided into extremely tiny rooms where everything is controlled by a panel of buttons bearing strange symbols -- is that a bathroom light or the Mayan glyph for self-mutilation? -- and is entered from a strange hallway off The Strand, the kind of little alley you hurry past for fear someone will try to lure you down it, probably to sell you tickets to the Lion King musical.
It's in Covent Garden, a handy neighbourhood where tourists can enjoy a sense of belonging. We sustain the medieval spirit of the place. Like rustics at a fair, we crowd around street performers, get ripped off buying trinkets, and flock to see musicals about lions coming of age. If there were a dancing bear or someone playing cup-and-ball or a grisly execution being carried out, we'd be all over that, too.
It's not just the Lion King; we're passionately in love with musical versions of Hollywood movies in general. They divide the market between them and there's hardly enough left over to bait The Mousetrap. You can give directions by them. British Museum? Right at Back to the Future, straight on past Heathers and Harry Potter, and east from Sister Act. If they could squeeze a few tunes and maybe a can-can line into Leaving Las Vegas, we'd go see it, burning down The Globe in passing if it was in our way.
I went to Southwark in the rain, passing the archbishop's palace and under a lot of greasy, dripping iron underpasses and, for lack of any better ideas, had another look around the Imperial War Museum, which is in one of the city's least beautiful historic buildings. Everything says Do Not Touch and no one can pass anything without giving it a prod. It's hard to get cranky about it. On the one hand, yes, you shouldn't do that. On the other, it is a tank.
I followed that up with a long walk up to Camden Town. There were long stretches of road work where miniature backhoes scraped away tentatively, nervous about destroying some Roman mosaic or disturbing the rest of some king of Wessex. On the railing of the bridge over Regent's Canal sits a row of punks, their legs danging over the road, keeping alive, like Beefeaters, an old tradition of dress and deportment. It gets dreary, sitting on a bridge smoking like a troll on a break. No one springs out of bed in the morning for a day of that. But if your father was a bridge punk, and his father before him, what choice do you have?
There's a smell of cheap incense in the mazy brick markets, and humorous t-shirt stores have taken over most of it, like a suffocating fungus whose spores of exuberant stupidity we tourists carry wherever we go, probably on our shoes. But the long walk along the brown canal to Regent's Park is quiet and pretty. Londoners are running, walking babies, or on curious errands, like the man carrying a computer monitor from a park to a lock. It's only when he's gone that you realize you want to know more about his life. Glossy canal boats nose into the locks from time to time and tourists record the operation on phones. The gates are hand-operated. One is tended by an old man in an ancient life jacket who mostly stands and watches his phone. How do you break into lock-keeping? Would I need some sort of certificate?
Tomorrow's not a very promising day, because a train-drivers' strike means a long and probably crowded bus ride to Liverpool. Three days after that, I start walking along Hadrian's Wall. I've already located the perfect companion in the form of a bottle of Glenglassaugh. I might put a tam o'shanter on it and carry it in a papoose.
