Here we go, here we go, here we go

Last week I registered at King's.  I was actually surprised at how well organised it was, wait in a room next to the registration room until the queue lessened and then join the green line to hand over passport and documents to prove you really had passed a bachelor's degree.  Unfortunately my degree certificate didn't arrive until Friday but I had something from the OU which stated that I wasn't arriving at King's under false pretenses.  All in all it must have taken about 20 minutes and then it was pick up the ID card which doubles as library card, be presented with a couple of letters stating I am a full time student (hopefully useful for convincing the tax office I don't work anymore) and I'm officially a student.  Well, I haven't paid yet but there doesn't seem to be much of a rush for that - what funding crisis?

Off I went to the library again (that's a picture of the entrance above, copyright King's) with the added excitement of being able to take some books out.  I'm currently reading Pierre or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville and not particularly enjoying it so I concentrated on books that would help with this.  I had walked to King's from Victoria Station, as it was a nice day, but my route took me past The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and so was full of tourists (hopefully spending lots of money).  It took me quite a while to get there so I decided that a bus was the solution back and whilst that took nearly as long it was much more comfortable.

Tomorrow is 'Induction' - three hours of it and then two hours of drinks.  I feel a bit nervous, not quite sure what it will bring and what will be expected of us. My great fear is someone asks me to stand up and explain what I have learnt from the background reading on Freud (not much really).  We also have a library induction on Friday - I'm sure I won't be brave enough to admit to already having used it - who's the old swot in the corner?  I'm really looking forward to starting the course - it's been nine months since I was accepted and nearly four months since I left work so a bit more structure in my life will be greatly appreciated.

I had a quick trip to see my parents at the weekend.  Dad & I went to see Liverpool play Wolves on Saturday afternoon.  Last week I saw something someone had written about watching football not being entertainment, it's far too stressful for that (although I guess if your team is Barcelona and they're playing their brand of football-porn you might not agree).  This was one of those afternoons.  The first stress was parking the car.  Anfield is situated in the middle of rows of terrace houses so no nice big official car parks.  When I first was allowed to go (in about 1980) you could park in the streets nearby and kids would offer to watch your car for whatever the going amount of money was (Dad used to look after people's bikes for a few old pence in the late 1930s).  Now those streets are all on resident's parking permits and anything possible is turned into a carpark (garage, school playgrounds,churches and even some people offering to rent their drive to you).  The charge is now £10 and there's no competition - the cost of going to a match certainly adds up.  We parked in a local junior school playground that meant I was able to combine football with some genealogy - we passed the house some of Dad's family lived in when the 1911 census was taken. 

I love the feeling of going to the ground - when we leave home we may see a couple of other cars with people wearing replica shirts or scarves.  As we get closer we start to see people walking to the ground, initially in maybe twos or threes and then, when we get to Stanley Park, people start to converge and as we come out of the passageway into Anfield Road suddenly there are hundreds of people all dressed in red - the main artery as opposed to minor veins.  Anfield is old, undoubtedly and perhaps if/when a new stadium is built there will be more tickets available and more ladies' toilets (please!) but it is magical.  It's a combination of residual emotions from European nights, tears spilt over tragedy and the souls of many of the faithful (although now the pitch management is so scientific I wonder if you can still spread ashes there?)  We were right in the corner of the Main Stand, parallel with the Kop and with a slightly restricted view, which no-one told me about when I bought the tickets, but nothing I know matches being part of more than 35,000 people singing You'll Never Walk Alone as the team comes out - no wonder so many old players hang around.  If it's addictive in the stands, how much more so is it on the pitch?  I won't go into the detail of the game - the team is still a work in progress (and watching was extremely stressful at times) but they won so we've got a 100% record in the games we've seen this season!

Thanks for reading ...

Nearly there ...

(For anyone who hasn't read before, after 22 and a half years in the full-time world of work and the part-time world of studying I am about to begin a full-time MA in English 1850 - Present at King's College, London)

Well, it's all getting very exciting!  I am getting daily e-mails via my college e-mail address inviting me to join the orchestra or choir (no-one has told them about my complete lack of musicality), attend various lectures (not relating to English) and asking if I would like to register for the Associate of Kings College qualification (AKC).  The AKC is very interesting.  It's open to all students across the college and covers ethics, theology, history etc.  It's a bit of a hark back to the earliest days of King's.  You attend lectures over three years and then sit one exam at the end and, if you succeed, you are entitled to use the letters AKC after your name.  If I was an undergraduate I would definitely sign up.  My MA is only for one year, however, and although I have now seen that you can study for the qualification 1 year in situ and 2 via distance learning, I'm just not sure.  The programme of lectures looks really interesting but should I just concentrate on doing as well as I can with the MA?  Decisions, decisions!

We had our modules confirmed on Friday (hurrah) and I was relieved and very pleased to get all of my first choices.  Our core course is called Texts, Culture and Theory and we all have to take that.  In addition my modules are: 'Modernity and the City' in Semester 1 (not really sure what the difference is between a Semester and a Term, another thing that has come after my time); followed by 'Poetry, Perception and Place' and 'Turn of the Century Representations of Sexuality' in Semester 2.  Then it's on with the dissertation and I have to decide exactly what I'm going to do for that.  At the moment I'm torn between something to do with classical influences on TS's Eliot's poetry, was there really a fin de siecle or something about women authors and hysteria.  I'll need to decide & firm up my ideas pretty quickly!

We complete college registration on Thursday (and pick up NUS cards and college ID/library cards) and then next week it is the English MA Induction.  I really can't wait to meet tutors and fellow students and just to get going.  I've enjoyed my summer of reading and preparing but I just want to make a start on everything now!

Thanks for reading ...

Today's the day the teddy bears pick new owners

Yesterday I went to a Teddy Bear Fair. Let me describe it for those of you who have never attended one.  Hugglets organise two fairs a year in Kensington Town Hall (February and September).  There are four rooms full of stalls selling manufactured bears (such as Steiff), artist bears (such as the lion above), vintage bears and materials/kits to make your own bears.  When I first started collecting bears there were three UK monthly magazines and lots of shows.  If you weren't in line for the Kensington fairs way before they opened you might not get the bears you wanted (most of the artist bears are one of a kind).  Unfortunately, as with all things the economy has impacted on people's ability to spend a not inconsiderable amount of money on teddy bears and so, I learnt yesterday, there is only one bear magazine left in Britain (Teddy Bear Times) and now it only comes out every other month. 

I had always promised myself that once I earned a reasonable amount of money I would collect Steiff bears but did nothing about it until one day when T and I took a short cut in Guildford and came across The Bear Garden.  This was a shop full of nothing but bears and after a long chat with the lady in charge I bought my first collector's bear.  (Collectible teddy bears tend to be made of mohair or alpaca although I have a bear made out of silk and they are normally fully jointed.  They are usually not recommended for children at all).   That was the start of my collection or 'hug' as it is officially called.  The normal path for a collector is to start with Steiff, Deans, Merrythought and the other respected manufacturers (I was lucky that a lady called Robin Rive was making beautiful bears in New Zealand and I have some of hers).  They all have (or had) collectors clubs so you start to attend club events and then if you are anything like me you go to a bear fair and suddenly you are confronted with hundreds or thousands of the most appealing little faces and artists you haven't seen in any magazine.  Artist bears can be traditional or a bit more wacky, perhaps a long neck or particularly long feet or a face that doesn't look like a bear at all.  I am always amazed by what people will pick up and buy but my tastes tend to be very traditional.  There are a lot of exceptionally good designers out there and I will just name a few that I particularly like.  Whittle-le-Woods bears make the most beautifully dressed bears and they were amongst the first artist bears I bought.  I have a school-boy, a Victorian bathing beauty and a Chelsea pensioner amongst others.  The attention to detail on the bears is amazing.  In the  
picture to the left you can see Amelie.  She was made for me by the bear artist trading as Humble Crumble Bears.  She is the most beautiful bear and, as Vicky Allum (Humble Crumble) makes bears that resemble old Steiffs, she is rather saggy so she tends to be, very appealingly, slouching.  I have a number of Humble Crumble bears as well.  If you join Vicky's mailing list she will tell you when she has new bears available.  Don't even bother looking an hour after that list has gone out, all of the bears will have been adopted.  (Whenever she is at a fair I'm attending I make sure I get to her stall first otherwise there will be no bears left!).  My final recommendation is for a very different type of bear maker - Bear Bits make realistic looking brown bears, polar bears and pandas among others.  They are of the highest standard and beautifully created.  Yesterday I saw another stall selling a couple of very realistic bears.   I will try and check out who they were because those bears were also magnificent.

 
 I had checked out the Hugglets site to see who would be attending yesterday and fell in love with the rabbits created by The Rabbit Maker.  Strangely enough this is an artist who only makes rabbits both as almost sculptured models and as 'traditional' rabbits. I decided to look at her stall but was sure common sense would prevail.  Well, here is Fifi and isn't she gorgeous.  She reminded me a little of someone just starting school and so seemed absolutely right for my situation (just over two weeks now to the MA induction).  There is a saying that a bear chooses you and in this case I think the rabbit chose me because, whilst all of the rabbits on the stall were simply beautiful, I only had eyes for Fifi.  That was officially it for me; budget was blown and I hadn't come looking for lots of bears to take home so I didn't buy anything else did I?

With a stone heart I walked past tens of other stalls, smiling at the beautiful bears and complimenting artists on bears that had already been sold. (Much safer, I find, if you praise a bear that is still up for adoption they may suggest you hold it and that way only purchasing lies!)  I walked through the two main halls without so much as an itching to pick any bear up and then I climbed up to the upper floor.  There was a stall with some lovely bears on and I was tempted to buy just one small one as they had such wonderful expressions but I turned around and saw Hahira (who you can see at the top of the page).  I hadn't seen a lion at the fair before and this one had the most adorable expression - he looks so sad.  I started talking to his maker and she explained he was created from recycled raccoon fur and invited me to feel how soft he was.  I ummed and aahhed because I shouldn't really buy him but, he was beautiful and I already have so many bears, a lion would be a first.  He's an Anglo-American lion, made in the Mid-West by a British artist so it seemed appropriate I should see him yesterday.  I left the hall shortly after buying him.  I had been there for quite a time and, more importantly, I couldn't trust myself not to fall in love with anything else.

So now you know the story of my trip to the bear fair and my complete lack of will-power.  Did you know people who collect bears are called 'arctophiles' and I was glad that, even in such tough times, so many were out yesterday.  I must try not to attend the fair in February tho' as it's very bad for my bank balance.

Hope you've been OK on this windy Monday (in the UK) and thanks for reading.  

Not Long Now

I was very kindly allowed to visit the Maughan Library at King's yesterday afternoon (I'm not fully enrolled yet so missing the card which would automatically let me in).  The library is in the old Public Records Office, just around the corner from the Royal Courts of Justice and opposite the Law Society.  I hope you can see from the picture (left) how beautiful it is on the outside.  Inside it is very large and light (everything seems to be painted white).  The reading room is absolutely gorgeous and featured in the film of the Da Vinci Code, although I'm not sure how proud the college is of that.

Although term doesn't start for about 10 days I was surprised how many people were there.  I got a bit lost at first and it was eerie to wander through a few empty rooms where lights came on just as I went into the room and then seemed to go off as soon as I left (very efficient motion sensors).  When I got to the English/Literature section though there were about 5 other people working.  I was worried that I might distract them as I took out my pen and opened my notepad but then I noticed there was a constant noise - the tip-tap of computer keyboards being struck.  Hmmm - spot the 'old' student.  I think I'll have to get used to using either my iPad or laptop for note-taking or look like a bit of a dinosaur.  I'm just worried that I'm too slow a typist! I suppose practice will make perfect and as I spent time today typing up my handwritten notes from yesterday I guess it will be more efficient just to type in the first place.

I really want to get organised now.  My prepatory reading is going well (i.e. I'm reading the background books.  If you tested me on Freud not sure how well I'd do) but I want to know when our induction will be and make a start on things.  I really need to learn some patience but it's just because I'm excited.

Thanks for reading ...  

A walk through London's history

Tower Bridge and the Thames

Last Thursday afternoon was absolutely beautiful weather so I met a friend for lunch and then walked to the Museum of London, on London Wall.  The museum is about 15 minutes walk from my old office but I had never been there before.  I'm ashamed to admit how much of London I haven't seen in the nearly 20 years that I've been living nearby.

A lot of the MA is focused upon cities and London itself so it made sense to visit now.  The museum is free to enter and was nicely busy (as in people in all the exhibits but plenty of room to look around) and, the Government would be pleased to know, there were lots of children in there discussing the exhibits with their parents.

Although I could have started in the mid-19th century galleries I did the right thing and began at the beginning.  After walking quickly through 'London before London' I did slow down for the Roman galleries.  Very enjoyable they were too.  On my left is a mock up of a prosperous Roman home.  I actually thought that I would be happy to move in. There is also a mock up of a Roman kitchen and various shops and finds.  It's very light and the exhibits are well labelled so it's a great area to look around and then there are the exhibits that knock you sideways: the finds from the Temple of Mithras and the real mosaic floor from Milk Street and you have to remember that this place you walk around not really paying attention to has been inhabited and worked in since Roman times!  Very exciting!!

Mosaic from Milk Street

 

The Medieval galleries were also extremely interesting.  This is a, 100 years old, model of St. Paul's Cathedral.  It had the tallest spire in England at that time and was, to my mind, more beautiful than St Paul's looks now with the dome.  I suppose it looked like other cathedrals such as Lincoln or Salisbury whilst 'our' St Paul's looks very different to other cathedrals in Britain.  What do you think?  In addition there were royal items and exhibits of glassware and other household objects - absolutely amazing that these things survive the centuries, especially when they are just household objects and wouldn't have been treated with any care at all. 

The Great Cross in Cheap (now Cheapside, a very busy street in the City)

The Black Death made its first appearance at this point.  I have to confess that I was such a coward I didn't go and listen to the accounts.  I've seen programmes on the plague in London (although mainly talking about the 17th rather than the 14th century outbreak).  The city was built of small houses, incredibly close together and it was no wonder that the plague would spread so quickly if you were not able to get away.  By the way T tells me now that there is a question mark over whether it was rats who spread the disease or if humans caught it from one another.  Living in such close quarters it would be no surprise if infection alone was to blame (and in which case we owe rats quite the apology!).

I took fewer pictures from now on but the exhibits continued to be extremely good.   The (poor) picture on the left is of a model of the Rose Theatre which stood (due to law) just outside the city boundaries and where Shakespeare would have performed with the King's Men.  In the Tudor galleries there are interesting and beautiful ecclesiastical pieces, victims of the Reformation and the dissolution of monasteries and churches.  Then you go forward to the Civil War (or War of the Three Kingdoms as T tells me it is now referred to) and the Plague/Great Fire of London.  You can listen to Samuel Pepys tell you all about it in one gallery and see some evocative and terrifying oil paintings.

Finally, I was in the part of the museum that I had come to see although I must confess that I enjoyed the earlier galleries more.  There is a very interesting exhibit about pleasure gardens that I wanted to see because they were still going (for example at Vauxhall) in the period when the MA starts.  It's actually a very creative exhibition - lots of dummies wearing the most beautiful clothes in a small room that looks like a very small part of the garden.  There was a film to watch but I had a bit of  a Doctor Who moment and decided I wouldn't stay in there alone in case the dummies came to life.

The final galleries included the Lord Mayor's Coach which is incredibly beautiful.  There was only one other person in the room with me so I was able to get a great look.  It is worth coming to the museum simply to see this:

With very sore feet I now decided it was time to bring my meanderings through time to an end.  There are two lovely cafes in the museum and a wine bar/restaurant just outside.  There is also a very good shop with loads of variety from cuddly Corgis (wearing crowns) to serious archaelogical guides to their latest findings.  Three tube stations are close to the Museum: Moorgate, St Paul's and Barbican but I walked back to London Bridge in about twenty minutes (and that was fairly leisurely).

All in all I look forward to another visit to London's history (and they have a Dickens exhibition from December so I'm sure it will be fairly soon).

Thanks for reading.

Books update

I've been doing a lot of the preparatory reading for the MA so not as many novels as I would like but here is a quick update on what I have been reading:

I have to confess that Charlotte Bronte is my least favourite of the sisters.  Whilst I appreciate that she wrote this book under extremely trying circumstances: Shirley had not been a success and more importantly she had recently watched Anne, Emily & Branwell die, I found Villette to be depressing and boring in the main.  I thought the characters were OK but I never really warmed to any of them.  Lucy Snowe is admirable for making her own living and being willing to find her fortune in another country but I didn't ever warm to her or care enough about whether she & M. Paul lived happily ever after or not.  One of the things I really dislike in Jane Eyre is the co-incidences and here they also play a part.  They are just not believable!!  On the whole the book is OK but I would definitely steer someone towards Anne or Emily if they want to read something of the Brontes.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with The Picture of Dorian Gray.  I knew it was about decadence & possibly evil but wasn't sure if it would be comic or horror.  It wasn't, infact, either of those things.  I would have said that it was a moral tale because of the ending but the introduction states that Wilde didn't want it to be read that way.  I'm sure you know the basis of the story.  A man sells his soul so that a portrait of him grows old whilst he retains his beauty.  You can argue that this is a tract that supports the aesthetic movement in which Wilde was a big player ('Art for Art's Sake/Money for God's sake' as the 10CC lyric goes - I think) but I have huge problems with the idea that anything is produced purely for art's sake when it's then published to make money for the author.  Anyway, I found the book interesting - it's certainly amoral and I hope, like me, you want to give Dorian a good shake by the end of it but it's worth a read.

I also read a much lighter book: The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld but I will be writing a review of that for Goodreads.com (they did give me the book to review).  It should be there in the next few days if you want to take a look - & yes, I enjoyed the novel.

I have just started reading The Ladies' Paradise by Zola.  I read Germinal as part of the Nineteenth Century Novel module I studied with the OU.  I was absolutely dreading reading it as it's about mining, and a miners' strike, in Northern France but it was actually one of my favourite novels on the course.  I think Zola writes incredibly realistic characters and interesting story lines.  The Ladies' Paradise is about a department store in Paris and one of the shop assistants' attempts to evade seduction by the owner.  As I'm reading about the Great Exhibition of 1851 on and off with my general prep books it fits nicely into the ideas of conspicuous consumption in the second half of the 19th Century.

In the original listing for the core MA course Mary Poppins was one of the texts and as, like many of you I'm sure, I'd only ever seen the film I was looking forward to reading the book.  It's almost a selection of short stories and whilst Mary is very similar to the Julie Andrews version in that she is vain and very strong-willed there is a level of surrealism that is definitely missing from from Disney (there's a surprise).  A couple of things come immediately to mind: a night at the zoo in which the animals are the visitors and humans in cages are the exhibits for feeding time and a 'lady' who runs a sweet shop who tends to chew on her own peppermint flavoured fingers occassionally. The back of the book suggests this is suitable for 8+ and, the above withstanding, I think it is.  I enjoyed it and was sorry it has been taken off the reading list.  Did you know this is just the first in a series of Mary Poppins books?  I'd like to read more but need to persuade T that it isn't quite as weird as I had suggested to him.  If you have 8 year olds, you have the perfect excuse! 

Next time I update I'll try to have some newer books to talk about.

Right back to T.S. Eliot now, I have 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' open at the moment.  'Every street lamp that I pass/Beats like a fatalistic drum' - ring any bells?  Who says that Eliot is elitist?

Thanks for reading. 

A Cultural Afternoon

I had the most lovely afternoon on Friday.  I went up to London (how enjoyable that sounds particularly compared to what was a daily grind of commuting!) to have a delicious fish & chip lunch with a friend and then set off for cultural edification.

If you have read any of my earlier entries you might have seen that on the T S Eliot Summer School we visited St Magnus Martyr, one of the two churches mentioned in 'The Wasteland'.  The other is St Mary Woolnoth which stands just around the corner from Cornhill, where Eliot worked for Lloyds Bank, in Lombard Street.  As the first part of the afternoon plan entailed walking to St Paul's via Cornhill it seemed silly not to take this opportunity to take a look.  Apparently this is Nicholas Hawksmoor's only church in the City.  I think it looks a bit odd really but it's lucky to have a handsome plot - the umbrella you can see on the front left of the picture is a coffee stand.  I had a quick peek inside, it's much plainer than St Magnus Martyr but rather nice in its simplicity.  On the wall there is a plaque to Edward Lloyd, proprietor of a coffee shop and founder of Lloyds of London.  There is also an odd piece of sculpture at the front of the church which recounts the lines from 'The Wasteland':

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Doesn't it just celebrate working in an office!!!

I enjoyed my walk down to St Paul's.  The weather was sunny but not too hot or humid and the crowds pretty OK until I got to the cathedral where there were lots and lot of people visiting and taking pictures (hurrah for the British economy!).  I would have gone in but I'm trying to be strict with my budget and St Pauls & Westminster Abbey are, I feel, ridiculously expensive.  I contented myself with taking lots of pictures from outside and then going down into the shop.  I was able to buy a couple of postcards and a bar of chocolate for T (one of those big ones with St Paul's on the outside) so I did do a little bit for the maintenance.  It looked as if they had a nice restaurant/cafe in the crypt and the shop was very good so perhaps we can save our pennies and visit properly.  By the way if you want to go and pray you can, of course, enter for free.

Then across Paternoster Square, which I thought was quite nice & provided lots of cafes for visitors and into the tube.

I had planned to visit The Museum of London as I've never been there but I have been able to access more materials for the core course of the MA and a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum was required before Week 2 and studying commodities and culture.  The V & A has brilliant British Galleries and on the 4th floor one of the rooms celebrates the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the photograph to the left shows an illustration of the Greek/Turkish stand within the Crystal Palace).  I had a list of questions to consider in respect of the manufacture of some of the exhibits which are now in the V&A and so I would have a good look and then sit and write the answers on my i-pad.  I felt like I was on a school trip and I'm sure the few people who were also wandering through the galleries were wondering what I was doing (particularly one little girl who tried very hard to see what I was writing).  By the way I asked one of the staff members about taking photographs and he seemed very relaxed about it!  Although it's only one room it's very interesting, from the items that were entered for medals to the souvenirs such as the Great Exhibition wallpaper and the picallili (?) lids.  The V&A, and other South Kensington museums, were founded on the profits of the Great Exhibition so it's very appropriate to have an exhibition there and of course, this year is the 160th anniversary.  (There is also an exhibition about the 1951 Festival of Britain down at the South Bank that is worth seeing).  I was able to answer my questions, have a look in the shop and take time for a drink and rather nice scone in the V&A cafe and still be home for 7p.m.  A really good afternoon.

I shall leave it there as I need to listen to a radio programme about Emily Dickinson.  I'll update on reading very shortly.  Thank you, as always, for reading.