Notting Hill, Kensington, London
Psychogeography is something Brits specialize in. Maybe it has to do with the size and history of their island. Punk goth styles filter in, the subcultures are British inventions, powerful universal exports. In London in October, you will see social ills, you will see the homeless man sitting on the concrete outside Notting Hill Gate Station, his head bowed so low it’s in his lap like a defeated ouroboros. Sexual dungeons, adult playgrounds distributed and hidden around Audrey Szasz’s London. Human traffickers in Notting Hill, in the Kensington neighborhood where you’re staying. The landlord is a finance guy who made a spare fortune selling selfie sticks to the IDF. Watch out when he comes round to weed out the tourist vermin lodged in the Airbnb like ticks. “Just tell them you’re friends of mine,” the guy who left you the keys to the flat wrote in his email with the instructions. “The neighbors don’t approve of Airbnbs.” They slip ominous notices about the Grenfell inquiry under the door. Housing and living spaces are on everybody’s mind: a handful of months ago there was a spasm of anti-immigrant sentiment over the stabbing of four English girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance studio. In reply, racist Brits called for immigrant housing to be burnt to the ground. Then the anti-racist counter spasm.
Inside Paddington Station, Pakistani girl watchers in clusters gather near Burger King banging Urdu fantasy pop music on somebody’s phone with tinny speakers. Erotics of the immigrant. They get quiet when the American woman nearby speaks. God Save The Queen, cuz tourists are money. Tourist scum. The Churchill Arms, a hideously touristy pub in Notting Hill, was plastered with images of the famous bulldog Prime Minister who is almost a historical caricature. It’s all Americans inside, talking about California and North Carolina.
Vivienne Westwood fashion ads plaster the construction site on Kensington Church Street with lascivious repetition: purses fixed over pussies like forbidding strapons, twink models wearing expensive coats, purse-pussy, twink in coat, purse-pussy, alternate and repeat like inexorable train tracks as you walk hurriedly down the sidewalk in the modern walkable city. Garbage men in orange suits like x-wing fighters from Star Wars wander the streets but decidedly less movie-heroic.
Drunks and crazy people are all over, mixed with the narcotized tourist zombies. You go out to Portobello Road and see day drunk laborers belching and walking around. Mentor-mentee social pairings of alcoholic men, a pub education. The frightening witch-lady with terminal bedhead, psychotic woman, passes you on the block then you see her again in a spot that would be physically impossible without her teleportation: the ancient immortal English bog witch of London is locked onto you. The second time she sees you she stares into your soul, making amused faces. The marginal street person walks amongst the tourists, phones out taking naive pictures of pastel buildings and George Orwell’s house with the historic blue medallion on it. Hardly anybody speaking English but this class is the successful class. Euro money from Spain, Eastern Europe. The vendors on Portobello Road are all from Central or South Asia — echoes of Britain’s colonial past come home a century later. The jewelers standing out watching over their stalls with their racks of rings and bracelets. The younger generations of immigrants going between the men shaking hands on some intricate secret jeweler business. The looks on the Englishwomen’s faces, the faces of the shoppers, are very old yet also young and beautiful. You would be inspired to go to war by these women’s faces. Cities in the UK seem to be about the races of faces, the writhing mesh of facial expressions in groups. The face-starved, like yourself from nowheresville USA, gorge on the phenotypes washing around you, your aesthetic reactions to all the women’s faces. You can read the romantic disappointments that are the natural sequelae of the modern dating game. The urban salmon swimming upstream to spawn and complain with high-pitched Audrey Szasz voices that “there’s just no good restaurants left in London.”
The iPhone is a divining rod, but instead of looking for water, it’s to find the blue arrow to your destination. The Internet is “blue,” they say. Wi-Fi zones are blue. Twitter notifications are the blue dot, the blue dragon. British cookies cling to all digital objekts when you turn on your phone and go to any website — not the baked-good sweets but the ad flotsam and jetsam. You decline them all but nevertheless you’re soon swimming in Twitter ads for cheap wine for £6. Computer science of British surveillance watching your social media habits, a superstition as real as MacBeth’s witches “when the hurlyburly’s done.” Britain is a Black Mirror society, more so than the USA is. Tech suggests dark things: fears, insecurities, apocalypses.
On the sidewalk, at night, the Lolita goth girl’s eyes are heavily raccooned with smokey eye makeup, staring dead as she walks by you en passant. 28 Days Later, zombies of London. Not werewolves, we’re beyond that. Subversive London beckons to you, but you’re only here for three days. Audrey Szasz is all you can think of. You want to bump into the novelist, or somehow catch a glimpse of her frightening, perverse, ironic-punk world in London. Schocking. “Szocking.” Although she seems somehow more Camden than Kensington & Chelsea.
Bath Rats
Arrived in Bath, England. What a contrast. A nicer spot than in London, by far. Perhaps less demonic and plagued with ancient concentrations of evil, with its people appearing where they shouldn’t be. Here are the luxury innovations of Britain, heated towel racks in the bathrooms which are unknown to you in rural America. Very old wrought-iron fences everywhere. No cash, just contactless transactions. Airbnb hosts must be making bank. The flat is in the basement of a Georgian townhouse centrally located for maximum tourist saturation. The front door to the basement flat is in a dank stairwell where youths have thrown beer bottles and trash. But these are external details. This inside is luxe, classy. Like you like it. It seems to be concealed by a dingy old exterior. Remodeling ancient limestone buildings for 21st century tourists — historic buildings festooned with wiring, Wi-Fi zones enabling card readers at cash registers and “points of sale.”
The admonitions from the property managers include to clean up all glitter at the flat when you leave. Bath is popular with Londoners on vacation for a hen party or bachelorette’s party, the Jane Austen husband-hunting connection made clear. Austen lurked in this small city, set two of her novels here. Bath is named after an ancient Roman outpost Aque Sulis, natural spring water baths where Romans in Britannia built a temple to the goddess Minerva for healthy bathing routines. Then under the Georgians it was fully established as a wealthy getaway spot. Currently there is a thermal spa in Bath which is big bucks to get into and you fantasize that if you went there and rubbed elbows with the elite you could end up hitched to Vladimir Putin’s daughter. Russian oligarkh money flows all over the UK’s elite vacation spots, you read somewhere.
A pub is like an interactive theater space. Knowing how, as a sober Yank, to deal with the bartender with actual Brits watching and waiting for their own drinks orders, is knowing how to navigate rough rocky waters of manners, although no one is impolite enough to make you hurt over it. Characters add and subtract from the thirsty, omnidirectional group-queues. Playback of Jane Austen dancing at a speed-garage club in Bath. Shopgirls of the UK, waitresses and perfume girls eagerly awaiting customers to set them into motion. You would give it all up for them, you appreciate them, and so do the lads in outdoor seating outside the Huntsman, the closest pub near your rented flat: “Fucking loads of arse.”
You wake up in the night to Bath rats running back and forth and setting off the motion detector-triggered light in the stairwell outside the front door. Gothic night rats against limestone walls under sodium light. Ambient breathing patterns of the city at night punctuated by yells and threats from anti-social young men. Everywhere’s a dark alley with a drunken yob or two screaming something. “Oi!” “Oi?” Margin walkers of Bath, untouchables who are thick with grime, party people for whom the party never really ended although it looks like their young lives may end soon. Death-haunted, unhoused junkies sleeping rough on the streets, accelerated decrepitude faces of Britain’s homeless replicants. Monkey on their backs. Face, neck tattoos of the Union Jack. Who are you to say what it means. Maybe they are a privileged class on some kind of intensely localized crypto-Rumspringa. Black Mirror characters dancing to the techno beats played by the pop up street food trucks. 24-hour party people of Albion.
You don’t go on observing tours to cities in the US like this, so you haven’t seen this resurgence of the 90s raver pant leg on women that seems to be happening in the UK — the big elephant leg hiding an entire shoe. You welcome seeing it because it tells you that maybe that music from the UK in the 90s is still hanging on. The raver/dark hippie clothes maybe never truly left the British Isles. You want to find a record store where they will still have that techno music you were obsessed with. But you can’t find it as you’re a dumb tourist and not a local purist.
The distance between tourist and native is heightened on the double decker tour bus around Bath. The frame rate acceleration of seeing all the individual people on the sidewalk as you ride omnisciently above them. Glimpsing all their lives, the gesture-life, the movements. Some non-American demiurge, something older than druids, coordinates all this effortless reticulum and mixture of people on the sidewalks.
Bath Abbey, the most striking building in the heart of Bath, is not a cathedral because it is not the seat of a bishop, but with its flying buttresses, it is gothic, as close to true gothic as a rural American country boy like yourself will ever see. You spent an afternoon sketching the architecture like an insufferable pseudo intellectual tourist. The square outside Bath Abbey has four lengths of wrought-iron benches where tourists sit and listen to musical performances from professional buskers. The musicians rotate on previously agreed 30-minute shifts, and likewise the pigeons or seagulls or whatever they are rotate around the square getting up close and personal to tourists, looking for food.
In the square the buskers with samplers and audio gear layer guitar tones and ukulele ripples. The gentle public music indicates family friendly zones, narcotizing. Two or four bars of a backing rhythm guitar are recorded, sampled, played on a loop beneath the lead guitar played in ghostly arrangement by the busker. Bob Dylan “All Along the Watchtower.” Pitched well at the age and class of the tourists around the square. Fat man lip-synching to Dylan. Tourists support the busker by purchasing his album as a digital download off a QR code propped up in front of his guitar case open on the flagstones, where he still is willing to collect the outmoded “filthy lucre” of the realm’s coinage bearing the dead Queen’s likeness. Technology of the busker seems to undercut the beggar’s appeal of his performance. “It’s not cheating, I think, if it’s you on the backing track,” he says into the microphone, cutting off the purist’s unspoken criticism.
Asian people pose by the Abbey for pictures, the floral-based organic finery shapes of the stained glass Gothic (big-G) windows. The Chinese fashion plate annoys her friends and family in front of the abbey facade. She’s hopping and insisting on photos and they’re over it. A guy with WH Auden’s lined face in sneakers and photo equipment taking pictures of the abbey, wait, no, he’s taking pictures of his Asian girlfriend. Before you left you bought JG Ballard’s High-Rise at Topping & Co Booksellers, housed in a Georgian faux-Greek temple structure on York Street. The bookstore clerk looked unimpressed with your purchase, and you noticed it, as if he was supposed to be thrilled by your selection as a foreign connoisseur of English fiction. Traveling to the UK to buy a Ballard novel at a well-stocked bookstore is as lame in its way as buying a tea-tray with Princess Diana’s face on it, the “cheap tray” of Morrissey’s “Everyday is Like Sunday.” Is this contempt under the surface in Bath like that movie In Bruges where the criminals hate the tourism of the city? If we only knew what the tourist believed, what he had in his heart, the tackiness of the tourist’s values. The residents of Bath — busker, shopgirl, pigeon or rat — know the secret full well.
-- Jesse Hilson is a writer from the Catskills in New York State. He has been published in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Exacting Clam, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Maudlin House, and other publications. He has written two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a poetry collection, Handcuffing the Venus de Milo; and a short story collection The Calendar Factory. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @platelet60.