Yesterday was another lovely, very sunny and very windy London afternoon.

In Islington Green we paid our respects to Bob the Street Cat who was sadly hit and killed by a vehicle last year. His statue was inaugurated this summer. We found it very effective and a worthy addition to cat homages in the great wen. (I have written a post about other London felines at https://longoio3.com/2017/12/21/i-gatti-di-londra/).

We climbed the Elysian heights of Primrose Hill where Blake conversed with the Spiritual Sun. (I have written a post in Italian on this at https://longoio3.com/2019/07/09/il-prato-fiorito-di-londra/).

Primrose Hill is also where the Cymric bards held their first British get-together under Iolo Morganwg:

and we also met some gorgeous multicoloured parrots.

On our way home we had our usual encounters with street – and bridge – art which also included Captain Tom.

These are some of yesterday’s glimpses, in a grimly blustering afternoon, of an otherwise nondescript area of London with both good and bad points intertwined.

No longer a low-rise capital in the suburbs with rising executive tower blocks overpowering thirties semis:

The boarded-up pubs by the canals:

Still by the canals, mini-libraries where I picked up a rare volume by Stefan Zweig:

Quirky front gardens (where they have not been paved over for car space):

Colourful zebras:

Pioneering thirties modernist underground stations by Charles Holden:

and much else including lovely wild flowers in open spaces

street (and towpath) art,

and children’s play areas finally re-opened.

Today we spent an afternoon at Bhaktivedanta Ashram, donated to ISKON (Krishna Consciousness) by George Harrison in 1973.

Harrison’s 1970 triple album ‘All things must pass’ with its hit single ‘My sweet Lord’ remains a favourite and shows clearly the ex-Beatles’ path to a new spiritual world. We also have been visitors to the Italian Hare Krishna centre at Villa Vrinidavan beautifully situated in a renaissance villa near Florence and about which we have written a post at https://longoio3.com/2020/11/02/villa-vrindavana/

At Bhaktivedanta manor we participated in a Shraddha puja celebrated to express love and gratitude to departed family members.

We enjoyed our delicious prasad.

We walked in the manor’s lovely gardens dedicated to George Harrison.

and visited some very happy cows on the Hare Krishna farm, one of which was being milked by hand (as they all are).

There are precious places which resonate in our hearts and minds. This is a special one for us.

Returning from Gunnersbury yesterday we noted a long traffic jam. Hardly any of the vehicles were moving. Was it an accident? Or just the standard North Circular pile-up? No. It was a queue to get petrol at the local filling station. I had only seen such scenes before on TV reports from distraught third world countries.

Yes, delivery shortages are everywhere to be seen in London now. People will argue over whether it’s due to lack of HGV drivers, brexit or covid. The fact is I’m glad we still have a decent public transport system in our capital city.

PS Congratulations to the employee-gardeners at South Ken underground station.

Today we visited the Rothschild mansion to enjoy its museum.

The family’s ‘piano nobile’ has some spectacular rooms which today are still used for receptions like weddings and conferences.

The kitchens give a clear indication of the magnificent dinner parties the Rothchilds held.

I hesitated at the mock turtle soup, however.

Run by volunteers the museum offers a fine local historical collection.

The museum also hosts an amazing variety of courses from stained glass to Tai Chi, Gong baths and perfume making this is a truly living historical space which, like so much of London, is getting back to as normal a life as is possible after the worst health crisis of our time.

Gunnersbury Park goes back a long way in our memory. We are always glad to return to it and to see it so well looked after and loved.

Yesterday we attended an exquisite organ recital of largely French Baroque music at the beautifully enflowered Wren church of Saint Margaret Lothbury.

We then took the DLR to visit the London Docklands Museum, a sophisticated display of what made London a great city, port and heart of empire: world trade and commerce.

Little was lost in describing its extreme facets: East Enders’ exploitation and poverty with the misery of Axis bombing, slavery’s capital crime, landed gentry’s enrichment of their country houses, revolutionary advances in ship-building and tunnel-boring. …and much else.

Today ‘docklands’ no longer means London’s port, dockers, clippers, merchants, gibbets, laskars, bordellos and bodies in the Thames. It’s now also lush riverside penthouses, modish restaurants, luxury cruise liners and an executive airport.

However, the former port’s international outlook continues to influence London as a exemplary multicultural capital. Besides, London is still a port city except that that part has now moved downstream to Tilbury.

Yesterday we were at Eastbourne with friends going back to schooldays on a glorious early autumn day. It’s the jewel in the crown of England’s South Coast seaside resorts with elegant Edwardian hotels,

a golden pier

and a fine marina.

Favoured by Debussy (who completed his tone-poem ‘La Mer’ in the Grand Hotel there) and Elgar, Eastbourne’s hinterland has such breathtaking places as Birling gap, the Seven Sisters

and Pevensey Castle;

all framed by the idyllic landscape of the South Downs.

Often belittled by those more used to Caribbean islands or South Sea lagoons the English seaside holds places which have still the capacity to enchant wonderfully.

This is summer’s last – soon wild storms shall break
the drowsy peace, and resistless rain patter
upon the sun-baked earth, and trees shall ache
to the unleashing wind scattering all matter.

Our animals know and expectant wait:
the autumn comes late, the ducks sit sedate,
and sometimes catch flies on the yellowed lawn,
or fix upon an unseen woodland faun.

The cats stretch themselves into the lulled evening
or stare at unknown worlds beyond windows,
beyond the forests, beyond the meadows
while apples and olives perfèct sapped ripening.

Another season passes and time goes by
for who knows when we’ll be for ever away?

FP.

Another wonderland to wander into London. As a kid I would cycle through an area of decaying docks and corrugated iron fences. Now I felt as if I was transported into a weird version of Shanghai by the Thames. In both cases, wealth created by the sweat of navvies and enjoyed by the ‘privileged classes.’

While women in Afghanistan, under increasing Taliban oppression, have ‘do not to touch my clothes’ campaigns protesting against having to fully cover themselves up in black, it is ironic that in the UK there are converse campaigns to have women fully covering themselves up in black.

It’s true that many emigrants preserve more conservative attitudes than the inhabitants of the countries they have left. In Delhi, for example, I found girls much more ‘westernly’ dressed than those in Bradford! But, meanwhile, too many women are in fear of their lives in countries ruled by mega-patriarchal political systems (which, according to today’s BBC news, also touches the UK parliament…).

Afghani women’s dress is beautifully colourful.

(Sandra wearing an Afghan Dress).

Are we then to suppose that those who cover up in black in the UK are sympathisers of Talebanic ideology? (…which word, ‘Taliban’, means ‘student’, the very right to be one they have denied women).

Meanwhile I note that the ex-isis member Shamima Begum, dispossessed of her UK citizenship and now in a middle eastern refugee camp, has changed her ‘look’ from this

To this…..