Sweet Sorrow, Juliet...

Dear Juliet

Parting is such sweet sorrow, and 'tis sorrowful to be apart...

(Romeo and Juliet, paraphrased)

There was an early start for the bus and though it seemed all the world was at my feet, some sense of tristesse.

That said, best foot forward and find what fate inspires upon the morrow.

Victoria Coach Station's actually in Belgravia, and I'd found a fine coffee house on the Tuesday near Chester Square. Nice place to visit, but I don't think I'll ever be able to stay.

From there to Brick Lane and the flipside of the coin. It seemed I'd gone straight from Made in Chelsea to Bangladesh via Rippertown (Whitechapel). I was actually in the East End's vibrant Bangladeshi district. With my quasi-Indian heritage, I'm quite at home with this, although I'm more accustomed to Tamil, Hindi and Urdu than Sylheti.

Historically, it seems Sylheti sailors worked as lascar seamen on British ships and settled around the East London docks from the 1850s onwards. More Bangladeshis arrived from 1947 to rebuild the UK after World War Two, still more to escape 1971's Bangladesh Liberation War.

If I get back there, I'm definitely going to one of the coffee houses, followed by a trip to the Babel Grill House (famed for its Lebanese mixed grill platter)...

The Lane itself was a smorgasbord of red, green and most other colours of the rainbow intermingled with the smell of seasoned Kafta and Meshwi in the hot, thick air as Britain's brief Bangladeshi-style heatwave was on.

From there to Southwark Cathedral, and the most important part of the day. Not meeting and mingling with the glitterati and literati...

But lighting those candles.

Suffice to say, it was done. And I said words for Tony and for yourself.

It was all maybe a bit cliquey and I'm not one of the chattering classes, but they did serve great Rocky Road and I mooched about amiably enough, only to be surprised to find that a measly 4% of published works are by disabled/neurodivergent authors whereas ca. 20-25% of the nation has problems.

I'm not sure what I can do about this apart from loudly shouting that Chaplin Books published Dear Miss Landau fourteen years ago, and as Harriet Gilbert (A Good Read) said at the time, "you get a bit fed up with fictions where characters with Aspergers or autism are there as kind of a device in order to explore the meaning of truth or goodness ... this is somebody who really has to live with Aspergers describing his world for us."

It's funny being a forgotten pioneer.

Come the next historic day, Andy Burnham's by-election was raucously bad news for the reeling government and while Starmer didn't resign on the 19th, it's increasingly looking like that result is the pivotal moment upon which his premiership will fall.

He's spending this weekend at Chequers with his family, who are probably trying to find nice ways to tell him he's too boring and uninspired to lead the country. Let's hope nobody hands him a loaded revolver and leaves him alone in the library...

And as the British state's foundations rocked and rolled like Elvis on a bad day, I made my happy way across the Millennium Bridge to the Globe.

Suffice to say Shakespeare's Globe was slotted into a small space between skyscrapers and right next to a Starbucks. A polygon of unseasoned oak, sentinel to a bygone age.

A tour guide called Cockney Mick took us round. I dared to say "Macbeth" inside the theatre. I guess I'll burn in Hell for that, and as depictions of Hell come up from beneath the stage during a show, I suppose you could say I was on a Hellmouth. I wish you could have seen it.

I was pretty damn surprised to find out there was a copy of the First Folio on the premises, right next to the gift shop. I'd honestly expected works of such value to be locked away somewhere while copies were shown to the public; but no, there it was. Unfortunately not for sale and open at the first page of Hamlet.

I'm used to seeing stuff like this, and even I was a bit gobsmacked.

Last stop but one: the recreation of the Golden Hinde. The original ship made Francis Drake the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. The recreation crossed the Atlantic in 1974-1975, dropping anchor in San Francisco Bay 8th May 1975.

It was very small and rather cramped. The gun deck was only about four feet high and I nearly got a close-up view of the latrine. It was real history, but I think I'd prefer the Enterprise-A.

Last stop along the way was Parliament Square's splendid lawn, and it seemed Old London, bald and grey, was raised anew upon the by-election day...

Once more, lascars slaved on the docks as Drake's Golden Hinde hove into port, but of this Starmer gave no thought.

"I am constant as the northern star," said he, "of whose true-fix-d and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament."

But unlike Shylock, Burnham had won back his bond and said to his supporters:

"Think of Starmer as a serpent's egg which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous and kill him in the shell."

So I stepped away that summer's day, leaving Shylock's serpents to their play.

And took the last freedom moped out of Nowhere City!

Love,

James