Neverwhere

As part of my fascination with London Underground, I borrowed the BBC TV series "Neverwhere" and watched the six-parts in about two days. "Neverwhere" was written by Neil Gaiman (of "Coraline" and "American Gods" fame). The story follows Richard Oliver Mayhew, a securities manager, who, whilst on a his way to dinner with his fiancee's boss, stumbles across a girl who is clearly injured. He takes her home and helps her out and the next day, she thanks him, disappears and that's when Richard discovers that nobody else can see him anymore. He passes into what's called London Below, a whole world that exist underground. While attempting to navigate life in London Below, he also attempts to help Door, the girl he rescued, discover what happened to her family and how she can protect herself. They meet various characters, including the mysterious Marquis de Carabas, a guide named Anaesthesia, a bodyguard named Hunter and try to avoid being captured by two assassins, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandermar. Eventually, Door and Richard are successful in finding out who killed Door's family and being to work towards unity and peace in London Below. Richard is given the opportunity to go back to London Above but after a few days there, he decides that London Below is truly where he belongs and goes back down.

Here is how London Above and Below are explained: “Young man," he said, "understand this: there are two Londons. There's London Above―that's where you lived―and then there's London Below―the Underside―inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you're one of them. Good night.” 

My favorite part of Neverwhere is how in London Below, the names of familiar areas or tube stop names in London take on new meaning. Knightsbridge becomes "Night's Bridge", a stone bridge whose darkness takes it toll in human life- guide Anaesthesia is lost to the Night's Bridge. The Angel, Islington, is an actual angel, but not necessarily a good one. As a part of their quest, Door and Richard visit the Old Bailey, a man fascinated by birds, the Earls of Earls Court and the Baron of Baron's Court. I was constantly amazed by the cleverness of the puns of the names.

What follows are three clips that will help you understand what I've been watching.

What adds to the creativity of "Neverwhere" is that after the production was complete, Neil Gaiman wrote a novel that was essentially "Neverwhere" in book form. Rumor has it that Neil didn't mind when producers took out certain elements from the series because he knew it could just put it back into the book later. It was interesting to read the book after seeing the series and knowing that the series came before the book- usually it's the other way around. Neil didn't necessarily follow his description of characters based on the actors and I know people found issues with that but I didn't mind. And I certainly read the book a lot quicker, knowing what was coming.

If you need convincing to read or watch this, let me end with some of my favorite quotes.

"You are all very stupid people and you don't know anything." -The Abbot of the Black Friars (see what they did there??)

The Marquis De Carabas: I thought it was just a legend, like the alligators in the sewers of New York.
Old Bailey: What, the big white ones? Oh, they're down there. I had a friend who lost a head to one of them. He's all right, he had another one.

"This ordeal of yours, how much of an ordeal is it? Is this the kind of ordeal like going to visit a rather elderly, ill-kempt, and female relative is an ordeal Or is this kind of ordeal more like a... like a plunging your hand into scalding hot water to see how fast it takes off the skin sort of ordeal?" -Richard Mayhew

Richard Mayhew: Can I ask a question?
The Marquis de Carabas: No. You don't ask any questions. You don't get any answers. You don't stray from the path. You don't even think about what's happening to you right now. Got it?
Richard: Excuse me, I know this is a personal question, but are you clinically insane?
The Marquis: It's very unlikely. Why?
Richard: Well, one of us must be.

"Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly."

"There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike."

Definitely recommend reading "Neverwhere". And watching the series. And enjoying the new version of what London Underground might be like.

London Under London

 

I stumbled across both of these books a few weeks ago and it's taken me awhile to read them but what they contained was absolutely fascinating. I never gave much thought to the goings-on underneath London streets but I have a whole new appreciate for those dark depths. 

Underground stations used duing air-raids and eventually became just like homes for people. Some essentially became communities- ‘Tilbury’ and ‘Mickey’s Shelter’ were areas that had people making order outo f the chaos. There were elected chairman and had shelter marshals and people who recorded everyday life underground. Some of my favorite sketches and paintings about the Underground are from Henry Moore.

Over 100 miles of underground rivers in London, both north and south of the Thames. Some feed into the Thames, some rose to ground level to supply ponds in various parks or the Serpentine in Hyde Park. You can still follow the courses of thses streams, from the hills that look down over London, through the gentle valleys and backyard ravine, to the Thames. Each of London’s underground rivers can be walked in an afternoon, though for some of them you should make it a long afternoon. You can check your course by the slight pressure of the gradient on your ankle. And should you tire, your feet aching, remember John Stow.

underground river

John Stow devoted a lifetime’s study to London and gave the more comprehensive picture of what London looked like before the Great Fire, including all the rivers that at one point were above ground and are now beneath. These include the Walbrook, The Fleet, The Tynbourne, Stanford Brooke, Effra (which reminds me of Watership Down for some reason), The Nieckinger and Earl’s Sluice.

Even though these rivers are underground, they are still incredibly important in aiding with flushing sewage out of London. London has always had a problem with waste, most glaring realized during the “Great Stink” of the 19^th century. The chapter called “Bowels of the Earth” had more awful puns about smells and excrement than I have ever seen before but also had incredible descriptions about what it’s like to travel through the bowels of London. “That’s what we call muck, down ‘ere. It collects and blocks everything. Ur job’s shoveling it up. Fancy it? Gotta wach it , though, even if you're only walking.” Imagine that being your job- although this is a job that has been part of London since the 1300s, when men called gong fermors would clean the streets and lanes of all dirt, dung and filth. But it was too little too late, the bowels of medieval London had become well and truly constipated. See what I mean about the bad puns?

Greenwich Foot Tunnel- cool and dark

Interestingly enough, there had been many people intent on improving London’s waste system, including the invention of the water closet in 1596 and a plan for a sewer system after the Great Fire but these were never adopted. It wasn’t until things were so terrible during the Victorian age that things began to get done. Today, the sewers that are under London are patched up version of the Victorian system. They’ve developed essentially robots/hovercrafts that patch up the narrower areas and men go down to unclog the larger areas. Yet the only reason that waste is able to be flushed out of London is thanks to those underground rivers and their waters.

The chapters on electricity, cable, post office trains, etc., were confusing and yet fascinating at the same time. The descriptions of how they created all the underground tunnels, including the Greenwich footpath under the Thames was absolutely fascinating. The Ackroyd book explained it a lot better than the older book. Essentially what they did was create a large, mechanical, metal version of a ship-worm. What it does is eat the timber of a ship, creating more space and then passes the wood through its body; its excreta is then used to bolster the fabric of the tunnel it has created.” Essentially what Marc Brunel did was create a larger version which would allowe workers, as the engine advanced, to carve out clay and then allowe a team of men in the rear to line the newly uncovered piece of tunnel with brick and stone. Although the system worked, there were many casualties, lots of injuries, frequent bouts of flooding and an eventual takeover by Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (BEST.NAME.EVER.)  But because of these tunnels, the post office was able to transport mail under the city streets, electricity and cable lines can run back and forth and keep the city lit and watching the BBC and ITV and in some of them, you can use to walk underneath the Thames without fear of getting too wet.

I have this t-shirt- naturally....

Of course, there must be attention paid to the Underground, the Tube, itself. The first line to ever be created was the Metropolitan Railway, and both books chronicled the massive undertaking it was to create this underground system ot trains. I already knew quite a lot about the creation of the underground but here are some of my favorite pieces of new trivia. Initially, there needed to be a way for the some and steam of the underground engine to be diverted and so engineers build a dummy pair of houses at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, W2. Identical to their adjoining houses, their facades consist of nothing more than a five-foot wall. Artificial windows and doors were built but behind the façade is the excess steam from the Metopolitan Line. Leinster Gardens is right next to where we stayed on the London trip- if only I had known! Additionally, the Underground used to have conductors shouting out the next stops since it was so hard to see out the dirty windows. One thing that you never think about is how dirty the Underground gets- and I don’t mean just mud and dirt from people’s feet. Each night, between 1:00-5:00 am, people clean up asbestos from the brake linings, human hair and skin, and what is left behind by signal crews, maintenance teams, engineering gangs, billboard men and cleaners, along with the millions of people who ride the Tube each day. The Underground Tube map that everyone knows so well is so much more geometrically than the actual twists and turns of the underground lines and tunnels, which is evidenced by anyone who has ever chaned lines at any major station. The underground has “ghost stations” and also passes through many burial grounds and plague pits, which just adds to the eerie effect it can have on people. Bill Bryson explains in "Notes from a Small Island" how you can get rid of friends for the day- give them the names of two underground stations and let them spend the afternoon traveling from one to the other without telling them that they were actually around the corner from each other above ground...

The Cabinet War Rooms are the most well-known underground shelters in London, other than the Tube, but there were also hundreds more shelters created during WWII that are now used for other things- Post Office stations, Doctor Who series, Security Archives, etc.. 600 acres of office space were built up under Storey’s Gate prior to WWII, protected by seventy feet of concrete, just in case they were needed during air raids. Up until recently, the Crown Jewels were kept in a bunker beneath the Tower and the London Silver Vaults are below the ground of Chancery Lane. A journalist from the New Statesman, Duncan Campell, found his own tunnel portal on a traffic island on Bethnal Green Road, descended 100 feet with his bicycle and proceeded to ride under the ground. He passed through the tunnel beneath St. Martin-le-Grand and then to Holborn via Fleet Street, noticing that Whitehall, the Mall, Leicester Square, Waterloo and Lord’s Cricket Ground were all connected by a system of tennels. Cardinal Wolsley’s Wine Cellar lies underneath the Mnistry of Defense and can still be seen by certain historical groups today.

 

After reading two books about London, I certainly learned a lot. But here’s the most important thing that I learned: There is a lot more going on underneath our feet than we can ever imagine or begin to comprehend.

Think about it… 

The (Mis)Adventures of the CMCs

Miss Kelsey's wedding was last weekend and although it was a total and complete blast, there were some misadventures. Nothing too terrible but certainly funny now looking back at it. 

On Friday, Regan and I met everyone over at the amphitheater for rehearsal. The wedding party practiced processing, the readers practiced reading, and then that was it No practicing with the music Why did I bring my cello over!? Luckily Regan and I didn't need to know where Blatchley was, so we tried out the acoustics in the amphitheater for a bit, figured out where I should sit and got that all sorted before going over to Simplot to help figure out what we needed to set up. My favorite part of the wedding decor was all the book features- the table setings were on old books and the name cards were on old book inserts. Love the creativity!

 

The next day had a few snafus at the start. I headed over to the school at noon like I was supposed to and waiting there for me was a delivery of chairs. I helped the guy bring them into the ampitheater and turns out there were 20 extra ones. I just took that to mean they threw in a few extras. How kind. I headed home and about an hour and a half later, I got a call from the chair rental company saying that they were so sorry the chairs hadn't been delivered yet. Huh?... I told them we had chairs and they called back in a bit saying that their delivery for us hadn't gone out. I told them I'd give them a call when I got to campus and went to meet Regan. Clearly they thought I was incompetant because when I got to campus, Regan was on the phone with them. She talked to them while I fielded a call from teh cupcake company and when we were both off the phone we went to investigate. I called Tracylea to see if there were any other groups on campus and she said it was just us- nobody else was on campus and would need 75 chairs. Luckily the name of the chair company was on the chairs so we called them and they confirmed that there was definitely a delivery for a Kelsey Keyes. We finally came to the conluclusion that Kelsey and Brad had maybe double-booked chairs and we told the second chair company to not deliver anything. We didn't need 130 chairs. We started to set up the 75 that we had when I got a text that they cupcakes were five minutes away. 20 minutes later, tey showed up. Thse were 20 minutes that we could have been setting up chairs. They didn't even have a total for us and Regan told me later that they charged Kelsey way less than Kelsey expected. I love discounts because of incompetancy. I finished setting up the chairs (sweating all the way), we finished setting things up in Simplot, waved at Kelsey and Brad taking pictures and finally were able to head home to change and get pretty fo thew edding. Regan came over for a small glass of wine beforehand. It was much needed.

our substitute for a shot of tequila or vodka

The wedding itself was beautiful. It wasn't too hot, I wasn't too nervous playing, everything went off well except for some random person yelling something inappropriate once (Regan went after them and had campus safety on speed-dial in case it happened again). The ceremony was beautiful and we got the chairs taken down and the amphitheater cleaned up in no time flat. Then it was cocktail hours where we got a chance to take pictures with the pretty bride before things got too busy for her. The apps were delicious and all the wine and beer were local vendors and we also filled out answers for a trivia game to get us to dinner first (although technically we really wanted to get to dessert first).

DOMINATED trivia- except the DJ didn't always have the same answers we did....

My favorite parts of weddings? The D's- dancing and dessert. I eventually kicked off both my heels and my rainbows and we boogied in bare feet. Greg and Aly were my BFFs on the dance floor, and we were constantly hydrated by wine. No better way to dance. The desserts were also delicious, especially the cupcakes. We went back for seconds and thirds.

 

me and Aly

it also happened to be Chris' bday

C of I- Katie, Regan, me, Aly

dapper Jasper

Kelsey's little nephew was a demon on the dance floor and her wedding party put together a flash mob for them (she and Brad kept trying to jump in and then were shooed out). Great music, good old-skool hits and lots of fun.

K's nephew

flash mob

dance floor

dancing fiends

favorite picture of the night- McElwains and the bride

CMCs for lyfe

At the end of the party, Regan and I helped tear things down. The worst part was bringing the card catalog back into the library- it was too big and bulky and I felt like I was the walking like an ape. And it bruised my arms afterwards. But I'm so glad that I was able to help out and take care of the day-of details so that the Iverson-Long-Keyes could enjoy their wedding. Kelsey and Brad, so glad I could be part of your special day! Happy wedding!

Zoo Boise

So after six years of living in Boise, I finally went to visit the zoo. I was at Brooke and Kevin's for the weekend, so I decided to run down to Julia Davis Park and meet up with Niki (who came bearing coffee) to wander through the zoo. For a zoo its size, it actually had some pretty great things- I loved the wallaby section and it was great to finally see the Hank the Giraffe in person, after usually seeing him over the wall when I park. There were quite a lot of monkeys- maybe a little bit too many monkeys- but I loved the lions, tigers and cheetahs and the penguins. 

The butterfly exhibit, which cost $1 extra, was phenomenal. The butterflies would land on us and on the pieces of fruit that were around the enclosure. It brought me back to 2nd grade, learning about the life cycle of a butterfly and also learning all about camaflogue. I loved the ones with the big eyes that made them look larger than they were. Certainly worth the extra buck. I would highly recommend it.

Elephant Shrew- neither an elephant or a shrew 

Baby wallaby

Old school!

My friend Hank the Giraffe!

It's no National Zoo, no San Diego Zoo or Wild Animal Park but for the size of the town and the size of the space, there is certainly a lot to see and worth an afternoon or morning. But be careful being there in the summer- it's pretty inexpensive so moms will take their kids and if you don't like too many children, avoid until the later afternoon or once school starts.