Like a pendulum do

We’re back from four days in London. I’d spent a week there back in 1979, but in imaginative terms, it’s like my second home—the city of Shakespeare and his kings; the city of Micawber and Moll Flanders and Clarissa Dalloway and the 101 Dalmatians.

Since Jonetta and Louis had never been to London, and I hadn’t been there since Johnny was still Rotten, we mostly stuck to the high tourist ground, starting with Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, where we watched a spirited reenactment of Wat Tyler’s rebellion. We exhausted ourselves in the massive Tate Modern museum, and watched 30 minutes of “Burial at Thebes” from the groundling area in the new Globe Theatre. (This was an opera based on a play by Seamus Heaney based in turn on Antigone by Sophocles.)

We saw the Elgin Marbles (the exterior sculptures from the Parthenon which the Brits are holding on to for safekeeping—any century now the Greeks can have them back) and the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. We visited Harrod’s. A lot of walking, a lot of standing and looking.

One of my favorite stops was the house of Samuel Johnson at number 3 Gough Square, a small 18th century enclave hidden away behind the modern facades of the financial district near Fleet Street. We arrived just as the house opened to the public on a smoky Monday morning, and had the place entirely to ourselves.

It was a rather small house, four floors with two rooms per floor. The first dictionary of the English language was written in the attic. Johnson was a man of inexhaustible intellectual energy who didn’t see why he couldn’t absorb and explain everything there was to know about history and ideas and literature. A large homely man prone to distracting facial tics, Johnson was a Tory who instinctively distrusted anything novel or extracurricular—including the political agitations of the American colonists. But he was also a gregarious man with many friends and a great wit.

We were able to emulate Johnson in spending two evenings in pleasant discourse while in London: one with Retini, an old friend of mine from New York who has lived in England for almost 30 years (and has the accent to prove it), the other with Ashley, a fellow Seattlite who has been living a hand-to-mouth student existence commuting from Brixton to Somerset House for the past year.

When I visited London in ’79 it was my first trip outside of North America. It seemed a distant, foreign place. Arriving in London from Copenhagen this year, it almost felt like coming home.

[The post title is from a Roger Miller song, circa 1967:

England swings like a pendulum do

Bobbies on bicycle two by two

Westminster Abbey the Tower of Big Ben

The rosy red cheeks on the little children.

I used to think it was "England swings like a pelican's wings." But that's neither here nor there.]

Stuff

At 7:00 on Friday morning the moving truck arrived. We watched from the upstairs window as a built-in crane swung the container off the truck and onto the ground:

You might imagine that we’d be thrilled to be reunited with the bulk of our worldly goods. Shows what you know. We’ve been dreading this day for weeks.

As we were leaving Seattle we had no idea what kind of home we’d find for ourselves in Denmark. Maybe a house in the country, or maybe an apartment in town. We raced to dispose of as much excess as we could, but as departure day approached, we became distracted. Then the movers showed up and the wrapping began. There were four of them, tall and strong, and they moved through our house with the single-minded tenacity of locusts. They didn’t question, they didn’t reflect, they wrapped: dirty laundry, rocks, newspapers, whatever they found.

Fast-forward almost three months. We have rented a house in the Østerbro neighborhood of north Copenhagen. But it’s a small house—not quite half has big as our Seattle house. And it’s furnished. It was never our intention to rent a furnished house, but we didn’t see any reason to pass on a good deal just because of some minor…redundancies. There was an upside: No lamps or sofa to buy, and the furniture the owners had purchased for the tiny rooms in the house seemed just right. They offered to put some of it in storage, but we hesitated, and then they were gone. To Vietnam, for four years.

So once the lease was signed in mid-September we began to plan. We looked at rentable storage units—too expensive. We created a spreadsheet where we listed every large item we could remember shipping and assigned it to one of the five floors in the house—the attic was our ace in the hole. Worst come to worst, we could even use one of the two bedrooms on the third floor for storage. Just cram it full of stuff.

They unloading went smoothly enough. We took turns walking outside to see how much more was in the truck. What we saw was a wall of boxes and packages, with further rows behind. We looked in vain for the back wall of the truck. With cigarette breaks every 20 minutes, the five movers were done by 12:30. They uncrated a dozen or so paintings, and screwed the legs back onto a table or two, but for the most part they left the unpacking to us. Armed with knives, scissors, and plastic bags, we set to work.

Sixty hours later, we’re more or less done. I thought it would be unpleasant but I was wrong. It was ghastly. How did we come to own this much stuff? I say “we,” but I’m the worst offender. Sixty t-shirts, forty long-sleeve button down shirts, thirty short-sleeve shirts. How exactly did this happen? I guess at some point I just stopped getting rid of old stuff, while I continued acquiring new stuff. In the past it’s been books that have been my undoing, but this time I’d put three-quarters of my books—about 40 boxes--into storage. Ah, but the 500 CDs. And the clothes.

Jonetta had about 10 large boxes marked “kitchen” to deal with. Large as in big enough to hold a full-sized adult. She started in at 9:30 on Saturday morning and was done by 10:00.—p.m. It was like two parallel universes colliding in slow motion. Yankee blender—meet Euro blender. Yellow Ikea plasticware, meet you blue cousins from across the sea. Half-consumed boxes and bags of food were summarily tossed into the garbage. This was their reward for passing successfully through the Panama Canal. But you can’t take chances—rice grains should not be able to move around on their own like that.

Upstairs I was unwrapping what seemed like an endless series of Christmas presents from a lunatic. At the center of a large ball of paper I would find—six pens and a rock! You shouldn’t have. A candle with a plastic holder. Three bags of marbles. Automotive supplies! Too bad we left our cars in the states. Fifteen canvas totes, nine backpacks. Two printers. Enough camping equipment for a six-month expedition to Nepal. A boom-box: useless. A brand-new big-screen TV: also useless (the house comes with four TVs). Notebooks, cassette tapes, computer mice, paper clips, connector cords, wire hangars, wooden hangars, plastic hangars…

We shipped five bicycles from the US. After arriving, Louis and I got new bikes for commuting. The house owners left us four bikes in the front yard. That’s 11 bikes for three people. They will all sit out in the rain all winter unless we find someplace dry to store them. Not likely.

Life is first a process of accumulating, and then a process of getting rid of it all. It’s pathetic to extend the accumulation phase too long—it’s like a granny in a pinafore. When you’re gone, nobody will want your stuff, anyway. Granted, these are special circumstances, but I grow profoundly resentful of the claims that things make on us. I’ve allowed myself to feel too affectionate toward things. Maybe for no other reason than that I’ve owned them for a long time. I have to become ruthless. The darned threadbare towel that my great aunt Margaret repaired was tossed. Sorry.

So, the initial phase is about done. The house has a bit of a museum-like quality to it. There is stuff everywhere. A queen-size mattress and box-spring are lodged in the downstairs hallway because they couldn’t be pushed any further into the house. We await the opportunity to Heimlich them out into a waiting truck. We’re looking for takers. No offers refused, reasonable or otherwise.