The last weekend in Harlow was fun. Simple, unadulterated fun – no pretensions of anything else but. After baking rows and rows of shortbread cookies, blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, and molasses buns (and eating more than a few for supper) on Saturday night, it was time to head over to the Crown.
Not much changes inside that little pub, with most of the same people hanging around the bar at all times, but that’s not always a bad thing. Ever since the first weekend in September, when we took that 17-year-old Lucy’s advice to graffiti the wall in the Crown’s alleyway, we’ve had a bit of a connection to the spot – not to mention a geographic convenience. The bar was all adorned in Christmas lights, with a tree perched in the corner. It’s still November, but once you get in that mood, good luck coming out of it anytime soon.
After the Crown’s last call around midnight, we came back to the Maltings for a little while only, before we grabbed some cabs to the Harlow Town Centre. In the daytime, it’s a generic strip mall. At night, it’s a shady place where you’d be crazy to go alone, where police cars wait around every corner and dudes go as far as the threshold of a greasy all-night restaurant before they take a piss. It’s also the spot where Seen Nightclub is.
There’s something to be said about Seen, and none of it is very good, except maybe for the fact that they close at 4 am (except then you’re at Harlow Town Centre at 4 am). I’d never gone before, but early in September a small crowd of East Coast pioneers went to Seen and came back with all kinds of stories about the sleazy English nightclub. The weekend I was gone to Paris, even more people went.
Seen could have been a festering hole in the ground where the festering is actually coming from dead puppies, for all I cared – I just really, really wanted to go. So when we got there and the bouncers wouldn’t take our Canadian IDs – even though there were close to a dozen of us with the same kind of IDs – and then refused to let us talk to the manager, I was about ready to make a scene. Remember the cops that I said were waiting around every corner?
I went to the police to try to get into Seen.
Jaysus, I can’t even take that seriously, and I was there. Anyway, that didn’t work either, and I never got my Seen experience. Though they assured us, if we had our passports, we’d be able to get in – which is what I guess we should have assumed. Who doesn’t bring their most important piece of identification out with them when they go clubbing in the freakin’ Harlow Town Centre?
Anyway, the cops were kind enough to point us to another club, just further along the stretch of closed-down shops. TwentyOneBar is in cahoots with Seen, but they took our IDs (even though we assumed their name meant you had to be twenty-one, which we all most assuredly were not) and only charged us £2, compared to the £7 Seen was prepared to swindle off of us.
Going to TwentyOne was something like going to Konfusion the first time on George Street – oh dear God, get me out of here, these kids are in high school, and I’m pretty sure I need a shower before I do anything else, but I kind of needed to go there, exactly once. I went to the bathroom, and some dude was standing up along the sink, with rows of colognes. I looked for the soap dispenser and couldn’t find it, but then he whipped out a bottle and gave me a squirt. Oh, I thought, well this is a pretty nice dude.
Once I’d washed my hand, he even gave me a spray of cologne on my wrists. Wow, I thought, this is pretty cool. Screw you, Seen.
Then he pointed to the damn tip dish. Uh oh. Now, I’m not exactly uncultured, but my dealings with bathroom attendants is pretty limited. I reached into my pocket, grabbed a cornucopia of coins, and tried to put it in his hands.
“No,” says he, shaking his head. “Dig deeper.”
Umm . . . what? Abort, abort, I need to get out of here! I gave him a five pound note, mostly because I was imagining the headlines of the cheap Canadian who got shanked in Harlow, and he gave me back £2. I’m not sure why that guy charged me £3 to watch me pee and give me something that you can get by rubbing the cologne ads in Rolling Stone, but so be it.
We didn’t linger too long at the club, taking off for an after-hours pizza joint. My donair – called doners over here, what a country – took an extra half hour because they forgot about it, but that’s ok, since once upon a time, back before Harlow Town Centre repeatedly kicked us in the nuts, we had requested a return cab for 3:45. We ended up taking someone else’s, just the same.
After that, Sunday really was a day of rest.
Two classes yesterday, both of them all about endings. Mary’s morning satire class had us take the sketches that we’ve been working on for the past three months – written about everything from the Metrobus system to tourists to the perpetual Townie asshole Dougie Cringles – and come up with an ending. I still don’t know what she wants to do with our sketches, but seems to think that we could do some sort of performance in the future. I have my doubts that will happen once we all go our separate ways in St. John’s, but wouldn’t that be cool? We even gave a nod to Republic of Doyle, and she figured we could get Allan Hawco on board – and she is Mary Walsh, after all.
Don’s class was a class unlike anything ever. After two presentations – and Sher’s perfectly-timed homage to everything we’ve done at an Oscar Wilde dinner party was the perfect send-off – Don started flicking through pictures he’d taken throughout the trip, projected on the big screen from his computer, which also showed plenty of male enhancement email spam. Then, up comes a picture of the original Hell-Fire club, followed by the story of how he walked along the Thames to get the shot (the building is in private property), got stuck in the mud, and had to change in the woods. Next thing you know, he’s got a guitar out, singing a song he wrote about being so poor you have to resort to cannibalism.
Best. Class. Ever.
More cookie baking in the afternoon (we’re going to wear those ovens out before we leave, I swear), getting ready for our little Christmas party in the common room with our Secret Santa gift exchange. What looked like way too much food got devoured, we watched Muppet’s Family Christmas, and had one last full group shindig, interspersed with more laughing than I’ve done in a long time, and ending with a big group hug. How do you come back from this? I never got the residence mentality before, never understood how you can form such a bond with a building full of strangers, but when you’re with them all the time, and you get each other and respect each other, no matter how different you all might be, it’s impossible not to.
I’m looking forward to getting back to Newfoundland, but damn it if I’m not going to miss this.
Lor acted as Santa for the gift exchange, and Devin gave a big show of giving me his present – a cheap, £3 bottle of Tesco cider, before giving me a Game of Thrones mug, while playing the theme song on his computer. Best. Gift. Ever. Plus, it had the Targaryen’s emblem on it, and Emilia Clarke is totally on my top five list.
*Swoon*
Seriously, how do you come back from this?
This morning, we took off for one last trip to London, heading to the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square, to see the special Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, “Painter at the Court of Milan.” I don’t know a whole lot about art, but I do know that this is a big deal. The exhibit, spread out over 7 different gallery rooms, is the most comprehensive displays of da Vinci’s rare surviving paintings ever, and it’s been insured at 2 billion (with a “B”) dollars. People have said it’s never happened before, to have all these paintings together, and it probably never will again.
Tickets are extremely hard to come by, and even though ours only cost £14, they’re already being scalped for £250.
From 1482 to 1499, Leonardo da Vinci was the court painter for Milan’s ruler, Ludovico Sforza. Leo dabbled in just about everything in his day – art, science, mathematics – and was an undeniable genius; his stay in Milan was considered to be his most productive periods, and the incredibly unique and special display at the National Gallery is the accumulation of that time period. No “Mona Lisa,” but lots of other things to gawk at.
After hanging out one last time on top of the lion statues at Trafalgar Square, we headed into the gallery, where the rooms were way more cramped and claustrophobic than I would have thought, considering they only let so many people in every half hour. After a few rooms, I couldn’t get up close to his notebook sketches, because it simply took too long with the slow-moving lines – instead, I just focussed on his paintings. There were a lot of cool ones, too, like “The Belle Ferronnière,” depicting the fiery gaze of Beatrice d’Este (Sforza’s wife), the unfinished “Saint Jerome,” and two versions of “The Virgin of the Rocks,” painted about twenty years apart and demonstrating da Vinci’s shift from an idealization of nature to a reverence for the divine.
Rounding out the exhibit was a massive version of “The Last Supper,” on loan from the Royal Academy of Arts (I have no idea how they transported such a huge canvas, even just within London), that was painted by da Vinci’s assistant Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli around 1520 and was used during the restoration of the original, still painted on the wall of the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
After we saw “The Last Supper” display, myself and Kayla got separated from the group, and tried to wander back to the main exhibit. We knew they wouldn’t readmit us, but figured we would meet some of our capadres there. We got lost along the way – although we did pass the 1533 Hans Holbein painting, “The Ambassadors,” which has been cited in so many literature classes because of the anamorphosis going on. Just look at the thing from a very sharp angle to see what I’m talking about:
At any rate, we got back to the exhibit, and couldn’t find anyone. Maybe they were at the main entrance? So, we backtracked.
As we were going up the stairs to the main lobby, I had to do a double take. “Kayla,” I said, and I could tell she caught the intensity in my voice, and the way I grabbed her arm. “Look . . . right . . . behind me.”
There were three people there, having a chat. “So?”
I shook my head. “Take a few steps back, right now.”
We went back to the top of the stairs and looked at the little group. “Is that . . . Paul McCartney?”
Sweet merciful Christ. Once we finished looking at the world’s most impressive collection of 15th-century Leonardo da Vinci paintings, Sir Paul McCartney had a private tour. I was literally about 4 feet away from him, and I eavesdropped on a conversation that Paul McCartney was having – it was about an old English teacher, indecently.
We had the camera out, but couldn’t do it – not in a museum, not while he was right in the middle of a conversation (and, let’s be honest . . . we’re from Newfoundland, where they hunt seals, and even if he didn’t turn us down, I’d still have a stupid Movember moustache in the picture), but I still got to have that moment of being in the proximity to a real live Beatle – ten years to the day that George Harrison passed away. Unbelievable.
Once we told our breathless story, a few other members of our group pretended to be looking for someone in the exhibit room and weaseled their way past security, locking eyes with Sir Paul and confirming our story. It was a pretty amazing way to end one final day in London – especially since Don was the last one to go in, convincing the guards he was in search of Mary, and came back as giddy as can be.
And now, here we are. Riding a three month wave of euphoria mingled with exhaustion, and somehow having to pack all of that away in a black suitcase that’s been sitting in the luggage room at the top of the stairs all this time. Come tomorrow, I’m going to have to start re-organizing everything, and getting set for a 6:30 am bus out of Harlow on Thursday.
I’m excited for that stage of the journey – unabashedly, even. Because December is an ending, but it’s also a whole other new beginning – and, if I play my cards right, it’s going to be the beginning of something great.
Cheers,
rb
No comments:
Post a Comment