Two Sculptures

Two works I stumbled upon on the streets recently that I loved:

The first one is called Young Dancer, found it on a rain-washed morning passing through Covent Garden, which is the heart of London's opera and theatre scene.


The second is called Two Pupils. Apparently, homage to the Royal Military School which was here (Chelsea) at the start of the nineteenth century, and the orphans of the armed forces who were its pupils.


















I stood around for a while here, taking pictures, and the best part about this one was, you see the moment of pleasant surprise on the faces of people walking by when they notice it.

The day I passed Birdlip

At seven in the morning, I barely got on the bus as it left Victoria Station; a bit of a sprint becoming inevitable in the last five hundred metres to ensure my boarding. But once inside, things immediately start looking up: this bus has massive windows, daylight is just appearing, and I am looking at a three and a half hour bus ride through the English countryside -- after we get out of the urban conglomerate of London, that is -- towards a region called the Heart Of England. I would alight, as they say, at a town called Cheltenham, I'd picked it out of a map on the bus company National Express's website.

The bus driver announces on the P.A. system that the first stop was to be Heathrow. There, in about forty minutes, the bus emptied of all the commuters, and only about twenty-five people remained. A matronly looking woman and her family got on, and she enquired sweetly about the driver's breakfast this morning. They were followed by three English women -- you could tell from the jaded tans that they wished they looked more South European -- on their way back from Tenerife, they said to the driver even as the conversation between the three of them never broke stride. As we drove out of Heathrow, the driver got back on to his microphone, he was much more at ease now and, as I was to discover, talked entertainingly for a couple of minutes. We should expect to call, he said, at Cheltenham by ten thirty, but might be delayed due to the traffic out from London to "the races". I found out later that he was referring to horse racing that weekend. It is apparently a big event in these parts; later in the day as I walked around the tiny village of Winchcombe, I could see through to the living room in a couple of the houses I passed, both televisions were tuned into the race. On the bus, somewhere in between briefing us on the traffic and weather conditions on our route, our driver also sends out messages of support to Lewis Hamilton on his championship-deciding formula one race that weekend, and the England rugby team on the morning of their World Cup final. This guy was fun. I had stationed myself in the now-empty first row of seats right behind the driver, with a view of the road in front of us.

Outside, vast meadows stretch out on either side of the motorway, with thick clouds of mist hanging heavily down, the first gentle rays of light casting a dim glow over them. Sheep dot the landscape.

The races at Cheltenham later that morning are a blessing in disguise. About thirty minutes later, the driver gets off the main highway to avoid the backup of traffic he has been warning us about, announcing his decision conversationally over the speakers. The tone of the journey begins to change immediately. In the world of Western Europe, the main motorways are so efficiently laid out and rule-driven that it can universalise the time you spend on the road. I haven't driven here, but I imagine that I will have to prevent myself from falling asleep at the steering wheel if I did. Often, other than staying within the speed limit, there is nothing you will need to do, nothing of the sort of things that make driving interesting anyway. I sat in the front row today with the driver's view of the road. The motorway rises high and wide above the landscape it has been erected upon, cutting an ugly swathe and littering your path with signboards and billion-tonne container trucks and displays of lane-change restrictions, stripping a journey of its sense of exploring the route you're taking. Railway tracks can be built into a landscape without taking away from the experience of journeying through it; a perfectly engineered ten-lane motorway can anaesthesize you to the experience.

I was delighted we were getting off the motorway now.

A series of gently curving county roads followed. There are no buildings or houses alongside the road; now and then, our bus eases past cars driven inevitably by a sweet-looking old man with his wife next to him, who I always imagine are on their way to a market somewhere. The sunburnt ladies from Tenerife have finished making their phone calls and have quieted down, the bus driver's hands are relaxed on the steering wheel. Now and then there is the name of a village and an arrow pointing in its direction: Birdlip, Totterdown, Tewkesbury. As we pull into the town of Cirencester an hour later for a rest stop, it feels like this has been the most satisfying way to approach it: on a bus with only a smattering of passengers, winding through the green grass and empty roads of Gloucestershire.

We arrived at Royal Well Bus Station at Cheltenham as promised, at ten thirty in the morning. As we entered Cheltenham, among the avenues of houses there is a small establishment with a board that says Chinese Takeaway and another one a little further down that says Balti House - Tandoori, Established 1971. Standing there incongruously among the handsome terrace of houses, these places look less restaurant and more a house that serves the local community. There is a sense of loneliness about them. I felt this feeling exactly on my first full day in London, when we passed by Richmond Tandoori, travelling by bus through the clearly affluent South Eastern suburbs early in the morning when the shops hadn't opened yet and you could only see the signboards. There were hardly any people on the road, and I had a wondrous, foreign feeling about being here. This isn't Central London, or one of its many multiethnic neighbourhoods, where the sheer profusion of influences and people from every continent can make everything at once seem right at home. This early morning I was seeing a postcard English High Street for the first time, from the upstairs of a red double-decker bus, and the shop sign that said Richmond Tandoori in its simple large white lettering looked impossibly out of place, from a different world. Then, as now, I picture a newly married couple from a far corner of North-West India in the nineteen seventies making their way here, to the lonely outskirts of Cheltenham to set up their business and earn a living, far away from home.

The streets around Cheltenham bus station are pretty. I find myself coffee and a nice table outside facing a mostly empty street. Next door is a large -- for its description -- well-outfitted shop that says Tobacconist and Newsagent. Someone goes in every minute or two, I see them inside gazing at the shelves reading the various headlines, before picking out their newspaper and walking up to the cashier, emerging out onto the street a minute later with the paper tucked under their arm. It is nice to see the act of newspaper buying this unhurried. Today, the big news, the main story, is pasted on a signboard outside the shop, "Tesco Armed Robber Locked Up For 7 Years", with a blow-up of the offending party's mug shot inset. It seems to have happened around here. This is in the local newspaper, and the sense of outrage and indignation that such a crime has been committed -- rather than the tone of inevitability you take for granted in a city newspaper reporting the story -- seems apparent even in the headline.

Every road sign around here seems to point to "The Promenade", so I decide I will take the bait and check it out. What it was was a smart paved street that was closed off to traffic -- usually a sign of tourist-friendliness -- with designer boutiques on one side, cafes and tables outside on the other, and in the middle, a ten foot wrought-iron man with the head of an ox with his arm around a ten foot wrought-iron man with the body of a rabbit. As I look around, from every direction kids are running against their mothers' calls towards these.. figures. I presently continue further on down the street. Past a young man playing all your favourite pop tunes on saxophone.

At the corner I'm on the verge of Cheltenham's High Street, packed with weekend warriors that Saturday morning buying clothes from the stores. But it was the names of the shops lining the High Street that sunk the heart: Boots, Primark, Mark's & Spencer's... all of the chain superstores that you see scattered about in a neighbourhood London shopping zone, all on this one street. They're disappointing enough to see in their soulless glory in London, a big city where, of course, one fully expects to see these things, but you pick a town you've never heard of in a quaint-sounding part of England one day, and it's here just like everywhere else. One is left to only imagine the kind of locally-run locally-flavoured establishments that might have lined this street once.

I get off the high street and wander about for a few minutes, past signs to a museum and a church. The roads are wide with tall trees, the town is quite pretty, but my view of Cheltenham is a little coloured by now, and already I am looking forward to going to the bus station and picking a name off the time-table to go to.

The town is at the foot, so to speak, of the Cotswolds, a series of low rolling hills that stretch, on its Southern side, roughly from Cheltenham in the west to Oxford in the east. I wanted to be in Oxford by the next morning, so I planned to detour my way through the Cotswolds that day while taking the general direction towards Oxford, and stopping off at a couple of villages along the way and spend the night at one of them. I am trying to figure my way around the large multi-sheet time-tables pasted on the glass doors of the bus shelters at the Royal Well Bus Station, with a somewhat apologetic disclaimer underneath saying "We aim to update our time table every six months, but please be aware that this may not be the best way to find a service." Each shelter has a time-table and routes of a different bus company. Private bus operators -- the kinds that have a sign in the bus saying "we also hire our buses out privately" -- serve villages and towns nearby. Buses seemed horrendously infrequent, I saw one route that actually runs once a week, on a Thursday. My traipse through villages of my pleasing wasn't going to be as hop-on-hop-off as I might have imagined it would be. The minimum wait right now for the next bus -- to anywhere -- is an hour and twenty minutes.

Yet there is character here. The only other place in Britain I've been in since I arrived, London, is so phenomenally well-connected, the transport system operates with such ruthless efficiency -- trains leave a station to the exact minute, buses numerous and run like clockwork even through the night. And while I wouldn't have complained if I'd found three buses conveniently leaving the Royal Well bus station in the next twelve minutes that afternoon, I like the fact that this is a country whose transport system can be like this, too, human; and like the three-two-five that makes its appearance only every Thursday afternoon (and that only in the alternate months of summer), quirky. And if I must wait for hours at bus stops surrounded by geriatric Gloucestershirers - all of whom have begun to study me like they have never seen a coloured person before - to celebrate that quirkiness, so be it.

Thus I sat down at a park bench nearby and opened my lunch box.

At one o' clock I am on a bus to Winchcombe. The lady at the bus stop describes it as "quite nice" when I asked her which bus I could take and she told me that Winchcombe was one of the stops along to where she was going, a village with the now unlikely-sounding name of Broadway. I can't be sure, but I thought I saw a hint of a satisfied smile when she saw me getting on, that she'd got me to get on to her bus. Around us, the hills slope lazily. The grass is lush, and every now and then there is a horse or a pony grazing, a rug draped on its back. Perfectly aligned little houses and sloping roofs with streams running alongside them. Curving hill roads branch off from ours. More sheep in the distance. The road narrows just a little as we approach a village. I want to get off here, and as I do, the surroundings have changed, everywhere there are small sturdy buildings of pale yellow stone. The streets are entirely deserted, and as I walk up to the walls and read the inscriptions that date some of the buildings, 1125 and 1273. If not for the cars parked on the road, this could be a ghost village. I was the only person there as far I could see down the road; it certainly felt that way.

At a shop front called Cotteswold Diary, there is a notice from the owners announcing a change of address, adding a note saying "for those of you who like to call in and pay your milk bill, we shall be at home Fridays and Saturdays." Across the road there is a gate and steps leading up to a church, and tombstones in the grounds. They date from the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds; some of the words on the inscriptions are spelt differently. The stone is everywhere, its yellow is pale, its shades and texture weatherbeaten. Signs outside the tiny, strongly-built houses along the road read "Teacher's Cottage", and "Weaver's Cottage". It all seems from an earlier time.

A few hundred metres down the road, there are finally signs of present-day life. A Tea Room that has just been awarded, according to the article pasted outside, the tea-room equivalent of a Michelin star in this year's awards, a post-office with staff behind the counter, and, most pertinently for me, a pub with a sign that says 'Open'. I descend the few steps down to the door of The Plaisterer's Arms; inside, a fire is glowing, and a family is at lunch at a table by it. Three men and the bartender are having a conversation at the bar, and as I sit at one of the three tables and set down my backpack I wonder if I am intruding. I have ordered coffee as I entered, and I decide I might as well take in the atmosphere and eavesdrop while I waited for it. They all seem to be from around here, and while one man and the older man are more settled into their chairs, the third has just dropped by, apparently on a break from his workshift. While the subject is mundane, one's visit to the doctor "downhill" for a bad back, the words are delightful, "I wasn't feeling too chipper last week", and "unbeknownst to me, I had developed..." I listened happily. As their round of drink arrives, the conversation has turned to England and the rugby world cup final later that day. Even the toast at the bar is perfect: "To good health, sir, and a fine English victory this afternoon."

I stepped outside into the afternoon sunshine. This would be a good time for a walk. I turned off the main street and up one road, and almost immediately, it seemed, out of the village and into the countryside. Soon there was a bridge that crossed what was probably a small river a few feet below it, the water flowing gently over the rocks. By it, a triangular damaged road sign that says "FLOOD", has fallen on to the railings. A record perhaps, unintended and thus poignant, of the day it happened. I pass a gate that says "The Old Cider Mill." The houses are becoming more and more spread out and farther apart now, the meadows getting larger. Between two buildings, for one and a half seconds, I see two horses in full gallop across a field. Then they're gone, hidden from view, leaving me to play it over and over in my head.

A couple of hours later, I am back in Winchcombe and trying to spot the bus stop, eager to stop off at another village before it gets dark. The two people waiting, an old man and a pretty thirty five year old woman, weigh the merits of my case enthusiastically. The old man laughs when I tell him I need to get to Oxford "only by tomorrow morning", just three hours away by bus and with more than half a day to get there. "Tomorrow's Sunday son, you won't find a bus till four in the afternoon." Besides, the only bus that will come to Winchcombe that day goes right back to Cheltenham, and I have no choice but to take it. Back at the Cheltenham bus station, I talk to a young bus driver, who tells me the same thing about counting on connecting transport in these parts, but rather more colourfully: "If you get to Kingham and then just miss the six o clock, you're knackered." This man wasn't joking, I duly followed him into his bus. We would travel through more of these hills to the delightfully named village of Chipping Norton, and onwards to Oxford that night.

As I looked out of the window, dusk was setting over the Cotswolds softly, like someone drifting contentedly to sleep. There were many things about the twilight now that reminded me of dawn that morning, the chill, the mist that had settled low over the meadows, the soft orange-ish glow of the light upon it. As we left Heathrow that morning and the fields opened out, there was this inviting quality to it, the kind that made you want to walk out into the distance. In the early evening, as the light begins to retreat, behind the woods and the mountains, the scene also takes on a subconsciously ominous tone, a harbinger of the darkness to follow, and cold that makes it impossible to picture yourself walking out to over there. But the best part about not wanting to go out into the cold is staying inside, and when you're inside a bus like I was that evening, you think about getting off and stepping into a place that is warm, maybe sit by a fire, at a pub like The Plaisterer's Arms, in a little village like Winchcombe.




And some pictures, from Oxford, Winchcombe, and a few more around London.