In which I do research and Jim is forced to walk--a lot!--and we find a River which is not a river and an Angel which is not an angel.

On the suggestion of my UK Agent, John Parker, we decide to check out Clerkenwell as a possible location for Book 4. Clerkenwell has an interesting history first as a rural spa where the gentry could take the waters far from the madding crowds, later as the location of an infamous "House of Detention" from which Wat Tyler directed his Peasant's Revolt, and later as a seat of radicalism and socialism less drawingroom genteel than that of Bloomsbury. Some people also claim that Sweeney Todd plied his razor here, but I'm not sure of that.

So, we hop out of bed, find our brekkie once again at Gran Sasso and then walk down Euston Road to King's Cross Road and follow it down for a while as it dips southeast and becomes Farrigdon Road...and begin to think we should have taken the tube to Farringdon, and maybe we've missed the crossing and where are we anyway, when we find Rosebery Avenue and stumble into the pedestrian favoring lane of Exmouth Market. We sit down in the shade of a market stall near a pub and try to figure out where we are. And are surprised to discover we're in Clerkenwell.

We wander around trying to find Clerkenwell proper and discover a park which is not Clerkenwell Green. Mr Kat finds a Victorian dog waterer. and gives it a go. But we have no dog nearby, and a sign that reads "Dogs not allowed on lawns" might explain why. There is a dog on the next path over, being inspected by some police constables--possibly for bits of lawn between his toes--or maybe just petted.

We carry on looking for the famous Well of Clerkenwell and this time we actually find it: behind glass in an office building. Or rather Mr. Kat does, as I'm looking the wrong way. It's very hard to take a picture of through the glass, but we decide not to follow the signs to the Farringdon library to cajole someone into opening up the exhibit for us, as we can see most of it through the glass wall. We carry on down the street and around the corner in need of a nice cuppa. Tea that is. Which we find at a small sandwich shop near Clerkenwell Green.


It is not particularly green and is so very small we can't imagine how Fagin and the Artful Dodger managed to find enough pockets to pick here upon which to train Oliver Twist. But the Royal Philharmonic offices are located on the other side so we figure that makes up for a lot.

We stumble around a bit looking the place over and discover Clerkenwell Priory Gate, which is somewhat choked with traffic and a tree. We wander some more and come up on the other side of the priory gate through Passing Alley which proves to be very well named indeed.

More twisty little streets, including one called Cowcross, lead us to Smithfield Market--the largest meat market in Europe--and also the location of many executions, including that of Sir William Wallace.

We don't make the turn that would take us down to St Bartholomew's Hospital, Hosier's and Cock Lanes or the Haberdasher's Hall (of which I'm not aware until we return to the US), but take Charterhouse Street toward the Charterhouse, which we discover one can't get into from this side. But we do discover Sutton's Hospital and its checkerboard wall . The dark squares turn out to be made of flint, which Mr. Kat recognizes from his childhood in Norfolk as real, honest to goodness, hand-me-another-arrow-Zog nappable flint. Ouch. Don't fall against that wall, kids....

We also find one of the famous Smithfield Pubs which were charted to open at 6 a.m. for the benefit of the market men who'd worked all night and thus missed opening hours. The Fox and Anchor is at the end of Fox and Knot Street and it's such a remarkable bit of Art Nouveau, that I had to take a photo of the whole thing. You can click on the picture to see the whole building front. At the top, there is a fired tile frieze of a Fox and not one, but two Anchors under a mass of lilypads and the date, 1898. It's very surreal. Also note that the gargoyles are laughing when viewed from the front.

Oddly we don't pause for a pint at the F&A, but carry on back up Cowcross and around by some byways until we come out at Northampton Road and Rosomon Place, get lost again, never stumble over the House of Detention, and wind up in a Pub on Rosebery that appears to have five different names, none of which I now remember. But it does have the best Pie and a tolerable Pint. I have Matador Pie, which contains no matador (take that Mrs. Lovett), but does have beef, real Spanish chorizo (not to be confused with the orange fat and spices squeezed into intestines that is sold in the US as chorizo), tomatoes and Spanish olives. It is divine and served with peas that are actual peas, not mushy peas. Mr Kat says they ruin the experience of true English Pubness, but I'm OK with that.

After we are suitably refreshed, we carry on, looking for the Head of the New River, which we find just a few blocks up Rosebery. Funny, it doesn't look like a river....
but the sign delares that it is .

Mr. Kat puts up with me for a while as I try to find any sign of the actual river--which is actually an artificial river dug by Sir Hugh Myddelton in the 17th Century. Eventually we find a pumping station, some gardens, and a locked iron gate which would normally lead to the actual bit of water that is still exposed at New River Head, but as it is Wednesday and past 2, it's locked.

Drat. Mr. Kat is getting restive, so we agree to follow the course of the river up toward Angel Tube Station and see if we have any better luck, but if not... I'm in trouble....

After a lot of wandering about, I find a park which is directly over the course of the New River and has been laid out to look a bit like a river. Leaving the increasingly grumpy Mr. Kat on a bench to dandle his toes in the non-existent water, I follow a hunch...

And discover the other end of the Islington Tunnel on Regent's Canal. (Remember how the research started at the Canal Museum near the tunnel on the first night in London?) Well, here's the other end: and some narrow boats that are moored nearby .

I return to Mr. Kat, pausing only to take a photo of the marker that shows where the invisible New River crosses 25 feet below Regent's Canal--but the photo looks like a big gray blob, so I erase it--and agree to go home, but stop a few times on the way back to the tube station to take photos of the canal markers on the street. The City of London apparently can't decide how to let the canal be made known as there are three different markers embedded in the sidewalks. The last on seems to be quite old and seems to indicate that the tunnel bends. Another one nearer Angel Station shows another bend, which must have made "legging" it through the tunnel quite interesting indeed. And it occurrs to me that the New River must not have been dug 50 feet deep, but that the city of London has somewhat grown over it until it's not so very strange that its pipes are now below the Regent's Canal, but wouldn't it be interesting if they weren't...? And of course, there's always the River Fleet nearby, under the ground....

We find Angel Station, which is certainly not an angel and cannot, in fact, find any angels anywhere nearby. Later I'm informed that the station is on the site of what was once a coaching inn named The Angel and that there are many pubs named the same all over London. This makes me a bit sad and I really think the Underground folks need to erect an angel of some kind for Angel. We do, however, find the longest (and steepest) escalator in all of London. . This photo was taken about half-way down, so you can see how very long and steep it is.

Finally, another tube ride and a bit of walking later and we're looking for dinner along the Euston Road when we find the most bizarre sight of the day: a templeful of Caryatids, just holding up a roof for no known reason on a building which does not appear to have anything to do with Greek temples or any temple at all. It looked a bit like a synagogue, in fact, but only a bit.

Eventually we find ourselves in an Indian buffet in Bloomsbury which turns out to be very delicious and we toddle off to our trusty hotel for a cuppa and then into bed, following an ominous message from my agent....

Tune in next time for the adventures of Kat Signing Books!

In which we have lunch and take a tour bus.

Because we're horrible about getting up early, Mr. Kat and I roll out of bed about 10 and head for the Embankment for a lunch appointment with my UK publishing team and my agent.

On the way we get caught in our first tube dysfunction. The Jubilee line on which we are traveling from King's Cross is unable to move past a certain tunnel, so we get off at Bank and scramble around to Monument and get back on a different line that takes us to London Bridge station from which we get horrendously lost trying to find our way through the various tunnels to the embankment station connection and across the river to the Publisher's office. We have to try three different "subways"--which are pedestrian walkways, not trains--to find our way to the Embankment and pop up right in front of the building, but several hours too early.

We look around a bit and discover that there are blackfriars in Blackfriars, or at least one particular blackfriar on top of a pub on a roundabout across the street .

Since we are early and American, we can't make it without coffee, so we pause at a Costa Coffee--of which we have seen many but entered none--and foolishly order "large Americanos" and a small "biscuit collection". The biccies prove to be as advertised and quite sufficient to the task, the coffee, however...

is so large it comes in a cup with two handles (no that gigantic size is not caused by foreshortening, please not the delicate size of the otherwise quite normal spoon on the saucer for scale). Alas, the coffee is also horrible and we really regret having ordered a lot of it.

Eventually we stroll back to 100 Victoria Embankemnt--which has a flag flying from a pole outside that I at first thing has the legend "lo0ve" on it, only to realize that it's actually a very stylized "100 V E" (for Victorian Embankment). I feel very silly and don't take a picture of it. But we do go inside and introduce ourselves to security where we are photographed for visitor badges, tagged and handed over to another security fellow who lets us through the glass gates and points us to the right elevator.

Upstairs we meet Assistant Editor (and the person in charge of my manuscripts) Donna Condon, with whom I am immediately in love. Donna gives us a tour of the Little Brown offices which are disconcertingly clean, shiny, bright and airy for the offices of publishers (which I'm used to being dark, paper-stuffed, dusty, smelly, and very cramped.) Donna assures us the former offices of Piatkus were all that, so I feel a little better. We stop at the Piatkus spoke of the great white wheel that is Little Brown and meet the Imprint Editor, Emma Dunford--who is lovely--and a surprise friend, Thalia Proctor. It's really fab to see Thalia again, whom I know through RAM and other Mystery fiction functions in person and haven't seen in quite a while and I try not to make an ass of myself and keep her from working. Eventually, Thalia is freed to return to work as we go to meet Paola and Ian who are both involved in the promotion, marketing, and selling of my books. And they too, are incredibly nice.

And then Donna, Emma, Paola, and we are off for lunch on the riverside at a very lovely restaurant whose name I never do catch. John Parker, my UK agent, meets us there and we all have a ridiculously good time talking about books and the beauty of the River Thames on the unseasonably lovely day--and it is. I forget to take any photos of anyone or anything and since the table is rather long, I miss the conversation at the Paola and John end completely. John has to leave early but asks me to drop by the office Thursday before the signing to chat and he's off without even getting his potatoes. We all eat them for him and they are very good.

After a terrific lunch and a long chat with Paola on the return walk--which reveals a huge difference in the PR approach of the UK vs the US publisher--we all finally part and Mr. Kat and I realize that it's already 4 p.m. We decide to risk taking a bus tour, even though it's rather late for playing tourist....

We find the bus tour office near Trafalgar Square and are told that the tours start until 6 and last about 2 horus, so we're fine. We buy our tickets and dash off to catch the next bus.

We discover that Trafalgar Square--when viewed from the top of a tour bus--is graces with some really lovely Regency fountains (of which I take a picture):


and besmirched with some truly horrid modern art (of which I do NOT take a picture.)

After a few minutes, we realize that we have no headphones for listening to the commentary and therefore do not know what it is we are seeing most of the time.

We pause at the London Eye
and I trot down the steps to ask the driver for headphones which he thought I hadn't wanted.

I trot back up the steps to the upper deck of the bus and present the headphones, but in spite of best efforts and trying as many plugs as we can find all over the upper deck, we discover that the audio is not, in fact, working and we never do figure out what are most of the sights by which we pass at often breakneck speeds.

This seems to be a theme with buses of all kinds during our trip: they go very fast and seem to rocket around corners at a horrifying rate to suddenly reveal unexpected glimpses of amazing things which you then never see again. Like... St. Paul's Cathedral. Oh hello....

Oh, goodbye....

And we discover that:

1. from the top of a bus, the White Tower (Tower of London) looks remarkably like a housing development
2. tourists get bored very quickly when they can't figure out what they are seeing
3. and they aren't the only people who get led around by the nose .

Eventually the call of nature forces us off the bus, back to another of same we are assured we can hop, and we disembark on a different side of Victoria Station from last time and find the washrooms and a Cornish Pasty shop where we have tea and pasty. We return to the bus stop only to discover that we've missed the last bus. And half the tour. While our tickets are good for 24 hours, we never do manage to get onto another tour bus and see the rest of London by double-decker bus-back. Alas, no Marble Arch, Hyde Park, Tyburn, Paddington, Regent's Park, or Piccadilly Circus from the top of the red-painted tourist-mobile.

But the pasty was very good. Although the staff was definitely not Cornish. Mr. Kat and I suspect Lithuanian, since we seem to have observed a ridiculous number of them working everywhere at everything (and probably being paid next to nothing for it.)

We give up and head back to our hotel for a nap, getting lost in a tube station that wound around for several miles under the streets and having to change lines twice to avoid another problem en route.

When we finally reach the hotel, it's getting a bit late and the Pasty has worn off, so we go looking for food and discover that pub kitchens close earlier than expected. We get out order in just barely in time (pasta for me and... Pie and a Pint for Mr. Kat.) We also find out that American credit cards frequently don't work in European machines, since most US cards have mag strips and most European machines are chip-readers with auxilliary stripe readers that aren't very reliable. Luckily we have cash.... And get our food and have our drinkn and toddle off for a cuppa and into bed.

Return for our Next Exciting Episode: Kat Does Research and finds a River that is not a river and an Angel that is not an angel.

In which we take our leave of Ipswich and return to London, where we discover some very unlikley animals.

On Monday the 11th of May, we turn ourselves out of bed at our hosts lovely home and do the laundry. Apparently our foreign clothes frighten the Scotts' dryer as it refuses to do the second load and only a great deal of cajoling and and laying the jeans out in the sun in the garden gets the job done and then we are ferried back to Ipswich proper to await our coach to London.

We wait outside the Plough
and I notice that Ipswich has three kinds of buildings: old, very old, and fake old:


Finally we are scooped up by our new driver, who is not as fun as our first one, nor quite as good a driver, but we do know that his name is Clem. On our rocketing way back to London we spot a genuine riverside pub, which it appears our fellow passengers would have preferred over the ride on the M-whatever-road.
Or at least a nice nap....

We somehow end up crossing London Bridge as we re-enter the city (which I'm still not sure how we managed, since we came from the northwest and the bridge is on the south) and spot our first wyvern.
We see quite a few more of these later, but still have no idea what they mean. They look quite impressive, even through a coach window though, do they not?

Once we are installed in our new hotel, we go for a stroll (after a nice supper of... Pie and a Pint! at the Mabel's Tavern next door.) During our ramble we discover Sicilian Avenue and I'm not sure if it's a shopping district, a building, or a ghetto (though a very upscale one) in which all the Sicilians of London have at one time been corralled with quaint shops and pasta. Hard to tell in this pic, but indeed all the shops and eateries we can see are Italian (though I'm not sure they are all Sicilian.)

We carry on and come around a rather long, spikey fence and wall and discover lions:
of which Mr. Kat cannot resist taking a photo. One may notice that there is a rather strange sign near Mr. Kat's leg which reads thusly:
. Needless to say, we do not climb on the lions, nor do we take an unexpected trip into the deep drop, although we do take a look down it. Mr. Kat's companion, the pocket bear, is not impressed.


A word about Pocket Bear: this little jade bear has been traveling around in Jim's pocket for the past 13 years. It's gone all over the US, but it didn't get to go to Italy, since Jim forgot it in a California hotel room and only through diligence, phone calls, and much guilt laid on the housekeeping staff was he restored to Jim on his return from Bari. So of course, Pocket Bear, like myself, was in desperate need of a vacation off US soil. Thus cometh the Pocket Bear to London.

And now back to the trip....

Pocket Bear's ennui is not equal to the utter supercilious couth of the British Museum Lion, for, indeed that is what we have discovered. Hi, Lion.


We wander off as darkness begins to fall, looking for a late night snack and discover that in London, Gorillas can fly. They also drive vans:

here is the rather low-res detail of the Flying Gorilla itself:
And as per usual, no explanation whatsoever of why there is a flying gorilla on a truck in Bloomsbury at 9 pm on a Monday evening. Yet another Mystery of Old London Towne.

Coming Soon: Day Six (and others)!

So, after rising from our squeaky bed and taking showers in the large, but inconveniently shelfless shower, Mr. Kat and I head out for brekkie, which is finally had at a little sandwich shop called the Gran Sasso on Caledonian Street near King's Cross. They have free WiFi and the prices for small but tasty food and coffee are very good. (We have already discovered that London is Very Expensive--also having a heat wave of upper seventies temps and rather full of black soot that settles on your skin and up your nose.)

After breakfast and WiFi, we head for the Canal Museum, of which I take no pics--what am I thinking?--but get many notes and ideas for Book 4. We then walk near, but not next to, the canal--since the tow path is closed for remodeling--past a "grade 1 listed building" (historically significant) which turns out to be a very pretty iron work gas storage register from the 1860s, and on to find St. Pancras Old Church.

Which has an interesting graveyard and a clock.

But what's really interesting about Old St. Pankers is that it's been... umm... remodeled. See...there's this railroad right behind it (that goes to St. Pancras station oddly enough) and back in the 19th Century, they had to dig up the graves and move them around in order to build said railroad. And there are several odd memorials that seem to have been moved to St. Pancras as well as the odd arrangement of graves from those that were there to begin with. Like....

The Tomb of Sir John Soanes and his wife and son:


Which looks remarkably like a phone box .

There are several things about Old St. Pancras that make one wonder if they really did move all those bones....

Like the Hardy Tree: which has an interesting sign (you can click on the sign to get a larger version to read.) . Which says, basically, that the illustrious Mr Hardy once worked in the graveyard, shifting bones and stones and this was the result:
Yup,that's literally hundreds of gravestones dating back a good long time, made into a sunburst design around the roots of a big ol' ash tree that has, through the years, grown down into the stacked up stones.

Take a look at the other side of the tree and you can see the stones go all the way around, 3 - 4 ranks deep: That's a lot of dead people and I sort of think, packed in like that, they didn't all bring their little old bonesies along with them. I wonder where Mr. Hardy left them...

Maybe near this interesting feature beside the railroad wall:
I called this the Gravestone Parade, and it's not even the weirdest sight in the cemetery, just one of the ones that photographs well. Here are a couple of the more interesting stones in the parade:

There is also a paving of tombstones, including one shaped like a full-sized coffin, and a lot of sunken, shifted, tilted, and broken stones, as well as several walls of and "end blocks" of marker slabs. Definitely a place to stop on any tomb tour.

Jim gets very cranky after I force him to sit through the canal museum while I take notes and buy books, then walk all the way over to the backside of St. Pancras, so we go up past Mornington Crescent in Camden Town for... Pie and a Pint at a pub called Belushi's. And Jim takes my picture which he tries to show off.
but misses in the shuffle.

Then we walk back down to Mornington Crescent tube station and head off to New Bond Street to look for Will's place of work: Sotheby's auction house. We find it after a salmon-swimming-upstream experience at Oxford Circus station and more swimming through the rush hour crowds.

As we near the quarry, the crowds thin miraculously until... by 4:55, New Bond is a ghost town, with only the sound of keys in locks and our own footsteps on the pavement.

Really tired, we head around the corner to Oxford and Regent's Street and find... crowds galore as the evacuees from New Bond and the rest of Oxford Circus area have all settled on the sidewalks in front of pub with pints of beer. We head into a coffee bar before any of them can contemplate needing sobriety and manage to cop a couple of comfy chairs in a Caffe Nero--one of what we eventually discover to be innumerable coffee chains, a-la Seattle, in London. I find a faceless dog on the wall of a club,
and think we should call it a day.

More beer, more food and off to bed for Day 3....!

On day one, Wednesday May 7th, we travel to London and arrive on Thursday May 8th. Hmmm....

After a certain amount of faffing about with a nice enough fellow at the Heathrow Underground Information desk, we acquire Oyster Cards with which we may ride the transit thingies of London for a reduced fare during our stay. We are informed that they are good for life. As of yet, we do not have confirmation of this, as we are not yet dead.

We ride the Underground--or "tube" as the locals call it--
--to King's Cross/St. Pancras Station.

We discover that while King's Cross is so ugly the English have chosen to hide it behind a bunch of stumpy cardboard buildings, St. Pancras station across the street, is quite a lovely bit of Victorian mock-Gothic. So lovely in fact, that much of it is hidden by scaffolding so as not to embarrass its sister station while it is being remodeled into flats and a hotel--excuse me... an hotel. It's still also a National Rail station with international trains to exotic places... like Exeter.

Up in the heights of Pankers--as the locals call it--we discover the Betjeman Arms and have a traditional lunch:
I have steak and mushroom pie and Jim has fish and chips. We both have rather nice beer and Jim adopts the rallying cry of the English pub-crawler that shall echo throughout our trip of "Pie and a Pint!" (I seem to have had all the best pies, however.)

We then drag our unhappy suitcases to the first hotel--the Howard Winchester--which is cheap, small, old, and weird, but also cheap! and only 4 blocks away. Hurray! This hotel seemed to have been built when indoor plumbing was a bit of an oddity and it's only gotten odder. Our "en suite" bedroom has a large step-up closet sort of arrangement with a frosted glass shower door on the exterior which reveals a huge wet-room of slate tile containing a shower and toilet. But no shelves or hooks on which to put anything. The sink is in the room proper with the beds. Yes, beds. I was unable to book a "double"--a room with one large bed instead of two small ones (a "twin")--and had to settle for a "double plus one": one standard double bed plus one smaller twin which then became our Place to Throw Our Shit.

After Throwing said Shit around a bit and learning how to flush the extremely picky English toilet--it's an art, I tell you!--we go out to prowl for Something Interesting and possible more food. Or at least more beer.

We find Regents Canal
to which we would later return in better light--or possibly not better light, since this was a particularly pretty shot of the revitalized canal with its new flats and condos replacing the derelict warehouses and factories that used to wobble along this stretch until a few years ago.

Abandoning the canal, we at last find sustenance (though not much beer) at a mediocre Indian restaurant called the King's Cross Tandoori (and Balti) before staggering off to bed.

Stay tuned for more exciting adventures of Kat and Mr. Kat in England!