English Parks Are Suspicious

It wouldn’t be one of my vacations unless it involved biking through picturesque landscapes. Huili took me to what he jokingly called the ex-con bike shop: a group of hippies that constructed Frankenstein rigs from bicycles of suspicious provenance. I purchased a light mountain bike with a rusty chain for forty dollars, and we were off.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take much adjustment to learn to bike on the left side of the street. The primary difficulty is that when I approach an intersection to make a turn, my assumptions regarding the safety and wideness of a given turn must be inverted. But it’s not too difficult. My assumption is that driving would be much more tricky, given that what video game designers call the “control layout” is reversed in British cars.

So I found myself biking past small houses with chimneys I recognize from Mary Poppins, crumbling brick walls covered with ivy, and eventually, parks.

A park is a very different thing in England than it is in the United States. An American urban park is an ephemeral respite from the urban landscape; no matter how much time you spend in the park, or how deep you wander into it, you will never escape the sensation of being surrounded by a city on all four sides. The English park is an otherworldly entity, in that it creates the unique illusion of being surrounded by a seemingly infinite yet utterly tamed wilderness. The trees are tremendous by American standards, and yet they stand in formations too orderly to be natural. The stern influence of humans is apparent everywhere; the trees are even housed in wooden cages to protect the trees from deer antlers.



The fauna are everywhere in England, and yet completely non-threatening. It feels as if long ago, the English eradicated all species that could be considered even a minor annoyance to humans, leaving behind only the colorful and the scenic and the well-mannered: swans, deer, butterflies, hedgehogs. In an English park, a mother duck pops up on her feet to reveal ducklings huddling beneath, who then walk up to me without fear and peck at the dirt around my shoes.

I’ve never been surrounded by so many creatures in my life, and I’ve been to Patagonia and rural China. I often hear crows cawing when I’m biking through Hancock Park in Los Angeles. But here, I can hear five or six different types of bird calls - all at the same time. The air is teeming with melodious chatter, making everywhere else I’ve been seem silent and lifeless by comparison.

There are signs everywhere in the parks in and around London, advertising the animals you might see if you look around. From my earliest days as a schoolboy, I have learned to ignore such signs, because they have always been guilty of false advertising. (In many American cities, streets are often named after the natural feature that was bulldozed in order to build houses: Stone Creek, Oaktree.) But the average time from sign-reading to creature-spotting in England seems to be in the neighborhood of about five minutes. I’ve learned to identify blue tits, meadow brown butterflies, and coots. Huili’s daughter Miranda would spot and identify species after species - something that could never happen with an American childhood.



And the smells! Walking through the Isabel Plantation section of Richmond Park, one can smell plants growing, flowering, dying, and decaying - again, all at the same time. There are so many species housed in the Isabel Plantation - including the common roadside weed from my childhood home known as the Texas Bluebell. The fragrances are overwhelming, and yet they transition gracefully from one area of the park to the next. It’s an olfactory experience that I’ve never had, and will probably never have again.

But there’s something unsettling about how well-mannered the wilderness is in England - as if it were cowed into submission. The people, I hesitate to say, feel much the same way. The good manners of everyone around you are both novel and delightful, but at the same time, somewhat suspicious and oppressive. There is a sinking suspicion that nobody is going to behave in an unpredictable and raw (and human) manner, and worse, that everyone is resigned to this fact as if it were a basic and fundamental aspect of existence. Which it’s not.

What’s on offer in London is quite beautiful indeed, but you must be content with what’s on offer, and never ask for anything more. Not an easy proposition.

The Rain in London

There’s a big difference between the rain in England and the rain in Texas.

The rain in Texas is like God coming down here after He just said not to make Him do it. It’s weighty and fierce, pelting you like ancient Greek capital punishment. (Meteorologists say that there’s more electrical energy in the Texas climate, so we also get some truly epic lightning.)

In England, the rain doesn’t fall; it condenses like an eternal morning dew. London rain is so fine and weightless, you almost forget that it’s there. But it is, the water slowly working its way into everyone and everything, wearing down your happiness and resolve droplet by droplet.

The rain is an integral part of London’s character and mood, acting as the counterpart to the sun in Los Angeles. Walking past Trafalgar Square, across rain-slicked streets, pedestrians wielding black umbrellas - there is no mistaking where you are.

However, I had the pleasure of experiencing a few sunny, twenty-degrees-Celsius days in London, and the city absolutely shines under such conditions. Hyde Park under the sun, suffused with green; Londoners lounging in deck chairs; swans with heads tucked in their feathers; the bronze gleam of the Peter Pan statue - the place becomes a storybook like no other.

But sunny and warm is clearly not the default mode of this place. The sun is always about to take its leave in London, and everyone knows it.

London and Largo

Before I get to London, a bit about Los Angeles.

One of the significant elements of my tenure in Los Angeles, one of the things that makes this place feel like somewhere I grew up, has been Largo, the dinner club/performance venue that is home to Jon Brion (he of Kanye West and I Heart Huckabee’s fame) and an ever-rotating ensemble of performers. Over the past several years, I’ve had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Brion improvise with musicians such as Robyn Hitchcock, Beck, and Fiona Apple.

Largo is relocating and shutting down its original Fairfax space, and so Huili flew in from London a while back to attend one of the last shows at the original venue. It was a pretty decent show, with Benmont Tench (the pianist from Tom Petty’s band) and Fiona Apple both in attendance. Fiona Apple is usually a very timid and halting presence, repeatedly engaging in the false start and then retreating to the corners of the stage. One of the pleasures of hearing her sing, and she’s very good at it, is watching her move through her fear and confront the audience at center stage, where she is utterly transformed. That night, the audience was treated to covers of “Crazy” and “Ain’t No Sunshine”. I’m not a particularly big fan of hers, but hearing her cover Bill Withers was something else entirely.

One thing in particular about Largo remind me of London. First of all, Jon Brion often covers the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” at his shows, much to the chagrin of both Huili and GP. And Waterloo Station happens to be the closest station to Huili’s house in Surbiton. It’s a beautiful, timeless station, emblematic of its city in the way that Union Station is of Los Angeles.