Joe and I got up at 5.30 and caught the Tube over to Farringdon and went to the Smithfield Meat Market. All the pubs opened at 3am and were in full swing as we approached the huge building. Inside, row upon row of carcasses hung from rails — beef, pork, mutton, goat — and everywhere men in white coats, many stained red with blood, hurried around. We walked once through the market, then went for a cup of tea and a bacon butty at a cafe where we got, as Joe put it, “service without a smile.”
Back in the market, a Market Police officer told us that if we wanted to take photos, we would need a permit, which seemed quite odd considering the proximity of other far more sensitive areas in London. But in any case, when we happened on the office where the permits were issued, we went in and got one for fun. Later, after passing a room full of boxes labelled with such things as, “none of your fucking business, you nosy little cunt”, we took a couple of photos and were promptly pounced on by the Market Police officer again, who demanded to see our permit and radioed us in. Strange.
From the market, we wandered at random through the still quite empty streets of the city until we came to St Paul’s Cathedral. At that hour (7.30) there was no charge to get in, so we went inside and were immediately struck by an almost miraculous looking beam of bright sunlight streaming down from the windows high in the huge dome. It was very quiet in the church and each footfall echoed between the huge stone columns to the ornate domes seemingly suspended up by the sky.
Behind us, a mad woman pushing a baby in a pushchair came into the church. She was babbling about how Queen Elizabeth was a terrorist and other mutterings, then she burst into song as she lit a candle in the nave. From the shadowy portals of the cathedral emerged a priest, bald and sporting a beard, and dressed in a black robe. As he strode past me, he said, “They’ve started speaking in tongues early today.”
He took the woman, now raving again, by the arm and led her towards the front door of the church. She said to him, “I am mad, Michael A-D,” obviously trying to sound sane. As we left the cathedral behind, I heard the priest telling her: “Most people aren’t actually possessed. They think they are possessed, but they usually aren’t”. The whole episode seemed surreal, like a sketch from Monty Python.
Joe and I spent the rest of the morning at the Imperial War Museum, then walked over Westminster Bridge and up to Piccadilly Circus where we met Linda and Rhonda. After lunch, Linda and I went up to Oxford Street. Linda went shopping and I caught a bus down to Tottenham Court Road and went to Jessops to look at camera accessories.
CurseOfTheTraveller 