I don’t know if it’s just travel fatigue, but the ride in from Heathrow was intensely green. It’s mid May, but tulips are already fading. Horse chestnuts are in bloom--white, pink and a dark smoky red. Some blocks have pollarded trees, raising anguished fists of leaves on otherwise bare branches. It’s a style I don’t much like, but I admit it looks somehow right in front of a posh brick townhouse in central London.

Our airport bus drops us in front of a row of nondescript flats on Crawford Street in Marylebone, on the city’s West End. Pre-war or later? I can’t tell. The style, small windows with brick fan-work pattern above, suggests Georgian, which is the dominant neighborhood style. But they might be Victorian imitations or even a post-war revival. In any case, the inside has been extensively remodeled, so there aren’t many clues. Our flat would originally have been the attic; we climb four flights dragging our luggage, pausing to gasp for breath at mid-point. We’ll get in good shape living here, maybe, or have heart attacks trying.

From our kitchen window there’s slate and terracotta roof tile as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by clusters of bottle-shaped vent stacks, chimneys, and the occasional satellite dish. Below, we see the backs of area rowhouses, ranging from utilitarian to elegant, almost every one with a patch of garden.

Our Tube stop is Baker Street. You might recall that 221-B is the home of the world’s most famous fictional detective; his address is now the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Our next nearest Tube Station, Marble Arch, is quite near Madame Tussaud’s. We didn’t visit either museum, but did shop for Sherlock kitsch and at the Beatles Store for souvenirs of the fab-four. Marylebone Station was the setting for the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night, and several of The Beatles lived in this neighborhood in the 1960s. Most famously, Ringo had a place on Montague Square, and John and Yoko lived there for a while in 1968. Today, supposedly Madonna owns a flat here (we didn’t see her) and neighborhood landlords hope for a revival. In the meantime, the area is mostly Starbucks and KFC knock-offs, Middle Eastern grocery stores, pricey townhouses and the Swedish embassy. And of course, short and long term rentals, which is why we’re here.

Our flat is on a busy street, but it goes quiet in the late afternoon, and in the evening it’s calm but for the steady hum of city traffic swelling and subsiding like the sea--with the occasional roar of a motorbike lacing through traffic. Sometimes during the night there’s the rhythmic hammering of a pair of high heels on pavement or the metallic thud of a car door. The first night I was all frayed nerve ends, and even ear plugs and eyeshades couldn’t block out the city. Slept badly, intermittently. Just after dawn, I dozed off, only to wake two hours later to a baby squalling on the street below and the Semitic chatter of men unloading a lory at the Hallal butcher across the road. Bells from St Mary’s Church down the block chime hour, half hour, and quarter hour during the daylight hours--a flattened seesaw chime like the call of a tone-deaf chickadee.

They don’t call London "The Smoke" for nothing: when you blow your nose it’s black, as if you’ve been gardening. Our apartment is well above the street, and we keep the windows closed most of the time, but still the blinds in our room are covered with soot. Luckily it’s been cool, and the rain keeps the grit down. It rains nearly every evening, and once or twice every day clouds roil in from the sea and you get caught in a downpour. We’re already in the habit of carrying an umbrella even on sunny days.

This city is kind of a makeshift place. It functions as well as any other large city, but it everything seems jury-rigged and make-do, or held together with string and tape. Cables trail down the outside walls of a Georgian flat and disappear between the cobbles right in the middle of the sidewalk, so you have to walk around them. Waste stacks run down the exterior of buildings.

Saturday was more relaxed. We spent a rainy afternoon browsing through music shops along Tottenham Court in search of a cheap playable guitar to keep Mike sane while we’re here (I can’t do that job alone.) We were referred to the area by the proprietor of the brass and woodwind shop downstairs from our apartment: " I was wondering if you had any string instruments to let?" says Mike. "String instruments?!" says the snaggle-toothed old man with a broad grin, "Wot’r those?" Then he gives Mike a spontaneous jostling bear hug. So much for British reserve.

Tottenham Court is right off Trafalgar Square, so it made sense to stop in at The National Portrait Gallery. It reminded me that I have a lot of gaps in my education. I’m ok with the early paintings, then after King James, everything’s a blur for decades and decades. But when I hit The Romantics, it’s like being among old friends: Byron, in his Albanian turban, a ringer for Johnny Depp; Laurence Sterne, sparkling with wit; Robert Louis Stevenson looking like someone you could’ve shared a toke with in 1970.

The gallery was showing "Searching for Shakespeare," a delightful small exhibit of first editions and documents, some solid portraits and a lot of ambiguous ones, formerly thought to be authentic, now considered iffy, if not downright fraudulent.

Here’s a nice little tangent: the night before the failed Essex Rebellion, Essex’s supporters commissioned Shakespeare’s theatre company to perform Richard II. The company was later called to testify that really they’d done it for the money and not for political reasons. But strangely, there’s a portrait of Richard II in the gallery from about the time of Shakespeare’s play (supposedly drawn upon the 14^th c portrait of Richard II in Westminster) that looks startlingly like Shakespeare. Now why would that be? I looked up the Westminster portrait and it has some things in common with the gallery portrait—in both he wears an ermine collar--but his face bears a closer resemblance to portraits we know to be Shakespeare. What do we know about the provenance of the Richard II portrait in the gallery? Could the portrait be a kind of a satirical cartoon, referencing Shakespeare’s connection to the Essex rebellion?

Have a look by using the first link below...