The Falling Stones and Internet Theft

A cemetery nearby on Willesden Lane appears on the map as “Willesden Lane Cemetery,” but the sign on the gate calls it “Paddington Cemetery,” which is a little surprising since we're quite some distance from Paddington.

Whatever it's called, the cemetery has some interesting characteristics. While there are some large and elaborate markers are from the late Victorian era, most of the stones are modest and from the nineteen-thirties and later. The soil seems singularly unstable, and the ground around even recent burial sites shows cracks or ripples.

The result is that headstones and wooden markers in most of the cemetery are listing, leaning, or have toppled and broken. Markers that promise “We Will Never Forget” look very much forgotten. In a few cases, headstones of apparently unrelated people lean toward each other as if offering mutual support, or as if the graves had turned intimately toward one another.

The biggest, oldest tombs and stones lining the path to the chapel are still mostly upright, and the chapel is in good condition. But aside from these, the only other markers that stand straight are the markers for veterans of the Great War, all of them standing together near a common memorial statue. Dating from the teens and twenties, they look newer than markers that were placed decades later. I'm sure that the government or perhaps an organization of veterans maintains these.

I've never before seen the usage common on many markers: “Fell Asleep” is the euphemism for “Died.” I imagine this was a fashion (for most of the twentieth century) in England. I don't know if I've ever seen it in the U.S.

I'm glad that the veterans' markers are respected and maintained, but I'm glad to see others going to ruin so swiftly. There is something strangely comforting about seeing the earth turn itself over so energetically in a cemetery. Markers carved only seventy years ago are already weathered into illegibility. Promises to “Never Forget” have been left by people who are themselves on the way to being forgotten. Why is this reassuring? I suppose because it reminds me that life is for the living, and that I can do worse with my time than lying on the cemetery grass to watch clouds cross the sky.

Holly observed that this English cemetery makes for quite a contrast from Japanese graves. Whether the austere angles of Bhuddist stones or the more natural shapes of Shinto, markers in Japan show signs of having been very recently tended and decorated, even if they are very old. Perhaps especially if they are very old. But ancestor veneration isn't a part of English culture.

As for Internet theft...

My one-week, twenty-pound subscription to Sip and Serve expired today, and I can't afford to keep connecting at that rate. I haven't been able to contact anyone in the Queen's Park Wireless Club since I met them during Queen's Park Day, so I set out to see if I could find one of their sites just by walking around the neighborhood.

I did find an unsecured hub only a dozen or so houses away from our flat. On the sidewalk, I leaned against the garden wall of a house and logged on. A man left a nearby house on his bicycle, returned an hour later and said, “You're here for the day, then?”

“For the hour, anyway,” I said. “I'm using a wireless connection, but I don't know where it's coming from.”

“I have an idea,” he said. He pointed up and down the sidewalk and smiled. “This is a lay line.” (For those who haven't encountered the term, a lay line is a metaphysical connection route along the earth. A line on the spiritual power grid.)

My battery gave out, and I went home. Once I had recharged, I set up in a shady spot at the kerb. (These English spellings are infectious.) Actually, my feet were in the gutter as I taught my MFA students. Feet in the gutter, mind on poetry. I was being the very definition of a writer.

A man came out of one of the houses. He wanted to know if I was all right.

“I'm fine, thank you. I'm using someone's wireless connection. I don't know whose.”

“Probably mine then.”

“It's unsecured, then?”

“Yes it is. Would you like some tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

“I'll bring you a chair.”

And that was how I met one of my neighbors. After I logged off, I brought the chair back to his front door, and we chatted in his kitchen for a few minutes before he had to walk to the school to collect his children.

We talked about my London project --- this blog and the writing I hope to get from it --- and he observed, as I have heard others observe, that London is a vast village more than a big city. It feels that way to me, too, when people I haven't met, people from whom I am stealing an Internet signal, offer me a cup of tea and a comfy chair.

Odds and Ends

British Telecom has started charging us for our phone line, but it doesn't seem to work yet. Based on this and some other reservations, we canceled the order for BT broadband. When Holly called a competitor (a phone and Internet company that, unlike BT, answered their phone...and with a real person, no less!) the helpful man at the Phone Co-op said to her, “Do I detect an accent?” Holly told him, “You do. I'm from America.” “I'm afraid you'll find that efficiency is in shorter supply here,” he said.