Under the Baobab TreeUnder the Baobab Tree: October 2004
Under the Baobab Tree
Sunday, October 31, 2004
My Ron, Your Ron, We All Scream for Myron! Today was another beautiful sunny day in London and we spent the entire day inside getting ready for tomorrow. We were occasionally visited by other members of the team, who were out and about seeing sights, which just made it worse. The only nice thing that happened was that my boss walked in at one point and announced he had a present for me. He had been in Harrod's and got me a copy of a hard-to-find English horsie magazine that is devoted to only two subjects, foxhunting and eventing (my favorites!). It is fabulous. Everyone made fun of me because I kept trying to look at it instead of do trial preparation tasks. Oh well. I thought it was very thoughtful of my boss. Speaking of which, people here are generally making fun of my horsie. So much so that one of our expert witnesses (first name Myron), who has since left us and gone back to the US, sent an email to me today that was entitled, "I Think Your Nice Horse Is Nice" and then the first line of the email itself was "Now that I have your attention . . . " Later he wrote me another email with the caption "Your Horse is Wonderful and My Football Team Won," which was also pretty funny because not only are people uninterested in my horsie, they were even less interested in Myron's football team (Tennessee Titans).
Speaking of Myron, he was a hit among the Brits. They pronounce his name like My Ron, as in Your Ron, or Their Ron, and they are unable to say "My Ron" except at top volume. "MY RON! Would you like some more tea? MY RON! You have a telephone call." Etc. We all collapsed in giggles every time it happened, which was often. MY RON is also bald and sort of rumpled looking and short, and very energetic and eager, so several times random English women would come up on the street and smack two wet ones on his bald head. MY RON thought that was a nice change from his native Tennessee.
The first night MY RON was here we all went to a restaurant in Mayfair called Langan's Brasserie, which is part-owned by Michael Caine. It serves normal food as well as bangers and mash (sausage links and mashed potatoes) and bubble and squeak (fried pureed potatoes and cabbage.) We had a lovely spacious round table upstairs, right in the back, out of the way of the hustle and bustle, we thought. Secluded, we thought. Reserved and dignified, we thought.
The only odd thing was there was a sort of spotlight right behind my head somehow and so my view of the table all evening was obstructed by a huge, bulbous shadow of my own head. Everywhere I turned there was a dark head-shaped blob blotting out all the light. It made reading the menu hard. I felt like an alien. Also, right next to my bulbous head was a vase of overpowering lilies. They made my woozy. I think they were special Sedating Lilies, strategically placed to mute conversation. MY RON noticed them too, and said, "wow."
As if the bulbous head and the Sedating Lilies didn't make it hard enough to follow the conversation (we travel as a group of anywhere from 6 to 10 people most of the time, so conversation is often hard to follow) at one point one of my contacts fell out of my huge bulbous head right onto the table in the middle of the bulbous shadow created by the bulbous head. I had to get up, turn face first into the weird spot light behind me, which temporarily blinded my only working eye, take a big gulp of the lily-infused air, and try to find the upstairs ladies room, arms outstretched. It was an exhausting meal.
Last night I read what my guide book has to say about Langan's. At first I thought the book must be right on because it says that the "beautiful, clever, rich and promising come here see and be seen." Those categories seemed to fit each of us, so…. But then it goes on to say that "[r]umor has it that famous people get the best seats and the lesser known get what they're given; of course, this is rigorously denied by the restaurant, but don't let them put you at a table upstairs." Hmmm.
But anyway, back to the original subject. I didn't see anything of the City today. I am still hoping to get into the Temple to see the Crusader tombs before I leave. And my colleagues' mission is to try to take a picture of Platform 9 and three quarters at Kings Cross Station for his Harry Potter-obsessed children. So we haveresolved to get out of the office in time tomorrow to do something fun.
We've been here in London a week now and it seems like we've been here forever. Our routine is very predictable and grueling. We get up at the crack of dawn and assemble at the office. We work for a couple of hours and then walk about 10 minutes down Fleet Street to the International Dispute Resolution Centre where our hearing is being held. We pass an enormous amount of history on the way. You already know about St. Clement Danes, the first thing we pass. In addition, we pass:
1. The Royal Courts of Justice, the country's vast civil court complex. It is a Victorian Gothic castle with 1,000 rooms and 3.5 miles of corridors (according to my book). It was built in 1882.
2. The Temple Bar Memorial, which marks the ancient entrance to the City of London. The Queen (who lives in the City of Westminster -- totally different) has to stop here and “knock” to get permission to enter the City before proceeding down the road to St. Paul's or sherever she is headed. There is a wonderful statue of a dragon on top of the Temple Bar memorial, which against the Gothic architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice gives the whole place a Tolkien-esque, fantasyland air. We've been arguing amongst ourselves about whether it's a dragon or a griffin, and lo and behold, I opened my book tonight and it actually says “the spiky dragon, which is definitely not a griffin ....” (page 92) Hah!
3. The Temple itself, which is where four of the Inns of Court are located. It is called the Temple because the Knights Templar were based on this spot from 1185 until 1312, when the Plantagenets kicked them out for some reason that I have not yet figured out. Several crusaders are buried in the round church inside. I want to get in there before we leave.
4. St. Bride's Church, just past our hearing room, is on ground that has been occupied by houses of worship since Roman times -- there is a section of Roman pavement in it. More importantly, its spire is the model for tiered wedding cakes (not that interesting, really).
Then, after the hearing adjourns for the day, we walk back up Fleet Street, past the Temple and the Spiky Dragon and the Royal Courts of Justice and St. Clement Danes, to the office where we work for a couple more hours and then all of us -- lawyers, paralegals, witnesses, client and hangers-on -- go off to an endless, exhausting dinner somewhere. We've eaten everywhere from Mayfair to Bloomsbury to Covent Garden to Trafalgar to the City. We are all now exceedingly fat. And some amazing things have transpired during these never-ending dinners, but those stories will have to wait for another day.
By now, however, most of our witnesses are gone and it's just the lawyers left and we're getting ready for closing arguments on Tuesday. So after working all day in the office, I decided to take Saturday night and do something without the gang for a change. So, I went up to St. Martin-in-the-Fields and saw a candelight concert in the church of Bach's Brandenburg concertos played on period instruments. It was lovely. The church was consecrated in 1712 and Bach's concertos were commissioned at just about that time. All the electric lights were off (just candles) and the period instruments sound a little different than the modern ones and so it was basically a transporting experience.
The french horns were very weird sounding (muffled, imprecise) and the flute and violins were very soft but the harpsichord was amazing! I've never had much use for the harpsichord, but this one sounded like a modern synthesizer it was so loud and clear and its sound was everywhere in the church -- constantly running along underneath the rest of the music, sort of like a centipede's legs in motion. It was actually kind of mesmerizing. I will never listen to Concerto number 3 the same way again (it used to be my least favorite).It is not really a very big church, so we were all crammed in there in the low light. But everyone was happy and tapping their toes and smiling and nodding their heads to the very familiar music. I sat in the nice warm nave and relaxed and didn't think about the silly hearing or anything and emptied my brain. Unfortunately, this usually means I start giggling to myself about something or other because when you have nothing serious to think about, everything becomes VERY funny! I tried not to giggle too audibly. The strangers sitting next to me didn't seem to notice.
After the concert we all tumbled out and off the big stone porch of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to a clear night with Nelson towering over the lions in Trafalgar Square and the round yellow face of Big Ben beaming at us and an equally round yellow moon over the river. St. Martin-in-the-Fields is apparently the architectural inspiration for many Colonial American churches, particularly the shape of its spire, so being there is oddly reminescent of New England. People dressed up for Hallowe'en were milling around Charing Cross and packs of window shoppers and people strolling were intermingled with them. It felt like Fifth Avenue does the week before Christmas.
I walked home through the theatre district and stopped for a bowl of spicy fish soup and a glass of white wine, still smiling and thinking foolish thoughts. It was lovely to eat by myself -- three meals a day with other people is exhausting for someone who is used to eating every almost every meal alone.Tomorrow, back to work.
Today was a beautiful sunny windy day which we spent almost entirely inside preparing witnesses. I took a break at one point to go outside and find a candy bar. I got a fine dose of history in my ten minute outing. First of all, as I'm sure most of you know, the Strand/Fleet Street/St. Paul's area is the oldest part of London. This is where Neanderthals rooted around in the riverside muck and this is where the Danes and the Saxons came and settled and conquered the Angles and the Mercians, etc., long before the Romans came. By the time William the Conqueror got here, the Romans had been long gone and the town was established, with walls and churches etc. Most of this town that William found was right around the current location of our office and hotel. Indeed, the old gate to London Town is just a few blocks east of here. One of things William found when he got to this tiny riverside town was a church called St. Clement Danes. It was founded by the few Danes who remained in England after the rest of the Danes were expelled by Alfred the Great in 900 A.D. Speculation is that the Danes who remained were allowed to because they had married local girls. If you read the book London by Edward Rutherfurd, the church figures prominently in one of the early chapters. It is thought to have been named after Pope Clement who was Pope in 100 AD who was thrown into the sea by Emperor Trajan whilst tied to an anchor and thus instantly became the patron saint of the sea. These Danes had a penchant for the sea and so they became known as the St. Clement Danes. Their little church grew up outside the original gates of the town, I think because they were not Angles and thus were outcasts, but not I'm not 100 percent sure of that.
Something happened to this little church between 900 and 1066 and it fell down or something and when William the Conqueror came along he saw the dilapidated little wooden church outside the gates and rebuilt it. Ironically, some say the bones of King Harold (the King whom William defeated at the Battle of Hastings) are beneath the church. It is not clear whether William knew this at the time. The idea of William the Conqueror rebuilding something that was old enough to have already fallen down by 1066 shows how very old this part of town is. Of course, William must not have liked St. Clement Danes too much because he somewhat immediately began building the church at Westminster which is now Westminster Abbey -- and he would have been buried there if he hadn't exploded in his coffin in the north of France before he could get here (they waited a little too long after he died to get the process underway, I guess).
But I digress. Time passes and the Danes and the Normans all became part of the great Anglo-Saxon mass, and in turn, they all became British. The little church of St. Clement Danes prospered and the town grew well out beyond the original gates and Fleet Street and the Strand grew busier and busier and the little church ended up on an island in the middle of two very busy streets -- a virtual traffic island, one books says. In the Middle Ages, "you would still have seen St. Clement's, though half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses, with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the 'Straits of St. Clement's.'" In 1692, the church was rebuilt again, this time by Christopher Wren -- who apparently did the work for free. Wren added bells to the church which chimes the nursery rhyme tune of "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's." The bells that nursery-rhyme actually referred to are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St. Clement's, Eastcheap, further to the east, which had been the historic center of the dried fruit trade. I don' t know how this St. Clement Danes got them instead. Perhaps the other St. Clement's has not survived? After Wren rebuilt the church it became quite fashionable, and Samuel Johnson was a parishioner. There is a statute of the man behind St. Clement's, facing down Fleet Street to St. Paul's.
St. Clements remained fashionable until WWII, when it was mostly destroyed by German bombs in 1941. Only the outer walls remained. If you walk by the Church now you can see the pitting and damage from the Luftwaffe still on the outer stone work. So it was rebuilt again, and in the 1950s, was fittingly dedicated as the RAF military chapel.
Nowadays, St. Clement Danes is right across the street from our London office, shrouded in very old, very tall London plane trees. Indeed, for much of the day I was in an office that overlooked the little church with traffic and double-decker buses and black London taxis streaming about it. This morning -- being Sunday -- the tiny space in front of the church between the two roaring streets of traffic was full of men in RAF uniforms and very somber women waiting for services. I overhead that the sermon had been about events in Iraq and the RAF men serving there. It was quite remarkable to sit here with my Blackberry and my cell phone and the Internet and all the technological prowess of this law firm and look at a church that has existed on that spot since 900 A.D., and which commemorates the entire history of England, from the pre-historic Expulsion of the Danes to the British military role in Iraq.
Oddly, no-one else on my trial team is particularly interested in this sort of information.
As some of you may know, I am in London through November 3 for an arbitration pending before the London Court of International arbitration. The proceedings start Monday. Our team all flew over to London to arrive today in time for a 4 p.m. kickoff meeting at our London office with our client and most of our witnesses, and the London staff who are helping us get everything done. My flight landed at 7 a.m. this morning and I got to my hotel door by 8:30. I was several hours too early for my room.
So, I set off into the drizzle with my fashionable black nylon topcoat buttoned up tight and my brief case slung over myself like a messenger bag. I was in search of a Starbucks, to while away the hours until the hotel called to say I could check in. I knew there was a Starbucks on Leicester Square -- I'd been there before -- but I was hoping to find one closer to the office than that.
So on the way, I found myself walking through Somerset House -- a huge Georgian palace built right on the Thames, a stone's through from our London office. It is where the Royal Barge used to disembark and is where George III lived -- the Mad King from whom we won our independence. It is a massive collection of buildings that surround a very 18th century stone courtyard and which connects the Strand to the River Thames. The public is permitted to walk through the courtyard from the Strand to the Waterloo Bridge.
There is an art museum in the Somerset somewhere, and a stairway made famous by Admiral Nelson, and nowadays there are a number of bureaucratic offices, like the office of marriage licenses and of internal tax, etc., in the buildings. In the winter the courtyard is an ice skating rink, with vendors of all kinds stuffed into the arcade around the cobblestones selling chestnuts and grog and white Christmas lights hung everywhere on the old stones and people whizzing by with fur muffs and long scarves. I remember walking through the skating mayhem a few years ago when I was here in December.
But when I walked through it at 8:30 this Saturday morning, it was completely deserted and totally silent. My footsteps across the cobblestones echoed loudly. The courtyard glistened in the rain -- the massive arches through which the horse and carriages used to pass were solid and glowed slightly in the grey morning light. You could barely hear the traffice from modern London outside on the Strand. The palace extended down three of four stories below the courtyard, and you could peer down through open air stairs and see the "below stairs" areas where scullery maids and boot blacks presumably used to work. You could almost hear the ghosts of the horses who had clattered into the courtyard in full royal regalia to deposit Admiral Nelson, or perhaps King George III's carriage, or the luggage of the visiting royalty of France, or something. You could almost see the contingent of servants and women lined up in front of the main door to welcome them. You could almost hear the string quartet playing minuets on the back terrace facing the Thames. You could imagine Handel conducting the first performance of the Water Music and Music for the Fireworks from the terrace on the river -- to celebrate the King's jubilee in the height of summer.
I learned later that this Somerset House was build on the the site of the palace where Elizabeth I grew up as a princess, never expecting to inherit the throne. It was very still. A ragged Union Jack flew above the top floor. I felt as if I'd walked onto the set of a Merchant & Ivory movie. The only odd thing was you could see the big jumbo jets on the south side of the river making their final approach to Heathrow -- a position I myself had been in only a few hours before. I sat for a long time in the courtyard at Somerset House, thinking how funny that this spot used to be the seat of power for the Western World -- the most privileged and protected spot on earth -- and now I was sitting there all by myself in the rain with my briefcase and my coat, completely unexpected and anonymous.
Later, after we were done with our afternoon meeting, we took the client and the witnesses out to Indian food. By this time it was dark and the rain was pelting down. We all sat at a long table in an Indian restaurant north of Charing Cross Road and consumed huge amounts of Indian beer and Tandoori chicken. Our boss regaled us with stories of his childhood washing dishes (or something similar) in his parent's family-run Greek restaurant. The client told stories about racing Porsches outside of Houston. We all giggled helplessly, perhaps overcome by our long flights earlier that day and also the influence of our mirthful and jolly Indian hosts. We stumbled out a few hours later into the still driving rain, and toddled back to our hotel, the Waldorf on Aldwych (Danish for "outlying farm."). Somebody paid for the meal, but I'm not sure who.
So we have ten days of rain and silly meals and unexpected historical excursions ahead of us.
There could be worse ways to make a living, I suppose.
