The Filtnib's Progress

Last weekend I escaped to the Netherlands for a flying visit to see my parents. The utter scene-shift, from a rainswept London full of tiredness and adulthood to the sparkling cold sunlight that greeted me on Saturday morning in the Hague, with the breakfast table already laid and my parents reading the paper and making toast when I came downstairs in my dressing-gown, felt wholesome and good and cherishing, like having a tea-cosy pressed around me. To my admittedly geektastic excitement, I travelled via Eurostar, from the renovated St. Pancras station. The clean, shiny-newness of everything, from the lanterns, redbrick arches and glass roof to the laptop portals (with UK and European plug sockets) makes you feel like train travel is something exciting, even (whisper it) luxurious.










































The station before the renovation, which took 10 years.












After.


































For comparison's sake, I also took some snaps of Brussels Midi. Tintin; brilliant idea for decor. Also the mischievous, massive advertisement for the new fast Eurostar service to London, which shows Blair, Thatcher and Major all holding EU balloons which they are about to pop.

I'd like to recommend a blog to you:

http://songkick.blogspot.com

It's a bit like having your coolest music expert friend on call, any time of the day or night for recommendations. Very nicely written and wow, you get to listen to the recommended tracks for FREE, easy peasy, no annoying downloads or watching ads or getting the track cut in half just as you were getting into it.
So go! Read, listen, be merry.

In the last six weeks, as part of our journalism course, we've visited a coroner's court twice. For a while beforehand, I'd been worrying that the experience would inevitably induce morbid thoughts. In fact, I was surprised by what a strange and unexpectedly graceful beast the coroner's court is. The particular court that we visited, St Pancras', is tucked a few streets behind the shiny new Eurostar station, and was built in 1886. With its red brick gables, buttresses and arched windows, sitting placidly in a wide, tree-canopied park that doubles as a Victorian cemetery, the court resembles an odd kind of gingerbread house; or a setting for a chapter of Dickens' great unfinished gothic novel, Edwin Drood.

I guess in a way witnessing an inquest is sure to cast shadows, and the cases that we observed spoke of the drip-drip despair of individuals whose lives were a constant struggle against unjust odds and the plundering internal war of mental illness. Both deaths were basically suicides, although the coroner recorded an open verdict for the first because of complicating factors that I won't go into here. It would have been strange not to feel an empathetic sense of loss when listening to the accounts of these people's lives, read respectfully by the officer of the court to a mostly empty room. It made me think of King Lear when he glimpses the bedraggled Edgar in the storm and says: "Is man no more than this?... Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art".

There is something so painful about the smallness of the process that greeted the deaths; the quietness of these people's exits from the world. Yet at the same time, I felt a kind of warmth sitting in the court and hearing the coroner's careful, unrushed questions as he tried to clarify the deceased's last days, hours, minutes; tried to sift through the emotional accounts of witnesses and carers; tried to restore some dignity and truth to a scene long concluded. A coroner is either a trained lawyer, a trained doctor, or, as in the case at St. Pancras, both. He or she is surrounded by a team of people for whom dealing with the narratives of death is a career. Yet there is something very sensitive and gentle about the process of the coroner's court; all the staff seemed intent upon keeping the atmosphere calm, ordered and above all, respectful. Because, although the coroner is an instrument of the law; a whirring cog in the machinery of justice and record-keeping, he is never there to find a guilty party. His or her role is strictly limited to establishing the facts behind any death that is a) violent or unnatural or b) sudden. In this way the word 'court' itself is misleading, with its associations of a prosecution, the apportioning of blame or the allotting of punishment.


I've often thought the truly brave way to live would be to do so with the waking knowledge of one's own mortality - although not to the extent that you live in constant existential terror, because that would mean you got nothing whatsoever done and simply existed in constant paralysis, like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights - but there's certainly nothing like coming up close to death for putting the daily grind into perspective. I do wonder how the coroner lives his life and whether he experiences it differently because of his daily encounter with death. Also, I quite like the idea of an inquest as a very British way of trying to cope with the random earth-shattering chaos-inducing anarchy of death. In some cultures people weep and wail in the streets, beat their chests, paint ash on their foreheads; here we get some people together to try to ascribe some order to the event, to encircle it with legal language, methodical procedure. And thus, one feels, we go some way towards imposing propriety, structure, tidiness. We wrestle back a little bit of control over our own fates.

Though don't let me give the wrong impression: I don't think that kind of spiritual succour was ever the official function of the coroner's court. The word coroner comes from the Latin for 'crown'; in 1194, it was decreed that three knights and a clerk "attend" every death - presumably this was optimistic rather than an actual policy, unless medieval knights had a hotline to the grim reaper himself - but anyway, their name was "custos placitorum coronae" - "Keepers of the Pleas of the Crown", and their job was to make sure that the correct portion of the deceased's assets were kept for the Crown. So basically, they were a kind of tax collector. I prefer their role today.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of a unique culinary experience. So good was it, that I would wager it won't stay unique for long, as good ideas in restaurant-land spread fast. But for one day, walking into Wahaca in Chandos Place, I felt a bit like Lucy in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - the first lucky child to stumble across Narnia.
Comparing myself to Lucy does a gross injustice to my guide and general inspiration in all things eatable, Dizzy Ostrom, without whom I would have remained entirely ignorant of Wahaca, not to mention its location, Chandos Place, which quietly occupies a nondescript middle-ground somewhere between Covent Garden and Charing Cross. Dizzy had heard the buzz about Wahaca and mobilized us into a small expeditionary force to test its virtues. Just as well she did. For one thing, Mexican food has never tickled my tastebuds particularly, so in normal circumstances I wouldn't have gone out of my way to try this place. And secondly, as Wahaca is down a long flight of stairs, there was no chance I would have wandered past and glimpsed its supercool decor or been tempted by the lush foodstuffs being rushed out of its kitchens.
Instead, I walked in blind, zero expectations and only a rumbling tummy to challenge my impartiality.
Wahaca's website - www.wahaca.co.uk - talks a lot about 'street food'. Don't let the idea of half-cooked bacteria-fermenting dishes simmering in a bin lid on some dirty street put you off. This food is street as in really, really cool. I had the 'Sonora Salad', which involved sliced avocado, grilled chicken, cos lettuce and green rice in a bowl made of a giant tortilla.













(Dizzy in Wahaca)




My fellow expeditionaries Dizzy, Clare and Greg chose a selection of dishes from the street food menu, including chorizo quesillada, flaked mackerel tostada, pork pibil taco and sweetcorn on the cob with chilli, lime and creme fraiche. Yum-my. We also had the mandatory tortilla with homemade guacamole to start, and were each gifted with a complimentary tequila and virgin mary by our waiter, due to the fact that Friday had been the Day of the Dead and therefore (initially confusingly) a celebratory time. In keeping with the good spirits of the place, if it hadn't been lunchtime, I would have certainly been tempted to sample the restaurant's delicious-looking mojito. But by holding back on Saturday, at least we have a pressing excuse to return a.s.a.p. for an evening outing.













Me, looking quite besotted with my salad in a giant-tortilla; greg enjoying the virgin mary.