on heroes

On Tuesday evening I dressed myself up, slipped on my brand-new Oxford shoes, had a delicious take-away curry picnic in Hyde Park (excluding today, the weather has been so nice here it would be a shame not to spend any and all spare hours out-of-doors), and then crossed the street for an evening with one of my heroes: Stephen Fry was speaking at the Royal Albert Hall.

And what an evening it was! The Guardian once called Fry a “national treasure,” and judging by the audience, there’s a lot of people in London who agree. Every single seat was filled. Apparently, the Monday night show was similarly attended, and an additional show was put on the roster for tonight due to demand. For my part, I was sandwiched between two young couples - one lovely pair of lesbians, and one equally lovely yuppie businessman and his Spanish model girlfriend. There was a group of four hilarious teenagers in front of me, and a late-middle aged couple behind me. This is a man who really does appeal to a wide cross-section of the population. (For good reason, as any one of us would be willing to tell you.)

It’s a funny thing, this business of idolizing people. Here are some of the people I call “heroes”: Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Tori Amos, Tom Stoppard, Sherlock Holmes, Alan Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Diana Wynne Jones, Ray Bradbury, and the Doctor (I am especially found of Eleven). I am aware that several of the abovementioned are purely fictional; I do not think this matters. I do think it noteworthy that the majority are writers even in this small selection of all the people that I look up to. (I am a cultural magpie, always searching out new ideas and entertainment. This excess of inspirational figures is not in any way a handicap as far as I’m concerned. “All novels are sequels;” as Michael Chabon says. “Influence is bliss.”)

ANYWAYS. Heroes. We have heroes for all sorts of reasons - inspiration, awe, wanting to be as great as them, learning from them… and sometimes, if we’re really lucky, we find heroes that show us, genius as they are, that it’s okay to be who we are. Stephen Fry is one such hero for me. Granted, he started out (in junior high) as the funny Melchett character from Blackadder to me, and then I moved on and found A Bit Of Fry and Laurie (it took several years for me to develop an interest in Jeeves & Wooster - either the TV series or the books. Oh, heathen soul!). But it was in high school, that time when we are most impressionable, and thus most likely to find heroes I suppose, that I truly became enamoured - I was one of those unbearable twats of a high schooler who thought themselves greatly cleverer than anyone else, utterly misunderstood, and who listened to The Smiths and The Libertines and carried around The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde all over the place. (To this day I have a great fondness for both Moz and Mr. Wilde.) …Which is when I stumbled upon the film Wilde, starring none other than Stephen Fry. And if I wasn’t utterly hooked by that, then I found his novel The Liar at the library, and reading it sealed the deal.

Now, because I draw influence from so many places, my love affairs with certain figures wax and wane as other interests crop up - I don’t discard any of them, I am not quite so fickle as that, but I do cycle through them, sometimes paying more attention to one than another. Such was the case with Mr. Fry. I got through my exams (the ones, to be perfectly honest about my selfish and lazy attitude towards schooling at this point, that mattered to me, anyway) with the help of Stoppard, Shakespeare, and Eliot. Etc, etc, etc, through college and my subsequent dropping out, until we get to a week ago.

I’ve just arrived in London, after what was frankly a rather miserable time at a live-in job in Cornwall. Feeling a bit adrift without having a friend to wander around with after spending over a month attached at the hip with a wonderful girl who will be cropping up more often as we move in and adventure together, I wandered into a place guaranteed to make me feel at home, and provide me with more friends than I can number - a bookstore. The flagship Waterstones store just down from Piccadilly Circus, if anyone’s interested. By the best-sellers shelves, there is a sign: Stephen Fry’s brand-new autobiography, half-price “because we love him.” I pick up what turns out to be the last book in the store - as the clerk I end up buying it from delightedly informs me, he’s knocked Tony Blair of the top of the charts.

Now, memoirs can be really hit or miss for me - they have to be both well-written and interesting to keep my attention. Focussing on his years at Cambridge and subsequent rise to fame, it instantly engrosses me. Witty as expected, terrifyingly honest, and heartbreakingly poignant with his writing, Fry talks about his obsessions and fears, of always feeling like a fraud, like he’s about to be “found out,” of his love of language and knowledge (as far as Fry is concerned, the only true sin is incuriosity), and in the process makes you (me) feel quite a lot better about being human, about your own doubts and fears.

And that’s the end of that, until a gentleman sees me reading on the Tube and asks me if I am going to see him (Fry) at the Royal Albert Hall. …what? Could it be possible? As a matter of fact, it could.

And so on Tuesday night I went to see him, and came away feeling like everything was going to be okay. It’s an amazing thing to look up to someone who looks up to the same other someones that you do. And it’s an even more amazing thing to look up to someone as gracious and intelligent as Stephen Fry. After an evening recounting things like his first meeting with Hugh Laurie, a few of his old one-man sketches (including the Dracula one), and answering Twitter questions, he decided to end the evening by dedicating it to Oscar Wilde. And so he launched into a speech praising not, as everyone who talks of Wilde tends to do, his wit, but rather his humanity; his braveness, his gentleness, and above all, his kindness. It put me in mind of Fry’s autobiography, when he tells the reader one of his favourite quotes from a Dean at Cambridge:

“A word of advice: don’t try to be clever. We’re all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.”

1,2, skip a few... 99, and back to the beginning

My next few posts will be all over the map as I attempt to catch up on my trip so far. And I have a lot to write about - about stony Edinburgh and sea-bound Cornwall and the magical properties of Liverpool. But first, here’s where I am now.

I arrived back in London almost four months to the day that I first came to the UK - something that I didn’t realize until I was already here, but that seems fitting. This city has an excess of gravity, I think; like a planet, it causes everything that falls into its orbit to either revolve around it endlessly or give in and come back. There are a lot of ‘ifs’ at play, too, of course. If I had found a job in Edinburgh… If I’d enjoyed St. Ives more…

But in the end, London’s gravity was strong enough to hold me, and I came back. And I am happy here, despite not yet having a job or a permanent place to stay, happy enough to realize just how much I wasn’t enjoying the last place I was in. But enough of that. This post is for the here and now.

Samuel Johnson once said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford,” and I think that is even more true now than it was in his time. In just five days, I have found dinosaurs, English majors, businessmen with Disney-character ties, an Indian music video shoot, most of the known species of butterfly in the world, part of a spaceship, comic shops that I won’t let myself buy anything from until I’ve found a flat, people asking me for directions, a giant statue of Freddy Mercury, a theatre built into the side of an underpass, Shakespearean plays, a painting come to life, and a fairy-tale castle with seven dreaming princesses, among other things.

I did not find Paddington Bear, despite looking high and low.

And now I am sitting in the courtyard of the Natural History Museum, one my favourite public spaces anywhere. I’ve found a small patch of sun between the trees, and the cup of tea beside me helps chase the last of the early autumn chill away. When I am finished typing this, I will go across the street to the Victoria & Albert Museum, to look at a collection of 60s rock‘n’roll photographs, and then I will take the Tube and spend my afternoon wandering Bloomsbury, looking for places to apply for work. Bookish Bloomsbury, which is fast becoming one of my favourite parts of London

No, I don’t think I will tire of this city. Because in London, to find your way to the riverside, you don’t follow the yellow-brick road. Instead, there’s a path lit by orange streetlights for you.