Jupiter - a light in the sky

I thought a plane was coming right at me last night at dusk.  But it didn't get any nearer. 

Apparently it's Jupiter. 

Jupiter

Starry, starry night: Jupiter

Obligatory Steve Hillage song:

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

 We visit Highgate Cemetery, continued.

Highgate Cemetery

When I first moved to London, in 1976, I and some other students took a tube to South Woodford, where we would be living in the Halls of Residence. Outside the city, a lot of the tube lines are above ground, and on this one we passed a gigantic graveyard. I'd never seen anything like it. 

"There are a lot of people in London," Ralph mused, solemnly. 

"And they're all dead," Trevor quipped, though it wasn't very funny. 

There are many more graveyards in London, but none as famous as Highgate Cemetery.

Near the entrance, and a must-visit, was the grave of Douglas Adams, writer of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, a Doctor Who writer, and the originator of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Adams died young, at 49, and as with all creatives who leave us early, one can’t help wondering what he would have done next. You can see his marker a long way off, as a tradition has sprung up in the quarter century since his death. Visitors leave ballpoint and fountain pens in a receptacle placed there for them. Anyone who has, or has found, a piece of paper with the number "42" on it also leaves them at the grave. 

I left a ballpoint pen in his memory.

Douglas Adams' grave

Also resting there is Malcolm McLaren, the producer, Sex store owner and manager/entrepreneur of the Sex Pistols.  Another man who didn’t quite make old age. As I’ve gotten older myself, some of the things I thought of as Malcolm “cashing in” – like the South African beats, or the Sex Pistols themselves – now seem more like genius moves on his part. (I could have done without “Cosh the Driver” though.)  Visitors seem to leave him pound coins. Not sure why, and I didn’t have one, but in a move that was well and truly NOT PUNK I didn’t steal any of the ones that were already there.

Malcolm McLaren's grave. Better a spectacular failure,
than a benign success.

The big draw to Highgate Cemetery is Karl Marx.  Dr. Marx has two grave markers. One where he was initially interred, and one where he was reburied. I didn’t have a tour guide to ask, but I assume he was moved because so many people wanted to spend eternity next to him. Paul Foot and Eric Hobsbawm were nearby, along with a few international Marxists and probably others whose names weren’t familiar to me.  His older grave was decorated with a little hammer and sickle made of loose pebbles. It probably won’t last long, no doubt a gift from a visitor.

Karl Marx' grave. Looks a 
bit like Zardoz, but isn't.

Karl Marx' original, now empty, grave. Also shown, 
several feet and a pebble hammer and sickle.

Eric Hobsbawm's grave, near Uncle Karl

Paul Foot's grave, near Uncle Karl

We also visited William Kingdon Clifford, the mathematician, Michael Faraday, the Father of Electricity,  Alan Sillitoe the playwright and Patrick Caulfield’s inventive “DEAD” tombstone. There’s also a circular section called the Egyptian Mausoleum which is a true city of the dead. Walking around it is like visiting Petra or Babylon, except it’s wet and cold and the signage is in English.

Allan Sillitoe

Patrick Caulfield

William Kingdon Clifford

Michael Faraday

It is a very sobering place. I got the very definite message that people are dead for a lot longer than they are alive, and that time doesn’t stop for them even then. It marches on, with trees ripping apart the coffins and tumbling the gravestones, and the thick layers of moss constantly overturned by crows hunting for insects underneath. There weren’t even any conkers around for me to take as a souvenir, as I had at Pere-Lachaise and Golders Green.

This marker reads "Daniel St. John Smith, International Man of Mystery"
and he is. We couldn't find out who he was.

Part of the Egyptian Mausoleum

European Vacation series: 

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

 European vacation continued...

We spent the rest of the time in Paris at the Pompidou Center,  touring the Surrealists exhibition. Paris is easy to get around – the Metro is wonderful – and the language presented no obstacle. (It helps that I can read French, full disclosure.) Most French people could tell we were English from about thirty yards away (especially amazing, since we haven’t lived in England for over a quarter of a century) and switched to speaking English. Evidently the era of French people pretending not to understand English is over. I wonder if leaving the Common Market/EU left them feeling more, rather than less, friendly?

We were soon back at Gare Du Nord for another round of sheep-dip-style passport lines and within hours back in London. So what did we do once we were back?

Why, go to Highgate Cemetery, of course.

Highgate Cemetery. An angel with a broken wing

In all the years I lived in London, I never visited it. I’m rather sad about that now, as apparently it used to be a complete mess, a sort of Goth playground, after a bankruptcy in the 1960s which led to it being completely overgrown (and, I’ve heard, partially desecrated) by the 1980s, when the Friends of Highgate Cemetery took over the administration.

We paid said Friends a few quid each and went for a walk among the inhabitants.

Where Pere Lachaise was neat, well-tended and respected, Highgate is still higgledy-piggledy, cattywumpus and dripping with nonchalance. The guide pamphlet mentions that the Victorians thought nothing of trampling over graves to get to their loved one’s burial pitch and it seems the modern visitors do likewise. After a few attempts at following the paths, we did the same, navigating by headstones, walking over graves and tripping over tree roots from full-grown trees that have as little respect for the dead as any of the visitors.  Where Pere Lachaise had rows of neat mausoleums engraved with “concession à perpétuité” (a plot granted to a family in perpetuity) on the back, Highgate has hillsides with tumbled, worn rocks that were once graves.

Don’t get me wrong – the Friends have done a great job clearing up much of the forest and putting things back together but there are sections that look much like a clint limestone pavement (and the grykes are just as treacherous). 

We had a list of people that we wanted to visit, but for this post, here are a few general views showing the packing density of the resting places and the full-grown regrowth forest that lives among them.

Highgate Cemetery 

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery's "grykes"

Highgate Cemetery - one of the more tidy parts

Next: More Highgate. Karl Marx and his pals and some of our heroes are buried there.

European Vacation series:

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

Progress Report 2: HOTLUAD no longer glows at dawn to presage the coming of spring

Bad news. The sun came up this morning but the House Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn to presage the coming of spring didn't glow at dawn.

On closer inspection, the broken windows have been replaced with boards. When we visited the house in 2020, the boards were behind broken windows, so they still could reflect the light, but I guess that's changed, or the glass has fallen out.

I've added a photo from February 2020 that shows the contrast with today.

What this means for spring, I do not know. But I have a bad feeling about this.

House on the hill opposite, February 23, 2025 at dawn

House on the hill opposite, February 2018 at dawn

The House on the hill opposite That Lights Up At Dawn To Presage The Coming Of Spring: Progress Report 1

The House on the hill Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn To Presage The Coming Of Spring is, alas, invisible.

Maybe there won't be any more springs?

I didn't have much hope for HOTLUAD this year as all the windows appear to have been broken, but nature has drawn a literal and figurative veil over it. There are another couple of days when we *might* get a chance to observe the glow but :(

The House on the Hill Opposite, Dawn, February 22nd, 2025
 (house and hill not shown)

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

European vacation continued:

To celebrate the promise and refreshed expectations of the new year, 2025 we took a trip to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  It’s the largest cemetery in the French capital, at 110 acres and 70,000 burial plots. It’s widely regarded as a place to go for a walk, rather than a place to contemplate the brevity of life’s brief candle-flame and indeed it is a fine place for a stroll. (Although it was raining and pretty darn cold.)

Père Lachaise cemetery

One notable aspect of Père Lachaise is its neatness. Every body has a nice rectangular plot, often a little mausoleum with a roof, a window and a place for flowers and remembrances. The grass is neatly cut and the paths laid out for walkers.  Only a few areas have the tumbledown look of Highgate (of which more later) and if it weren’t for the thick beds of moss on the horizontal stone surfaces, it would look newly built.

Rare disarray in Père Lachaise

A wide variety of people are buried here, and the one that most Americans will recognize is Jim Morrison, the singer with 60s rock band The Doors who died heartbreakingly young.  We visited that gravesite – and so did everyone else, it seems. It’s been cordoned off with tape (perhaps to keep people from trampling nearby plots) but fans have left piles of flowers and souvenirs on the stone. Perhaps ten or fifteen people visited in the short time we attended, which you can’t say about Chopin, who is also there. (Though he also has fresh flowers.)

Chopin

Jim Morrison's grave

I was delighted to visit Champollion, a giant in Egyptology and one of the pioneers in reading and understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. His tomb is marked by an obelisk, of course.  Oscar Wilde is there with a very fancy carved grave marker, sadly covered in Perspex to prevent people from leaving graffiti on the stone. The mathematician Fourier is buried there as well. The old bust that used to mark his grave had lost its nose and was widely believed to be a bust of Voldemort, so it was replaced with a new bronze bust not long ago.  His grave is also marked by an Egyptological flourish – a sun disk with two vulture wings. Paris was Egypt mad at the time. (Even more so than London.)  Another scientist buried there is Fresnel, an optics pioneer.

Oscar Wilde's marker

Oscar Wilde's marker, three quarter view

Champollion's Obelisk, Père Lachaise

Fourier's grave with verdigris bust

Fresnel's grave and headstone

I’m not sure what Miguel Asturias did to deserve a faithful copy of a Mayan stela, but it’s certainly a beautiful sight. It seems perfectly situated, a little bit of ancient Guatemalan jungle realized in Paris.

Mayan stele at Pere Lachaise

There is also a crematorium onsite with thousands of pigeonholes in a structure known as a columbarium. After a long search, we found Max Ernst’s final resting place. I guess he didn’t want a grave and a mausoleum, or indeed any fuss.  Hi Max, anyway.  

Max Ernst, in the columbarium

I picked up a conker (horse chestnut) from the grounds and I’ve put it with my conker from Golder’s Green Crematorium, which I took with me when I went to visit Marc Bolan and Paul Kossoff, many years ago.

Next: Continuing our quest to celebrate the possibilities of the brand new year, we visit Highgate Cemetery in London!

European Vacation series:

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

Vacation continued: 

One of the highlights of London is how easy it is to get out if and go to Paris instead.  You hop on a train at St. Pancras Station, and it deposits you at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Well, I say “hop” but due to Brexit, you do have to go through a partially-assed passport control and customs check which is a little like being a sheep herded through a sheep dip, but once that’s over you sit on the train and munch half-French British Rail-style sandwiches and try not to think about the weight of water above you in the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, La Manche).

We stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel – a suite of rooms for around $100 a night – and utilized the French equivalent of an Oyster Card, a Navigo pass.  Same deal as the Oyster Card, you fill it up at a machine and rub it against ticket  turnstiles when you want to travel.  With a London Oyster Card, you sign in and sign out at your destination. With the Navigo, you just sign in. There’s no check of where you get off the Metro. 

I found it a bit more difficult to use, in that the first time I tried, I must have waited too long to push forward, or otherwise annoyed the Transport Gods, and the green “go through” light went out. And you can’t use the card at the same gate a second time! I assume that’s their way of preventing a traveler throwing the card to an accomplice outside the gate for a second journey, but I can’t think of a reason why they need to do that.

Anyway, one of the locals, seeing me gesticulating wildly in English, let me through the gate while his own light was green. After that, things went better.

I’d never been to Paris. I’ve been across the Channel on a ferry, notably during the Royal Wedding in 1981 when I could no longer face the  overload of Union Jack bunting in London. But we only went as far as Calais, on the coast, the spiritual home of Duty-Free fags and liquor.

I think everyone has a bucket list of what they want to see in Paris, and so did we, but since we booked the trip only a few days before we traveled, we couldn’t get tickets to 95% of them. (Places like the Louvre are famously booked up months ahead, and even then are seriously overcrowded.)  

Our first trip was to the Eiffel Tower. The summit was closed, but the lower two stages were accessible by steps (or an elevator if you booked early enough, which we hadn’t). Being a Northerner, I couldn’t help measuring it up against the Blackpool Tower, but I have to say that apart from the lack of world-class ballrooms, it is impressive. We climbed the stairs to the first stage and spent an hour looking over Paris. We set out for the stairs again and I’d climbed about nine steps before declaring the second stage could look after itself and I wasn’t going a step farther. 

Lining up for the Eiffel Tower

It is a very long way up and it was cold and windy but incredibly impressive in the way all Victorian cast-iron construction is.  It was built in a couple of years for a World’s Fair, with only a 20-year permit to stay up. (Obviously, that permit was extended.) The construction speed and determination of the people of that time was something else.

Eiffel Tower from ground level beneath it

The next item on the agenda was Montmartre. As the name suggests, it’s on a mount, so that entailed another tranche of steps. The websites explain that climbing the steps is like participating in some Film Noir or WWII drama, but cities are so crowded these days that it was more like participating in one of those religious pilgrimages where seven thousand people get trampled to death because someone stopped suddenly to tie their shoelaces.  There is a funicular (an elevator/train cross) that will take you up there, but my navigator (Hi!) led us up many flights of stairs while continually telling me the funicular was just a little further on. And so it was – the top of the funicular. Google Maps had led us to the top entrance instead of the bottom.

View of Montmartre Basilica

View of Montmartre Basilica

 Since we were already at the top, there was no use crying over it, so we explored. It’s a touristy area, of course, but the Basilica was beautiful and the restaurants around retained some of their Impressionist-era charm. 

We took the funicular down.

Montmartre from the bottom of the steps

Although we had the Metro travel-card, we walked a huge distance in Paris, six or so miles a day. Things are quite far apart (compared with London, which has its major landmarks in a tiny central area) but despite the cold they were pleasant walks. The city is well-laid out, with wide streets, reasonable traffic and dotted with architecture that extols the mightiness of the French state and the citizens’ need for proportion and beauty. The non-national buildings are in the characteristic Hausmann Style. We saw the Ramses Obelisk, in much better nick than Cleopatra’s Needle in London, the Arc de Triomphe and beautiful fountains.  Oh, and the Moulin Rouge.  One surprise was the Seine, which flows rapidly. The Thames seems to mosy along slowly, and sometimes when the tide’s coming in it seems to not flow at all, but the Seine runs like a small river coming down from a mountain. (Except much wider.) It was the sort of flow you wouldn’t want to fall into unless you’re an unusually strong swimmer.

Notre Dame had just reopened after a devastating fire gutted the interior and collapsed the roof. There are still cranes and builders’ huts around it but it’s back to its glory.  It was raining when we visited, and the Griffons were spouting water on the passers-by like something from Gotham City.

Notre Dame Griffon spouting rainwater

Montmartre Griffon

Montmartre Griffon

Fountain commemorating the Smurfs

Ramses' Obelisk

Moulin Rouge from the street

Next stop on the vacation was the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.

European Vacation series:

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

 Vacation continued, still in Soho:

We toured Carnaby Street, marveling that it’s still able to trade on its name 56 years after London’s swinging creaked to a standstill. All the modern big names are there, even though Lady Jane and Biba are long gone. We didn’t buy anything. But at least it wasn’t closed.

The Coffee Store

My old not-very-happy hunting ground, Patisserie Valerie, is gone now, but the tea and coffee store a few doors down is still there. I couldn’t see any of the thick, embossed tea bricks that so excited my imagination in those days, but  you can get them on Amazon now. No need to visit the inscrutable orient, or for that matter Soho. 

We did eat pastries from Soho – I had a Mont Blanc, which is not, as I thought, a type of pen – from a patisserie nearby. Or it may have been a boulangerie. In standard Soho fashion, all three square meters of the patisserie were packed so we were sent upstairs where twenty to thirty people shrank to fit themselves around five small tables in an area no larger than my bedroom. At intervals, waiters and waitresses would appear at the top of the stairs and attempt to give random pastries to punters, who would point fingers at each other and shout out who needed what. (Each newcomer learned who had ordered which pastry from the previous round of groans and finger pointing.) It was like an Alice in Wonderland tea party, but the cakes were heavenly.

Third Man Records, London

Fender Triplecaster on Third Man stage

Pedal Board on Third Man Stage

Third Man Stage in basement

Edit to add (03/01/25): You can watch a video of Jack White demonstrating this equipment on

Instagram here.

Literarium, Third Man Records, London

Also on the menu, so to speak, were Third Man Records, Jack White’s record store, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum, a must-see. It’s been expanded since I was last there. Like the zoological-taxidermy addiction of Walter Rothschild, previous post, the architectural-stone jones of John Soane was quite insatiable and the museum, which is really just a London townhouse, holds so much carved and worked stone that it must be constructed of Tardis-material with steel foundations reaching below the Tube layer.

Talking of giant stone monuments, we also (after a couple of false starts) figured out how to queue for the British Museum. This *is* a place I visited many times while I lived in London, but seeing it again was wonderful. We spent a lot of time on the Elgin Marbles. (I’d never paid any attention to them before as my parents took one of their dislikes to them.) I then spent 90% of the remainder of the time in the Egyptian Rooms, a type of pilgrimage for me.

Below: Pictures of items from the British Museum Egyptian Collection

The British Museum, unlike most I’ve visited in recent years, has not dumbed down for schoolchildren and I’m pretty sure the schoolchildren don’t mind that. (There were a lot of them around, all engrossed.) There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of items on display, with cards giving basic details and there was a complete lack of “activities,” broken machines that show videos, broken machines that show how things were made or used, or crayons, coloring books, sandboxes or play bricks.

It would take days to properly explore the museum, but we didn't have days. We did have fun.

Vacation to be continued...

European Vacation series:

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2