*title suggested by Dad
Primrose Hill has lots of fashionable looking young men wandering about with guitar cases. I wonder if they’re the latest modern rock stars, or just those who think they’re the latest modern rock stars. Being entirely out of touch with matters Rock these days, New Rock Fame is wasted on me.
The neighbours are nice enough, though, one beautiful young couple (more unrecognised famous types?) helping Dad when he gets lost. They call up a street map on their iPhone. Dad’s never seen an iPhone before. ‘He was stroking his phone!’ he says later.
We talk about the strange social license to collar people with unfamiliar gadgets  (not many iPhones in Dad’s village). An example is those cigarette substitute devices that exhale water vapour and are allowed in bars. There must be a point where the number of times the user has to explain the gadget to strangers becomes so tiresome that they either give up nicotine for good – which is the point of the thing – or it backfires and they return to real cigarettes, anything rather than be an accidental attention seeker.
This is the burden of the Early Adopter. I get it myself when I use my Kindle on the Tube, sometimes to the point where I wish I’d brought a normal book so I could be left alone. On top of which, ads for the Kindle are all over the Tube itself, so one feels like an unpaid advertiser, as well as an unpaid beta tester.
***
The British Library Cafe used to be a Best Kept Secret for meeting one’s friends or just killing time: affordable refreshments, free internet, power points for laptops & phones, free jugs of water, proper air conditioning, nice clean loos, no piped music, excellent exhibitions nearby, and until recently, lots of free tables. There’s now the sense of a secret slightly over-shared. And with that, that curious mix of happiness for others, yet slight selfish sadness for oneself. At least when one can’t get a table.
Since they brought in free Wi-Fi, the cafe is so crowded that there are posters asking people to not take up a bigger table than they need. They also hint (very nicely) that table occupiers really should buy something from the cafe too. During busy periods it feels fair enough: it’s about fairness for the customers rather than mean-spiritedness by the management. If you buy a meal in a cafe, it seems only fair that you have your own table at which to eat it. The BL’s armies of all-day laptop loafers just need to bear this in mind, that’s all.
Actually, many of them already seem happy to sit on the floor and use the power points meant for vacuum cleaners.
Dad and I come here today straight after visiting another great London Secret – St John’s Lodge Gardens in Regent’s Park. Unofficially known as London’s own secret garden (and intended for quiet meditation), it has just one entrance, tucked away off the Inner Circle so that the people who go there don’t do so by passing through. They either know about first, which is good, or they’re lost, which is better.
Today, on a sunny early June afternoon , there are just two other visitors in the whole garden. One of the statues is for someone ‘Who Shared This Garden’s Secret”. Not shared too much just yet. I want to tell everyone I know about this garden. And not tell them, too.
Tags: British Library, primrose hill, regent's park
