Dearerst Suzy.. Written on 16 December2016

I have to say I’m glad we didn't schedule a time to meet in London or plan trips around anywhere. As it was, it was an intense, complex and too short a time there. Next time remind me to stay longer.

Apart from all the marching around the West End and Covent Garden and even Carnaby Street and Wardour Street and outside the Keyboard Shop on Denmark Street where I first met Ian Jones, and trips to photograph the dehissing towers where my favourite drug dealer lived in back in 1981 – I mean.. I marched everywhere and up and down Portobello Road and even out to KEW to see the queues of people going to see THE LIGHTS…. And Jim’s party.. . which was the least interesting thing.. because really… everybody had THE LONDON LOOK! But I mean.. they have it down pat. As Jim says, ‘they know how to follow instructions!!’ Every girl looked perfect… not only their figures, but their hair, make-up, their nails.. every detail.. like they were born that way and it was effortless… but I did notice, there are instructions everywhere (as Jim suggested) so.. of course…with a little keen attention to detail, they can make themselves look the ticket.. Still.. for a brief moment, I just wanted to run screaming from the building and find a hairdresser to bleach and crop my locks into the 'London Look' Perfection!

Anyway….. After all that nonsense…. Thursday’s trip to the British Museum was such a peaceful haven and sucb an interesting trip, (even though Jim who also spent many hours of his life roaming around those hallowed halls, calls it a ‘Zoo of Stolen Treasures’..) Yes it is, BUT STILL.. the place is incomparable. I spent a good few hours roaming the Eqyptian, Mesopotamian and Assyrian rooms.. of which there are many. Actually, there seem to be more rooms now than before (has the building grown?) and maps on the wall showing the names of all the place the Americans have spent the last 25 years bombing into dust - from Basra to Aleppo.. so I felt a bit embarrassed really (as an American and clearly by birth, part of the campaign against the Muslim world) and then heaved a sigh of relief that the Museum had managed to save a few of these treasures from the ‘Cradle of Civilization’ before their annihilation.…

vis a vis the GiantWinged Assyrian Guardians:

But as I roamed I noticed there seemed to be an increase in the number of sarcophagi and Mummies… yes.... They seem to have many more MUMMIES now than I have ever seen there before. As I strolled around the glass cases filled with what are ostensibly ‘people’ stored inside them, I found it deeply ‘deep’ in some unfathomable sense and yet on the surface just so ‘creepy’ (and I don’t even like that word) to keep the sacredly dead hanging around a museum like so much firewood. They were just everywhere. Mummies.. wrapped in their soaked cloths and trappings of station.. some with golden painted masks and others wth just eyes and mouths painted onto their cloth-shrouded faces, and so many with an x-ray alongside to show us the ‘bones’ of the queen or princeling within,. They even had cat mummies and baby Bull mummies and hedghog mummies.. it was a f*cking MUMMYFEST! But what shocked me most; so many people wanted a photograph of themselves.. alongside a MUMMY!

And then a bit of this, a bit of that… a bit of mummified bull, a bit of mummified cat…with it’s fish supper.

So yes.... Dead bodies everywhere… and if that was not enough.. now they’ve got TWO men pulled out of the marshes.. Previously they had only the ‘Tollund Man’.. he was blue and sad from Denmark somewhere with a twisted writhing scream of emptiness on his lips, but now they’ve got the Gebelen Man… he is even more like some poor human being crushed by fate and rolled up and put in a hole and covered over like an eternal foetus.. It saddens me to look upon him, but there they are.. the tourists posing smiliing having their photos taken next to Gebelen Man… (I won’t post photos of him because somehow it just seemed so un’right’ - so goulish - he looked like he was just sleeping.)

Of course next to the dead people were the Coptic Martyrs

And after the Coptic Martyrs in a Room dedicated to the ENLIGHTENMENT was a giant plynth with naked young men with colts’ tails chasing each other 'round it. The start of Trans-Species LGBT!

Anyway....The art and symbology, the ancient perfect arcane language of artisans, priests and Hierophants.. every image is carved painted engraved to carry the ultimate complete message. Even if it is 10,000 years old and in our dull modernity we think we’re ‘smart’ human beings and they were crass and uneducated. Boy, they could teach us a thing or two.

Lastly.. I photographed the beautiful new Foster Dome. I know it’s been on the building a while now.. but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Really Suzy.. we MUST GO the next time I come down.

Anyway.. after the profound.. came the PROFANE.. I went to meet Mr K at his house in Islington..which (and memory defies me on this) is a COMPLETE house.. (as in, a big house in a great part of London – Islington - and DETACHED (not emotionally, just physically) with all the trimmings and an XJS in the drive and which, even though I’d slept there a few times.. I remembered NOT AT ALL., OH Klaus.. he DESERVES an essay.. but not now. Another time.. he is a man-mountain unto himself. A being beyond all laws except those cosmic laws that leave the rest of us wondering how the ‘rest of them’ get away with everything. He has gotten away with the lot in his life, but then again, he was arrested on Wednesday morning..(I hope he was wearing his blue thong when they rang his doorbell, (which is what he greeted me wearing.) Anyway we’ll see what happens with that. Of course he says, ‘Electra! Nothing will happen with that.. they have no charge.’

He managed rock bands, played heavy metal drums and had a finger in every pie! ie. strip clubs, shops on Carnaby Street and an Israeli partner who’d been a Bomb Disposal Expert, who I am absolutely CERTAIN worked for Mossad! Anyway Mr K as he was when I first met him 34 years ago:

 and Mr K as he is now….looking a bit like Robert Plant. Relaxing at home, about to whip up some Tagliatellii before he starts beating heck out of his £15,000 drum kit! (“The same kit Nick Mason of Pink Floyd uses!”)

So.. it’s been beyond interesting and beyond intense.. I strolled down every single centimetre of memory lane.. all the bits I’d forgotten the last three times I was strolling there. I can say it’s been nothing short of ‘provocative’. Tomorrow is yet another journey up to Leicester to see Ian’s mum.

I hope you are well.. I sent a card to your mum and dad in Looe. I guess you’l get this whenever you get it.

Lots of love,

E xxx