Confederacy of a Dunce - Tottenham Cemetery and Hairy Beasts

Monday, April 30, 2007

« The cat in the flat | Main | Pot plants or plants in pots »

Now that the Dunces have started settling into our new home, we've managed to find the time to start exploring the area a little bit. The past two weekends we've done some wandering just a teeny little bit off the tourist trail. Today's post is in honor of the Tottenham Cemetery where we had a short wander after a local history walk¹.

It's quite a large cemetery, and has enough vegetation that it feels like anything but the midst of a legendarily urban area:

The different sections are divided by narrow walkways, and many of the gates along the way are locked. Once we made our way inside, we found out the secret to getting from one section to another:

And here's the best gravestone we came across:

Unfortunately, we found that the cemetery also featured hobo-ish ne'er-do-well-type riffraff wandering about and menacing other visitors:

Or if not ne'er-do-wells, at least a wild-haired Dunce in full "California Hippie" mode (along with super-nerdy GPS-as-fashion-accessory). But this weekend was the end of the Hair Farm. The advance of summer made it impossible to keep going with long, crazy hair. No longer will complete strangers comment on my resemblance to "Mikey" from the US TV series "American Chopper", but it'll most likely be Philip Seymour Hoffman once again. I'm not complaining, anything is better than "Spaz" from Meatballs (I'm very sorry I couldn't find a picture of this character. Trust me, 1979 was not a good time for a nerd who resembled a comedy character called "Spaz"). If I had grown up in the UK, I suppose it might have been the Milky Bar Kid instead.

¹This entry should perhaps be about the local history walk itself! It was the first in a monthly series of local history walks put on by the newly organized Tottenham Civic Society (which soon will count the Dunces among its membership), starting at the fabulous Bruce Castle museum and then taking a loop around Tottenham. Which was formerly quite an exclusive area but now has a reputation of a grim, crime-ridden hole (and one of the few places where first-time buyers might claw their way onto the property ladder). So it was really interesting to see just how many interesting buildings from various eras are dotted around the area. In any event, we didn't actually take any pictures during our wander, but only afterwards. So you'll have to take my word for it.

travel

Monday, April 30, 2007 4:24:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)