Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  I gave up and called my colleague Stu who I knew was working in the office.

  “Ah … well, you see our address on Oval Road is not actually on Oval Road,” he explained, as though it made perfect sense.

  “Walk right to the north end, past the Pirate Castle, and look to your right. You’ll see a red brick building with satellite dishes. I’ll come down to meet you.”

  This was the Interchange — the Associated Press building. My new home. Thirty-two Oval Road was actually a block off Oval Road, at the end of a dead-end street called Gilbeys Yard. It was formerly a shipping centre for the gin company of the same name, right beside the Regent’s Canal and the Camden Lock that I was unable to find earlier in my ancient map book.

  Global TV’s Europe Bureau was on the second floor (third floor in North American terms) amidst a United Nations of broadcasters. Russia Today was next door, Japan’s TV Asahi at the end of the hall. Around the corner was CCTV from China. The Mexicans were a few doors down. And just opposite the elevators was Brazil’s Globo — much larger than Global Canada. We always got their mail and phone calls.

  Globo had an elegant, illuminated sign on their door. We had a torn photocopy of the Global logo, leading to what appeared to be a former closet — a long, narrow room with packing cases for TV equipment piled high on either side.

  There was a couch jammed up along one wall, salvaged from the hallway after one of our better-resourced neighbours put it out for garbage.

  My new desk was right beside the window, looking east over the market. Food stalls were bustling below, with canal boats tied up alongside. The water on the canal was turning a fascinatingly bright shade of green, with some kind of alien fungus coating the surface of the water.

  I loved it.

  With the Royal Wedding still a week away, and all my bosses still asleep back home in Canada, I resolved to use my first few mornings to begin the apartment hunt. The company would pay for a short let for a month or two until I found a more permanent place. Isabella and Julia would be coming to London in a few weeks, so my challenge was to find an enticing pied-à-terre that would encourage them to want to stay.

  Of London’s eight million people, roughly seven million are estate agents. They are unfailingly friendly and helpful. They will all tell you: “Of course we can find an absolutely lovely flat that’s well within your budget.”

  I suspect that as a condition of their licence they are all required to take a course in creative mendacity. London has no apartment that will be both lovely and within your budget.

  Every neighbourhood has a clutch of estate agency offices, usually grouped together. They have names like Chestertons and Black Katz, Foxtons and You ‘R’ Fucked.

  I trolled through the offices near the bureau, most of which did not do short lets. Posted in all their windows were pictures of flats that appeared perfectly fine, but which were not actually available once I entered inside.

  The first agent was a smiling young blond woman in a tight tube dress and ten-inch heels.

  “Wo’s yoh bo-jut?” she asked.

  My hearing was already not the best. I leaned in, turning my good ear toward her, and asked her to repeat.

  Twenty-three times later I finally figured out she wanted to know my budget.

  “Ow … royut. ‘Ere’s a luvly playce,” she said, calling up a listing on nearby Gloucester Crescent. I remembered the stately houses on the street from my failed search for the bureau. Sounded promising.

  “Okay. Can I see it?”

  “‘Course, luv,” she said. She promised to set up something for the following morning, but somehow it never happened. She claimed the landlord had decided to not rent it after all.

  Instead, she brought me to another “luvly playce” on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, not far from the international school that we thought might be a good fit for Julia. Fitzjohn’s is a nice street in Belsize Park lined with many grand-looking houses. At around 3:00 p.m. every afternoon during the school year, it is plugged with traffic. This part of North London is densely packed with schools and it is always jammed during pickup time.

  She led me into the front door of one of the imposing piles. Underneath the staircase was a door leading to the flat, very much like the entrance to a dungeon. The dinginess at least had the benefit of making the dirt in the corners less evident. The square footage was roughly similar to the average mid-sized sedan, with a strange walk-up to an inside balcony where a tiny bed was perched.

  Nope.

  The morning flat hunts took on a depressing similarity. There was the garden flat in Kentish Town. “Garden flat” is an elegant English term for basement apartment, although they are not quite so subterranean as back home. This one had tiny rooms, with a ceiling so low that even someone of my modest height risked concussions on the doorways. It did have a walkout access to the garden, but it seemed that the moss had actually migrated inside.

  Nope.

  Around the corner from Euston Station, and next door to one of London’s few strip clubs, I looked at a place in an apartment building. It was clearly a bachelor pad, with a black leather sofa. In fact, lots of black in the decor.

  “Nope,” said Isabella when I described it over the phone.

  Although spinning my wheels in the search for accommodation, I at least managed to start doing some TV stories, relishing the chance to say, “Sean Mallen, Global News, LONDON!!!”

  Yeah, baby. That’s me in London.

  Euphoria was tempered by tense calls home at night.

  “I’m not happy about this,” Isabella would say regularly. “You’ve left us. I’ll try, but remember, there’s no guarantee about this.”

  My stomach would turn in knots and sleep came with difficulty. But work distracted me the rest of the time.

  A week before the wedding, a clutch of true royal fanatics started camping out across the street from Westminster Abbey. A similar cast of characters always gathered for these kinds of events.

  John Loughrey was the first. A lean, slightly wild-eyed Brit, he relished being the earliest arrival of the band of eccentrics. He bragged that he had attended most every major royal event since 1981.

  By the time I arrived, approximately 436 reporters had already interviewed him, and so his lines were beyond well-rehearsed — they were automatic. I simply asked him why he was there and he went on a three-minute rant, explaining his background, how he is a Diana fanatic, and showing his sleeping bag, his Union Jack hat, Union Jack carrying bags, and Union Jack flag with the happy couple pictured in the centre.

  “How are you going to last all that time, camping out here?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m organic. I’ve got lots of energy.”

  No other questions were really necessary. I resisted asking him whether in fact he had a life.

  Finding Canadians in the crowd was a snap. Bernadette Christie from Grande Prairie, Alberta, was close to the front, displaying a giant Maple Leaf flag to match her Maple Leaf top. I was to see her again the following year, camped out on The Mall for the final concert in the celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. She also somehow got herself a ticket on a special anniversary cruise marking the centenary of the Titanic sinking, where she also managed to get herself widely interviewed.

  The circus was most certainly in town. As I was quickly learning, the worldwide appetite for royal stories is insatiable and none was more newsworthy than the marriage of Diana’s son to the reed-thin, perfectly poised daughter of rich party planners. “Waitie Katie,” as the tabloids liked to call her, had played all her cards right, been patient, and got her prince.

  When William attended the University of St. Andrews a decade earlier, mothers far and wide scrambled to get their daughters enrolled at the same time, hoping to land the heir. Catherine Middleton outmanoeuvred them all and hit the jackpot. Now her picture was everywhere and every frock she wore immediately became a bestseller.

  Opposite Buckingham Palace, at Canada Gate, huge scaffolding was being
erected with banks of cubicles for the world’s broadcasters — each paying six-figure fees for their little studios with a view of the palace. There had originally been a long list of members of the Global National team back in Canada who were coming to assist in covering it all — until the bills started arriving and the budget was trimmed.

  Behind the mediaplex in Green Park, acres of grass were being killed to accommodate all the trailers, satellite trucks, and porta potties that had been brought in to support the broadcasts.

  My new collaborator, the Europe Bureau’s cameraman-editor Dan Hodgson, had already been fed up with the spectacle for months. “Every time William gets a new brand of toilet paper to wipe his ass, we have to do a story,” he groused.

  “Resistance is futile,” I advised.

  My preferred term for the Royals was the “overpaid, inbred, spoiled anachronisms.” Not that I ever used it on camera. As a history buff, I actually had an avid interest in the story. And as a lover of the absurd, who could resist the utter silliness of it all? For a journalist in London, it did not matter whether you liked or loathed the Royals, you would be covering their every move.

  In a nod to balance, I interviewed a representative of Britain’s sadly outnumbered republican movement. He did his best. But the Windsors had bounced back since the dark days of Diana’s death and were now ascendant, an unstoppable PR machine. Here was an attractive, personable, and media-savvy couple riding a wave of romance and fascination. Barring an unanticipated catastrophe, it would be a triumph for the royalists.

  The Windsors and their various assorted homes are among Britain’s greatest tourist attractions, and there was talk of a boost to the economy of £30 to £50 million.

  Margaret Tyler was doing her bit to be a one-woman economic stimulus package. She had something on the order of ten thousand items of royal memorabilia in her modest home not far from Wembley Stadium. I gave her a call and asked if she would mind if we came out to do a bit of filming.

  “Oh, that would be fine, dear,” she said. “I have the Australians coming in the morning and the Indonesians in the afternoon, but if you could arrive around noon I could fit you in.”

  Mrs. Tyler was well on her way to being interviewed by every single one of the thousands of reporters in town for the wedding. And making a killing. “I hope you don’t mind, but I usually ask £50. Would that be all right?” she asked sweetly.

  This was my introduction to the British form of cashbook journalism.

  She began her collection with the wedding of Charles and Diana and the hobby grew into an obsession. The Tyler house was a teeming, cluttered, chaotic shrine to the Royals.

  “Bulging at the seams, isn’t it?” she observed.

  She knew what the likes of me needed and had her dining-room table covered with the latest wedding souvenirs. “Nobody eats here now,” she advised.

  Nobody really sat anywhere in her house either because every single square centimetre was occupied by a Royal photo, spoon, teacup, or pillow. There was a large portrait of Diana, her favourite Royal, as a centrepiece in a room that she has devoted to the late Princess of Wales. Alongside her Kate-and-Will loving cup was a Kate-and-Harry mug.

  “I think it was made in China,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

  Mrs. Tyler turned up her nose at some of the more satiric choices: the condoms (called Royal Jewels) were not part of her collection and neither were the wedding barf bags, for those who could not stomach the spectacle.

  Despite her prodigious buying, the wedding threatened to be an economic bust when one factored in the multimillion-pound cost of security and the multibillion-pound cost of giving the nation the day off work.

  The Windsors and their subjects would have a blast of a party, but Britain’s struggling economy would pick up the tab.

  A giant grandstand was erected opposite Westminster Abbey, just behind where Bernadette, John, and the rest of the campers had taken up their positions. This is where I would be standing, along with a couple hundred of my good friends in the international media, for four hours or more on the day of the wedding. We had a rehearsal on the eve of the nuptials. Dan and I climbed up the stairs at the rear, past the several large contingents working for the major American broadcasters, past their legions of makeup artists, field producers, sound guys, and gofers.

  We were renting a strip of space about a metre wide, and a few metres deep — just enough for Dan to set up his camera and shoot me with the abbey in view behind. At events like this, one always must be wary of blurting out “fuck” or “cocksucker,” because likely there is a broadcaster from Argentina or Thailand with a hot microphone standing mere inches away.

  Those lucky reporters on the scaffolding would be the first live witnesses to the most-anticipated event of the day — Kate’s appearance in her wedding dress. This particular frock was a closely guarded secret. There were rumours of multiple dresses — a bogus one to throw the tabloids off the track, and a backup one that would be pressed into service if a picture of the genuine article leaked out.

  The frenzy over the dress left me a little cold. Far more amusing were the contortions of the British prime minister, David Cameron, over what he would be wearing on the big day. Cameron was most sensitive about his image as a “posh boy.” This was a new term I was learning.

  Cameron came from a wealthy, connected family. He was descended, illegitimately, from King William IV, thanks to a regal liaison with a mistress. In his Oxford days he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club — a group of what could only be described as rich young shits who would regularly get hammered and trash property, with little regard for the consequences. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was a fellow Bullingdon boy.

  Cameron, only prime minister for a year in a coalition government, ardently wished to distance himself from the image. As a result, he hesitated to commit to wearing something so prototypically posh boy as a morning suit — especially given that a photograph had been circulating of him and Johnson posing in just such an outfit from their Bullingdon days.

  Never mind that it was the traditional choice for a royal wedding — the prime minister did not wish to come across as a “toff” (another new word I was learning: it is more or less synonymous with “posh boy”).

  Cameron was finally bailed out when the deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, announced he would be wearing a morning suit — as would the lefty head of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband.

  Given sufficient cover by Clegg and Miliband, Number 10 Downing Street announced that the prime minister would in fact be wearing a morning suit, claiming with little credibility that the matter had never been in question.

  As for me, I would be wearing a shockingly pink tie for my four hours of live broadcasting. Julia had picked it out for me at our favourite men’s shop in Toronto, Caruso Fine Tailoring, on the Danforth. She sweet-talked the garrulous Caruso brothers into throwing it into the bargain for my latest suit purchase.

  It was not only pink, it was fairly electric pink. But what the hell — it would likely be one of the least ridiculous bits of attire on display.

  With all the streets closed off, Dan and I hopped on the Tube early on the day of the wedding to make our way to the abbey. Climbing up the stairs to our perch, I noted that a surprising number of reporters were wearing shockingly bright ties … even pink ones. My six-year-old must have known something.

  The day was overcast, but the rain held off. I had covered political conventions, a papal funeral, and natural disasters, but this was a different kind of exercise: hours and hours of silliness, with dashes of escapist romance.

  For my first live hit, I jumped in with both feet, noting the numbers of women arriving for the wedding with fascinators, exercises in surrealist architecture, atop their heads.

  Princess Beatrice, daughter of Prince Andrew, was wearing one that became an internet sensation — described as a cross between a toilet seat and a weapon of interstellar warfare from Star Trek.
“Fascinator on stun!” was one clever online posting, with Captain Kirk pointing the Beatrice toilet seat at some threatening aliens.

  “It’s a good thing there’s not much wind today or the breeze would be catching those things and carrying many of London’s finest ladies out over the Thames,” I observed.

  In my ear, I could only hear silence from the anchor desk.

  Then: “Thanks for that, Sean.”

  These kinds of events are old home week for all the crowned heads of Europe and the world. Most of the Europeans are relatives anyway. They all automatically get invitations and show up in all their finery. With one exception: King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia regretfully declined, claiming he had a tight and full schedule back home. Which meant that it was likely the one and only time that King Norodom Sihamoni’s name ever appeared in a British mass-market tabloid — the Mail snarkily describing him as a “shaven-headed former ballet dancer.”

  At just about the time Will and Harry’s limousine left Clarence House for the church, the abbey’s bells rang out and the crowd erupted in cheers. Here was an electric moment, even for a republican.

  Ten massive bells, the largest weighing 1,500 kilograms, produced a deafening, spine-tingling din. Within a few minutes, the prince and his brother emerged in front of the abbey.

  The rest of the Royals followed them in reverse order of seniority, with the Queen and Prince Philip last. Then, there was Kate. My view from across the street was far inferior to anything seen at home on television. But I could definitely see her dress.

  It appeared to be white.

  Some weeks later, while on a tour of Buckingham Palace, I saw it on display up close. Her waist seemed to be about twelve inches.

  I wondered about the happy campers Bernadette and John below and whether someone stood up to block the view just as the big moment arrived after their days of sleeping on the street. Kate’s moment of arrival and display of the dress lasted less than a minute.

  Even as she was stepping out of the limousine, the iPhones and BlackBerrys of thousands of reporters simultaneously buzzed with the delivery of press releases from the palace, describing her frock in minute detail. The royal press team is a sophisticated operation, with elaborate protocols for disseminating endless reams of trivia about the Queen, her family, and all her relations.