winging it in the Charles Lamb

I'm in Elia St on the Charles Lamb's free wifi. I've always said if the dear man were alive today he'd have a blog, he was just the type. Strangely, tonight the pub is strewn about with "Happy Thanksgiving" banners, the mantelpiece mirror is covered with huge saccharine cut-outs of pilgrim and Indian children, and the menu is full of corn chowder and pumpkin pie.

I guess nobody in my family is probably giving much thanks today - though, as was said to me the other day, my father "is at peace." Which is more than I can say for me. But these things happen and holidays come and go, do they not, as regular as the seasons. And the whole point is that they happen regardless of everything else. And Ms Baroque pretty much gave up on Thanksgiving, as it happens, as soon as reaching the Shores of Albion: hurrah! No more most boring day of the year! No more White-Witch-like Christmas Without Presents. The day on which, whilst not being allowed to eat anything till 4pm and while the grownups were all watching some football game, the most amusing thing you could do was walk to the main road and stand in the middle of it, just to prove that there was really no traffic.

Of course it was le Duc himself who deprived me of my lunch all those Thanksgivings. I can see him now, bringing an enormous platter of turkey into the dining room (and again on Christmas). Anyway, families, eh. I'll be flying over in less than a week to greet the deadness of my dad. It's not good.

Our Charles Lamb was someone who understood the strangeness of family dynamics. His sister Mary went crazy one day and, after some horrible chasing-round-the-table-&-screaming scene, stabbed their mother. Fatally. She also put a carving fork into their father's forehead, but the father survived, thanks to young Charles' efficacy in finding the right medical help (as well as an asylum for Mary and a funeral for their mother). The penalties for murder back then didn't really bear thinking about, and nor did the "asylums" - Mary was sent to a private asylum for a time but Charles managed to get her out, and off any trace of a murder charge, and she lived with him until he died. Which wasn't very old, poor thing - 59 - possibly hastened by the stress of his life. He worked in the accounting offices at the East India Company (see, the "famous authors" - even the "dead white males" - weren't all grand), and wrote a wonderful essay about the excessive jubilation he felt when they called him in one day and gave him a pension. (I mean, one he could live on! That's not going to happen to me before the age of 59. Apparently raising the next generation, unlike working in - say - Macdonald's, isn't pensionable.)

Anyway, he and Mary got on happily enough, but she had periodic fits and had to be sent to the asylum - there were a succession of them - but in between they had weekly soirées where she played whist and he had his friends round - including Coleridge, etc. He wrote his wonderful essays, and poems and letters, and she wrote most of the famous Lambs' Tales From Shakespeare. Charles said of his sister, "We are like tooth ache and his friend gum boil, an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort."

And imagine knowing what the consequences of one of Mary's attacks might be! I sometimes think of that: what it took to take her in. And he never married, never had children.

His essays are funny and lovely, but I love his letters even better. Many of the letters act as first drafts for ideas later kitted out in the essays - the best among these I think are the one where he left work and the one about Coleridge's shocking book-borrowing habits. (That one is actually rather affecting, such was his love for his troublesome friend.)

And there we are. The pub has only been called the Charles Lamb for about two years, clearly named in honour of being in Elia Street - which is clearly named, as Elia was Lamb's nom de plume, in honour of Lamb having lived around the corner for a time. I love it round here. But it's too dark, and I'm not going to eat the Thanksgiving food.

And now the bar guy has taken away my glass - why do they do that?? thus removing all trace of an excuse for sitting here. Home one goes.