Planet Harrod's

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon getting my reader's card at the British Library before they closed for the long weekend (which is not memorial day in this country, but the somewhat opaque observation of a "bank holiday"). Registration is quite a process, involving application forms, paper documentation, and an interview--almost like getting a green card, but not quite. I finished with that late enough in the day that I didn't have enough time before closing to start work (or much inclination really, it being a Saturday afternoon) but early enough that I didn't want to go straight home. My solution: go to Harrod's.

To say that Harrod's is a department store is like saying that China is populous, or Barack Obama is iconic; it expresses the truth of the matter, but it hardly does it justice. Harrod's is a store on such a scale that it probably has its own weather and ecosystem. It takes up an entire block in six floors, and when I say you can buy anthing you want there, I am hardly exaggerating. In my stroll through yesterday I saw a range of items for sale from designer perfumes to live puppies, from silver spoons to horse's saddles, from chocolate truffles to elliptical training machines. The variety of restaurants alone is astonishing: I passed by an oyster bar, an american-style diner, a lebanese restaurant, and a charcuterie, to name a few. Everything in Harrod's is on an unprecedented scale. Other stores have restrooms; Harrod's has "Luxury Ladies' Washrooms." Other stores have uniformed attendants; Harrod's has suited assitants in the colthing department and sales clerks with white vests and boaters in the food court. Other (upscale) stores have piano players to entertain the customers; yesterday afternoon Harrod's had a soprano standing on a balcony in the middle of the central escalator gallery serenading the shoppers as they glided up an down. This gallery is also phenomenal in and of itself, since it must have been built in the 1920s and it decorated in high art deco style, with egyptian motives and rose-colored lighting. Even if you don't mean to shop there, Harrod's is a sight to be seen.

Of course, it can't please everybody. On the way in I passed a small but outspoken group of agitators, protesting the selling of fur products at Harrod's and armed with a bullhorn and some very unpleasant posters of skinned animals. It is really noteworthy the extent to which, much more than in America, you can be confronted with painfully graphic images in public places. I commented on this to James, and he agreed, saying that there are infomercials for car safety on TV here that he can't watch, showing children getting run over and people impaled on steering wheels. It's funny, since in some ways the British seem so much less confrontational than what I'm used to. People apologise when they bump into you on the tube, which I gave up doing after a year of living in New York since no one seemed to care or even acknowlege it. And yet there is this tradition of incredibly in-your-face imagery. Strange. I think you are better able to notice inconsistencies when you are a stranger in a country or a culture than you ever can about the habits that you have grown up around, although no doubt they are equally varied.