Through Queen Anne’s Gate, and spoke to an old lady moving slowly on a cane. James’s over the bridge surrounded by a wall of minarets made of fog. Walked down Bond Street, bought an umbrella, walked then through St. I loved everything I was happy everywhere. James’s Park it rained, there were a few people, hurrying doll shapes, the pond flat and gray, done with brush strokes, the water birds. I was just as imperialist as they (the English colony) were.” And I thought of Freya Stark brought up in Italy and crying desperately in Persia “I was an Imperialist. Walking I looked down, a diamond of stone: “O Rare Ben Jonson.” Then I was saturated with kings, and kept in this time only by vulgarity: the vulgarity of the RAF Chapel, of the Canadian royal chairs, the cleric guide-“This here is all that Edward I done for his family.” “Mary Queen of Scots had Lord Darnley done in.” “If you want to give something it’s quite in order.” The Coronation Chair, and the stone, and I understood-not the queen, but Virginia Woolf, and I felt an identity again with KM, but for a lesser and sillier reason: we the Colonial outsiders looking in. There was a service, a few lights, a choir, a few people. In Westminster Abbey I was cold and took off my shoes. But some things became clear, fell into place. Then the first lacy shapes in the mist-Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

“Where are you from?” “Do you like Canada?” he said, and then, confused, “I mean.” White and gray, milk white and bread brown-milk in a brown pottery bowl-that was Whitehall in the afternoon rain. “You’re not English,” said the young policeman on Trafalgar Square. Rain and rain and I was wet and cold and happy.

Yellow paintbrush strokes