In lieu of starting this story with “It was a cold and rainy night” I will just have you assume cold and rain as preconditions of everything that happened while I was in London. It will be too exhausting to continue to draw attention to the miserable conditions of that town which has been described by so many writers for centuries. Gloominess is a way of life in London.
Out of this gloom walked the Mad Scientist who’s grand design it was in the first place to liberate the things we carry in fibers, the one and only D.Bob. His hair was wild and long and he was dressed like a carny, rag tag scraps of fabric that had survived the liberation process fastened around him at strange angles. He carried only a small leather bad with him. This had been what he had lived out of as he had traveled far and wide over Europe. It turns out that most of his traveling was spent posted on a beach in Spain getting fabulously drunk on cheap booze. My man.
He was tired and showing the first signs of an illness that was slowly beginning to conquer his entire body though we didn’t know it at the time. It was just a little cough, he said.
The hostel was a disaster show. Semesters everywhere had come to a close and the traveling circuits were crowded with college kids covered in expensive traveling gear that would likely see little use after this season. The room we were staying in was crowded and smelly. There was a large Asian guy who slept all day. He snored asthmatically to the extent that we thought that he was ill and could possibly die at any moment.
The day that D.Cam got into town the transportation workers were all on strike. He had to take a cab. This didn’t set him off from his normal serenity, always at peace with the world. He was the most conservatively dressed of any of us, but he still looked like a young artist wearing the faded Eighties era military wear. He looked like a restrained Hunter S. Thompson.
D.Cam and I left D.Bob to battle his sickness alone in the hostel while we walked around London looking for a good strip club. D.Cam is something of an aficionado of these establishments and he had a hunger to visit one in a foreign country. We walked for hours in no particular direction. We didn’t reach anything resembling a seedy neighborhood until well into the night after we’d discussed just about everything there is to discuss about the state of our art.
We never made it into a strip club, but we managed to get pretty fucked up on whiskey. It was strange to be walking around a city that I was already bored with while Drew’s eyes were sharp and open to the newness. I was a little jealous.
That was really the only day that we had to explore the town. There was business to do.
The Drews had brought separate portions of the world’s first portable Hollander beater across the ocean in suitcases. This was that beater’s inaugural run. We’d be hauling it all over the UK in those suitcases, making paper in places where it had previously been impossible.
Beaters are very expensive instruments and not a lot of people have the money to commit to them because they don’t make a whole lot of money back. The market for handmade paper is pretty slim these days.
A beater is a glorified fabric grinder. A circuit of water conveys the fibers through a roll which has teeth designed to cut the fibers down to their most basic elements, or pulp. When that process is finished the pulp is drained into a bucket and then sheets can be pulled.
Our first scheduled appearance was at the Imperial War Museum.
The Paper Trail 