London in Four Days

With a farewell dinner at the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury, on Sunday, August 25, 2019, the Compline Choir’s England Pilgrimage to Canterbury and Salisbury came to a close. The next morning, I got up early to say goodbye to most of the members of the choir, who sleepily boarded the bus to Heathrow at 6:30 am. Peggy and I finished packing and then had breakfast with those remaining, who like us were extending their stay in England or other parts of Europe.

We caught the train from Salisbury to London’s Victoria station at about 10:30. There were only a few others in our car, but when we stopped at Basingstoke, a multitude of young people jammed in, taking every seat. Most were dressed in outlandish regalia, starting their day with beer and flavored alcohol in cans (permitted on trains but not the tube or buses). In our cloistered life at the two cathedral towns we had only now learned that a million people were descending on London for the annual Carnival at Notting Hill Gate, which occurs yearly on Bank Holiday weekend at the end of August. We were glad that our hotel was in Earls Court and not Notting Hill!

We settled in our hotel in the afternoon, and took the bus in the evening to attend a BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall. We had tickets to see the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Daniel Harding, featuring the Babylon Suite by the German composer Jörg Widmann and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6.

On Tuesday, we rode buses to Trafalgar Square where we lunched at the atmospheric Café in the Crypt under St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Then we toured the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. By the late afternoon we had to make our way across London to the Bridge Theatre, near the Tower Bridge. We were closest to Charing Cross Station, and I thought we could connect underground with the Jubilee Line, and be near our destination in only two stops. But after a tiring walk through an underground corridor, we found scores of people packed in front of us even before we got to the Jubilee platform. We grimly realized that it was rush hour! It took about six trains before we could jam into a car, packed together, face inches from face, back pressed against back. A loud, insult-laced fight between two men a foot from us, about who had shoved in front of who, had the whole crowd worried, but when they both pushed onto the next train, they took the fight with them. We avoided the tube during high volume times from then on – but felt sympathy for those who had to endure this every day.

Peggy had gotten us tickets to several plays, and the production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre was truly amazing. A big draw was having Gwendoline Christie (“Brienne of Tarth” in Game of Thrones) play the roles of Titania and Hippolyta. For this production, Titania’s and Oberon’s lines had been switched — so that the fairy queen gave the love potion to her husband, and he falls in love with Bottom, making for a much spicier version of the play. But take a look at the trailer, and you get the idea…

The next day, we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. The weather was hot – in the 90s, and children were wading in the pool at the V&A’s courtyard. In the evening, we took a bus over to Spittalfield in East London to dine at one of London’s four Ottolenghi restaurants. Shortly after I retired in 2014, our next-door-neighbor told me about the Ottolenghi cookbook, and I’ve made a number of their recipes – so we were eager to go to one of their restaurants, and we were not disappointed.

On Thursday we took a bus to Pimlico to see an area where Barbara Pym, one of Peggy’s favorite authors, had lived. Many of her novels include references to the social circles within the “High Anglican” church – and we saw St. Gabriel’s Church, which Barbara had frequented. She most likely set her 1952 novel, Excellent Women, at St. Gabriel’s.

We then caught a bus back to the V&A again where we had lunch; then on to the British Museum, where we each went to different sections – Peggy to see Egyptian mummies, and I to look at fourteenth-century artifacts. After dinner outdoors at an Italian Restaurant, we walked to the Donmar Warehouse Theatre. The play, Appropriate, by American Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, set in a faded, decaying mansion in the American South at the present time, told an engrossing story of a family’s racial secrets, discovered after the patriarch dies.

The cast, entirely British, managed the U.S. accents nearly perfectly. But Peggy writes, “Why see an American play in London? Plays by U.S. playwrights predominated in London’s West End the last week of August, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is exceptionally good.” In addition to the excellent acting, the play came with “paranormal” special effects at the end that were scary and stunning. But we wished we had our noise-cancelling headphones on – especially at the play’s opening, when in total darkness an ear-splitting sound of cicadas filled the theatre.

We both agreed that we had really made the best of our four days, and it was nice to get some needed down time on our nine-hour flight back to Seattle on Friday.