My evening’s activity was to attend a performance of Tina!, a musical based on the life and career of Tina Turner. I had considered several other possibilities, for example Wicked is playing, which I haven’t seen; but I figure sooner or later that will show up locally to me. There’s a new dance/musical show, Message in a Bottle, based on Sting’s music. But I felt like some loud rock’n’roll. The plot pretty much followed the main points of Tina’s life as outlined in Wikipedia and in the bio-flick What’s Love Got to Do With It (which I have not seen).

Well, here is the official trailer for this production, which pretty much sums it up. I could have done with a little more music and a little less dialogue, but it was a good evening. Four stars, maybe. Damn, but the lead actor, Aisha Jawando, works her butt off. How she does that six, seven times a week…

Here’s a funny thing about British theater, as I’ve seen it so far, my vast experience extending to, um, exactly two performances. They don’t make it easy to learn the names of the cast. There are programs, but they are glossy books that cost five pounds. Nor is the cast listed, that I can see, on the show’s website. If I was an actor, I’d not be happy about that.

Well, anyway, home via the Tube and to bed.

Monday, 2/17/2020

Out at 7 for a pleasant cappuccino-and at Les Filles, then back to the room to kill time. Out at 9am for the Royal Mews, by Tube to Green Park, and then a nice walk under a clear sky past Buckingham Palace. On the way: backlit daffodils. Of course I was too early for the 10am opening time, so had another cappuccino-and.

“Mews” is (a) singular and (2) the English word for the building where you parked your horses back of your house, before the French invented “garage”. The Royal one is where they keep all the State Coaches–there are several–and the horses to pull them. First thing we walk by is the tack room, where there was a … tacky person at work?

As I said there are several coaches, used on different occasions. They are all here and in tip-top shape I’m happy to say. Here’s one of the lesser ones.

Of course the prize is the Great Coach of State, a 4-ton monster of neo-classical themes gone wild then gilded.

So that was that; now on to the Queen’s Gallery, just next door, where there was a special exhibition based on the collections of George IV, whose whole life was as good as a soap opera— but boy did he have good taste. The exhibit of extremely nice things takes up several rooms. I took pictures of some of my favorites but it’s too much trouble to put them here. Instead, a panorama of one of several rooms.

A point that seemed interesting to me: almost all the people browsing this exhibit were seniors, my age and older. In the Mews and other galleries there’s always a mix of ages. Not here. It was quite noticeable.

Now it was nearing noon. I called for an Uber to take me to Trafalgar Square where I mounted a second assault on the National Gallery. I’d left off in the 16th Century; now I made it the rest of the way through the 18th, 19th, and… I don’t think there was a 20th Century gallery. There were more people than my prior trip, suggesting what a scrum it might be in summer, but still not unpleasant. Except one small stretch of wall where it was hard to move. Can you guess where the crowd was thickest?

I finally ticked off the last room on the map in the brochure, and went down to the basement to the National Cafeteria (really) where I had a tuna sandwich and a dessert. And up to street level and next door for the National Portrait Gallery.

This institution has only portraits, either by famous British artists, or of famous British subjects. Here I was both disappointed and relieved to learn that the whole of floor 2 was closed off for renovation. That’s all the portraits from before about 1800. I walked fairly fast around the remaining floors. I was looking for famous people, or people of whom I had some association. I spent longer in the one room set aside for Technology and Science, admiring portraits of Huxley and Darwin and Lister and Stephenson and Brunel.  Well, I knew what those guys had done, and admired it. As opposed to any number of famous politicians and military offices. Down a floor to the 20th C., where they have moved on to photography for contemporary people. And pretty much… done.

Back to the hotel to blog and rest up for the evening’s outing.

 

 

 

Sunday, 2/16/2020

I slept in unusually late for me, 8am, which made me a bit late. I had booked an entry to the Cutty Sark for 10am; travel time would be roughly an hour; I needed to shower and shave; where would breakfast fit in? In fact there was really no rush and I knew it. That 10am entry time might matter in the summer, but I expected (and it proved correct) that there would be no line of people and I’d have this major attraction largely to myself whenever I showed up.

Still, out the door at 8:30, toddle up the block to Les Filles, and oh dear, the girls are swamped, place is jammed. Oh well; plan B, go to Greenwich and find breakfast there.

The route was Central Line to Bank, change for the DLR (later I learned it’s Docklands Light Rail), an above-ground line. That ride, even on a dark and rainy morning, was an eye-opener. I’d never gotten to this end of London, the Docklands so called. This is where the greatest part of development has been happening since… the 80s? 90s? Anyway, the train rode a curving viaduct for a couple of miles through an amazing forest of tall buildings. Huge buildings with styles of every recent decade, rectangular apartment blocks, cylindrical glass things, octagons, on and on. And large construction sites where they are building more.

Finally the train crosses to the South bank of the Thames and I got off at Cutty Sark station. A few steps out the station door, and there’s the famous ship just a hundred yards away on the left. (A picture I didn’t take, alas.) But it was not yet 10, and looking to the right I could see that Greenwich has a friendly looking village high street look, with small shops and restaurants. Walking that way I found a nice restaurant for breakfast; a chain outlet, Bill’s; no idea if it is related to the Bill’s that opened a couple years ago on Middlefield in Palo Alto.

Fed and caffeinated, I put up the umbrella and walked back to the Cutty Sark. The preserved tea clipper is in a permanent dry-dock with a remarkable glass roof.

The site does a nice job of teaching you about the construction of the ship and its long use hauling tea from China, and later wool from Australia. You walk through the hold and up to the deck where you can step into the restored foc’s’l and see the sailors’ bunks, and peek into the galley and other rooms, then back to the officers’ quarters. I took a few snaps which I’ll try to organize later. Here’s the helmsman’s view, steering straight into the Docklands.

Next thing was to visit the Royal Observatory. This is a half-mile walk away, through the town center, across a park, and up a rather steep hill. Once at the top and into the site you can stand on The Meridian. From there is a rather nice view of the Docklands. Inside the buildings are very nice and informative displays on the work of the Royal Astronomer, and on the famous Longitude Problem and the intricate clocks that were made attempting to solve it.

So that was that and I headed back down to Greenwich town and the DLR. On the return trip I thought I’d switch up the route. Coming down I’d taken the Central Line to Bank for the DLR. Now I’d take the DLR only to Canary Wharf (a vast office/residential/shopping complex) and change there to the Jubilee Line. That worked, but I was surprised to find that to get from the DLR’s above ground platform to the deep underground Tube, I had to traverse two levels of a huge, and very posh, shopping mall. Anyway, eventually back to my modest hotel. Nothing booked for tonight! What ever shall I do?

…well, as it happened, nothing. I went out for supper at a neighborhood Italian place, very acceptable Tortellini, and then watched TV in my room.

However, I also booked myself for two performance events, Monday and Tuesday night.

 

After blogging and a nap I headed in light rain to attend a concert at St. Martin’s-in-the-fields, an old church that fronts on Trafalgar Square, at the National Gallery’s left elbow as it were. Looking at their website I see they have the Cafe in the Crypt. So fine, I’ll eat dinner there.

By now, Saturday 6pm, the Central Line trains were as jammed as they would be at rush hour on a weekday, to my surprise. Indeed at Bond Street station, where I wanted to transfer to the Bakerloo Line, the crush on the platform was so scary-dense that I couldn’t get to the exit to Bakerloo, and had to take the “Way Out” doorway that led only to the street. So, tag out with my Oyster card, turn around, tag back in, down a different escalator to the other line.  And on three stops to Charing Cross.

There’s a weird thing going on: I completely miss large obvious things. When I was around Trafalgar Square the other day, I walked up from the Horse Guards Parade and around to the National Gallery, and I never noticed the Charing Cross underground signs. When I came out of the National Gallery, I wanted an underground and couldn’t find one, ultimately taking an Uber.

Tonight, I came up out of the Charing Cross underground, one block from St. Martin’s-i-t-f, and from the street it couldn’t be more obvious. Where was it two days ago? Oh well. Unreliable narrator here, don’t trust anything I say.

The Cafe in the Crypt is actually a cafeteria. You take a tray, get some food, pick up utensils, and find a seat at one of many tables. This picture shows several things besides the general layout.

One, my dinner featured mushy peas, something I’ve only had in England and in Sydney, Australia. They’re good! Two, the desert is apple crumble, but served with a big pitcher of white sauce. That took me back. This slightly-sweet milk sauce is a standard condiment with British desserts. The IBM cafeteria where we worked in the 70s always had a big pitcher of it for you to pour over your dessert.

OK, dinner over, up the stairs to the Nave for the concert. Thanks, I guess, to my booking early–this was the first booking I made, early November–my seat was in the front row.

The musicians were the London Musical Arts Orchestra, artistic Director and conductor, John Landor. It was a sizable ensemble, harpsichord, two celli, a bass, a violist, at least six violins.

The first half of the program started with a viola concerto by Telemann, 4 movements. Doofus that I am, I neglected to get a program sheet on the way in (I don’t think I was offered one, but see above about not noticing things). So the next thing sounded real familiar and I was wondering what it was. (Pachelbel’s Canon in D) Also the next one (Bach’s Air “on the G string”). And the first half finished with Mozart’s Serenade in G (a.k.a. “Eine kliene nachtmusik”). Well, at least I knew they were familiar, even if I didn’t name them. The second half was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. By now I had a program, so could follow along with the different movements.

I assume the musicianship was top-notch. The experience was classical, except for the wooden pew which was medieval.

Saturday, 2/15/2020

I should mention that my run of surprisingly good weather continues. Yesterday rain was forecast for the afternoon, so I carried my umbrella, but never opened it. Today the forecast is for cloudy only, so I went out without the umbrella. Of course, I got rained on, but only a little.

My breakfast spot, Les Filles, didn’t open until 8, so I had breakfast in the hotel. Then off to Euston station via the Central and Northern lines. I’d not been in a British rail station in modern times. There’s a vast open hall with a gigantic reader board spelling out in detail which trains are departing when and from which platform, and exactly what stops they make. I took the 9:15 to Crewe whose 2nd stop was Bletchley. And off we go, as smooth and fast as the German trains I enjoyed a decade ago. The first half hour is through pretty dreary industrial suburbs. About the time open fields and trees appear, we are stopping at Bletchley.

Out of the station, it is not entirely clear where to go; there’s no signage to Bletchley Park or its two museums. But the maps app suggests turning right; and there just down the road is a modest sign for the Park. Inside, the pedestrian visitor hoofs it quite a ways before a small sign directs him to the visitor center for the Codebreakers museum. Persevering through the car park one finds another small sign that points up hill to the building that houses the National Museum of Computing (NMOC). I was a few minutes ahead of opening time but fortunately the door was open so I could shelter from the light rain while the staff got themselves together.

I shan’t write much about the NMOC at this point. I was very interested, saw several neat things, and took pictures and videos. But I want to put those all together in some coherent sequence, either as a separate blog post, or as a slide show, so that I can talk to my fellow CHM people about the NMOC and my impressions of what it does well and poorly compared to us.

I had a fairly pathetic sandwich in the NMOC’s shop/snack bar, then went down to the Codebreakers exhibit. This separate museum tells the story of all the people who worked on the process of gathering intelligence from German radio transmissions.

There were many parts to the process. There were separate listening stations with directional antennas up and down the British Isles and they tried to triangulate so as to know the exact source of a transmission: was it in the North Atlantic? Was it moving? and so on.

The transmissions were recorded; they were frequency-shift keyed audio, bleepity bleep. This was rendered visually by a pen on a strip of paper showing the high and low tones. It was explained to me that it was a five-bit code, plus a low start bit and a high stop bit, so seven bits to a character. The wiggly line on tape was transcribed by eye to characters. That is, operators read the wiggles on tape, mentally picked out the character patterns, and hit keystrokes to transcribe them as holes in punched paper tape. Of course the transcribed characters were a random sequence; the messages were enigma-encoded strings. For that reason, each transmission was transcribed twice, then the punched tapes were visually compared to find mismatches, which would be transcription errors that would mess up the decryption process.

The transcribed punched tapes were given to motorcycle couriers (who were often women, WRENs) to drive to Bletchley. There the decoding process began. At first decryption was manual. Later it was done using the “Bomb”, an electro-mechanical device, and later still the Colossus, the kinda-sorta digital computer based on Alan Turing’s work, but actually implemented by engineers from British Telecom.

After decoding, the transmissions had to be translated by people who understood German military vocabulary and special terms, and then interpreted by intelligence people and delivered to decision-makers.

The Codebreakers is a pretty thin exhibit; it has display cases with artifacts of the workers, including their working papers and books; and interpretive panels. However other than a courier’s BSA motorcycle, it has no hardware to show. All the decoding stuff, the Bomb and the Colossus, are up the road at the NMOC. I was in and out in a half-hour, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

So, back to the Bletchely station and was happy to learn a Euston-bound train was due in 15 minutes. The train up had been nearly empty, but southbound in the afternoon it was nearly full.

At Euston rail station I was out the door, around the corner, and into Euston underground station, and as I neared the top of the down escalator a very strange scene was taking place. There were two escalators going down, as usual with a solid line of down-going people on each, but as I walked up to the head, there was shouting, some kind of disturbance ahead, and… there were people climbing up the down escalator, pushing past the people standing going down. Lots of people were coming up, which is quite an effort; those escalators are not slow.

My first thought was, it’s a few kids having a bet. But no, they were mature people and they weren’t laughing. Slowly it dawns on me and the other people who are backing up into a mob at the head of the escalator, that they are running away from something down below on the platforms.

London Transit people responded with admirable promptness. Both escalators were stopped immediately. Transit people in orange vests started saying, back up please, we have a situation, leave the station. I heard someone near me say, “there’s a suitcase”, which I took to mean, an abandoned one that looked suspicious. I have no idea if that was the case. Realizing I had nothing to contribute or to learn, I turned around and exited the station.

(Four hours later the Manchester Guardian reported: British Transport Police said “Officers were called to Euston station at 1:27pm following reports of an altercation between two men involving the use of a knife. Our investigation found that there was no knife involved and no stabbing took place. The incident has been classed as ABH assault.” It must have been a pretty violent altercation to cause at least a dozen people to climb up the down escalator to escape it. But whatever; life in the big city.)

Out on the street, in light rain; how to get home? Euston is a bus transit center, and I asked at the bus kiosk if there was a bus that would take me near Lancaster Gate. No, I’d have to use two buses. Pfft, I’m too good for that, I’ll take a cab or an Uber. However, there are police sirens in all directions (and I have to say, modern emergency vehicles have ordinary sirens, no more klaxon hee-haw noises) and pretty clearly traffic will be jammed around here, and cabs hard to find. So I walked a few streets away. No cabs in sight so I called an Uber, which took a while to come, but was driven by a jolly Jamaican man, and the ride took me through parts of London I hadn’t seen. Regent’s Canal, with narrow boats parked along it, for one.

 

 

Friday, 2/14/2020

Yesterday afternoon I looked ahead at planning a trip to Bletchley. It involves a short train ride out of Euston Station, but I found I couldn’t book tickets for less than 24 hours ahead. Which meant I couldn’t book for today, so I booked instead for Saturday. By the way, the Midlands Rail website worked well; it sent me my ticket via email but in a form that I could load directly into my Apple Wallet. So that was all set for Saturday, but what would I do Friday?

I got out my list of museums that I’d made up in November and was about to opt for either finishing the National Gallery, or the Science Museum, when I realized OMG the British Museum itself! OK then. On its website I found there was an 11:30 tour, “Around the World in 90 minutes, highlights of the museum”, for a fee (as contrasted to the usual docent tour which is free). Book it!

I left at 9:30, the now-familiar four-stop run from Lancaster Gate to Tottenham Court Road that I’d used for &Juliet and Faulty Towers. The street leading to the museum’s gate is lined with tourist shops (the museum must draw visitors by the million in summer) and among them I noticed one that featured Scottish woolens and cashmere. Hmmm. On impulse I stopped in and the lady was happy to show me a light cashmere sweater, quarter-zip, shawl collar, coffee-brown, exactly what I wanted! So I bought it. Probably paid too much, only a bit less than Harrod’s wanted (but theirs wasn’t cashmere). Anyway, that’s done.

Into the museum. The fore-court is lined with serpentine crowd control barriers. Again, as if they were ready to handle huge numbers of people, although today there were only dozens. Into the museum, pay £2 for a map, and start wandering. Yesterday I wrote of the V&A, so much stuff. Hah. I didn’t know what so much meant. This one has everything the inquisitive, acquisitive, sticky-fingered brits collected as they spread out over the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Just casually, here’s a hall of Egyptian mummies, there’s the hall of Elgin marbles that I saw reproductions of in Athens last year, and over there, yeah, that’s the Rosetta stone. Whatever, no big thing.

The building rambles out from a central court in concentric square rings of halls. I got all the way around one ring before it was time to go to the meeting point for the tour. The tour was led by Peter, a friendly Yorkshireman, “you may have noticed I’ve retained just a trace of an accent?” No problem, Peter, I’ve watched I don’t know how many Britcoms set in Yorkshire.  We were a group of 8 (“I usually have about 20, this is the perfect number”). Peter led us wide around the museum stopping at a dozen objects “selected by the curators of each gallery as a highlight.” The Mildenhall chess set, the Sutton Hoo helmet, Lindow man (a body preserved in a bog for 2000 years), the Oxus treasure, a lion from Nebuchadnezzar’s gate, on loan from the Pergamon museum in Berlin (been there), the David vases (earliest known blue and white Chinese porcelain), an Easter Island statue, a study reproduction of the Rosetta stone (“you can touch this one, we’ll walk by the real one shortly”) and the Parthenon marbles. Couple others I didn’t note.

It was a fun and entertaining 90 minutes. Peter did a good job, clear, informative, and funny. British docents are so far scoring very high with me.

But I’d now been museum-gawking for three hours and my feet hurt, so I left, stopped by the woolen store to pick up my sweater, and back to TCR underground. Now to plan the route to the Barbican for tonight.

When I was booking things last fall, I wanted to have some kind of dance performance, and found this one: “Anton and Erin dance the great movies”. I didn’t bother researching who Anton and Erin were. Well it developed over the course of the evening that Anton du Beke and Erin Boag were long-time professional dancers on Strictly Come Dancing, the British reality dance show that was copied in the USA as Dancing with the Stars. This was a tour they’d organized, and most of the people in the audience were fans of the TV show and had been watching them dance for a decade.

Besides Anton and Erin there were three male and three female dancers, two singers, and an orchestra of at least 30 pieces. There were a number of dance routines, a lot of costume changes, lots of floofy gowns and tight revealing outfits, and it was fairly entertaining. In the first and second halves combined, Erin and Anton spent at least 20 minutes, I kid you not, in chit-chatting with the audience, answering questions, reminiscing. That was pretty feeble stuff for me, since I didn’t have the associations. In the audience, introduced from the stage, was Len Goodman, a familiar name to me as he has been a long-time judge on Dancing with the Stars.

Part of the attraction of this booking was that it was held at the Barbican Centre, which I’d never been to. I almost wasn’t to it this time. It’s only 3 blocks from the underground station, but there were no signs, and Apple Maps went completely spastic on giving directions, sending me first one way, then another. Possibly confused by being in a forest of very tall buildings and overpasses, but I must have walked 20 blocks to cover that three, and ended up coming into the venue by a back door. When you finally get in, it is a very large hall. Quite handsome. This panorama doesn’t do it justice.

The seats were wide and very comfortable. I had booked a front-row balcony seat and had good sight-lines.

Note spelling: I think they are treading carefully around Intellectual Property issues. Anyway, the Faulty[sic] Towers Dinner Experience is literally, dinner theater. You gather with about 40 of your new friends in the lobby of a Radisson Blu hotel and be sippin’ drinks when an awkward Spanish guy in a waiter’s jacket comes in and starts making mistakes serving snacks, and Basil Faulty comes in and slaps him around and then Basil’s wife Sybil comes in and takes Basil to task for losing the seat assignment chart she just gave him, but it turns out it’s in his pocket after all, and he proceeds to call out names and with many sarcastic comments directs us to our tables in the dining room next door.

And it goes on from there, an actual three-course meal gets served over the next 90 minutes, but there are continuing mishaps and disasters between the three characters, many of which are familiar if you can remember the original TV series. Like Manuel having a pet rat, which he insists “No, is HAAAMSTER, meester Faulty”. And of course the rat gets loose and Basil and Manual are chasing it under the tables.

I was seated between Rebecca, a young-ish woman who was there with her partner and her father; the father, about my age, was visiting to do some handyman work around the flat, and they wanted to give the old man a treat. On my right was… I forget her name, very outgoing woman, we talked about the California vacation she’s planning with her husband who was across the table.

It was all pretty amusing and fun. The three actors were physically very close to the originals, had the voices and accents down pat, good comic timing, and all told did a great job.

Oh, and the papers had dire forecasts for heavy rain, which did not develop. I’ve been carrying my umbrella but didn’t have to open it at all yesterday. The weather has been remarkably mild.

Thursday, 2/13/2020

Had breakfast at Les Filles, a very pleasant place. Sat there and had an email exchange with Janette of FOPAL and someone who wanted to donate 20-year runs of computer journals, ACM Transactions and the like. I offered suggestions and forwarded to Gretta at CHM, only to get a reply from the donor, basically saying, sorry, they’ve already recycled most of them, forget it. Pih.

Back at me little room (it is very small) I discovered the hotel wi-fi wasn’t working. Instead of offering the daily log-in your room number page, it said this service is blocked. Down at the desk, happily found that a hotel staff member got the same message on his phone, so it wasn’t just me. All they could offer was to wait for “the manager” to come in at 9. And indeed, at 9:10, all was back online.

After publishing the &Juliet post, I headed out. My plan was to Tube it to South Kensington station, which is close to the V&A, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum. I wasn’t sure which to go into. It turns out there is a dedicated “subway” (underground walkway) from the station, to all the museums. In it, I found myself following a large herd of grade-school kids. They took the turn for the Science Museum so I carried on to the V&A.

The volunteer at the entry gave me a map and reminded me of what I had learned by careful research a month ago and then completely forgotten to note this morning: there is a docent-led highlights tour at 10:30 and I’m just in time. Yay. The tour meeting point was in the front hall at the main entrance (the tunnel from the station comes in at one end). And here, under the entrance dome, was a familiar sight: possibly the biggest Chihuly glass sculpture I’ve seen.

Always nice to meet an old friend in a strange place. The docent, Rob, was excellent. He led a group of only five people, around the ground floor spaces showing us about 6 specific pieces, with background info and interesting side-lights. He threw in enough history of the museum for orientation. An exemplary docent tour.

In a nutshell, the Victoria & Albert was established by Prince Albert after the Great Exposition to house exemplary arts and crafts for the benefit of British artisans. It specializes in art and design. During the tour I learned about “casts”. In the 19th Century there was a thing for making copies of classical art, typically by making latex casts as molds and then casting plaster replicas. The V&A has a large hall devoted to these casts, of which the largest are — I was boggled at seeing this — a cast taken of Trajan’s column in Rome. Yup, some Victorian built a scaffold around a 98-meter column, took latex molds off it, and recreated it in plaster (around a brick core) in London. It’s all there in the building although they have cut it into two, 40-meter sections to fit under the roof.

One of Rob’s stops was the tea rooms. There are three, each decorated by a different famous name of the day. After the tour I was hungry and had a very good lunch, which I ate in the Poynter room, which is all decorated in ceramics. Ceramic technology was a hot area of interest of the day; they were just rediscovering how to do Della-Robia type glazes. Here’s a view.

The chandeliers are from the 21st Century and while pretty, wouldn’t be my choice for this room. But they didn’t ask me.

After lunch I spent about 90 minutes walking almost all the halls, although I confess I walked pretty briskly through some. There is so much stuff. I was especially impressed with the scope of the ceramics halls, which go on forever. If you were interested in making or collecting ceramics, there is nothing you couldn’t learn about ceramics from any era, culture or style by walking these aisles. Metal objects. Halls and halls of furniture, from the middle ages to mid-century modern. Objects from Japan, South Asia, India, and the Near East — one of Rob’s highlight objects was the huge Arbadil Carpet, from a shrine in Iran. Nothing from Oceania, I think.

By 1:30 my eyes looked like this: and I headed out the door. Where to now? Well, Harrod’s is just up that street over there… so I went to the famous Harrod’s store. Which didn’t please me. My first thought was, this could not be more different from Selfridge’s. The latter is wide open, spacious, brilliantly lit. From the moment you step through the door you are in it. At Harrod’s, every street level entrance opens into a low-ceilinged, dark boutique for one of the high-class brands. Get through one of them to the center and you are in the dimly lit perfumery section. Finally to the escalators where you ascend past faux-Egyptian columns like a thirties movie theater. Anyway, I found the men’s wear and almost found a sweater. Light soft wool in green or blue, shawl collar, quarter-zip. Two drawbacks. One, it was very long, would have hung below my hips. And, B, it was £240. OK, I flunk shopping.

I took a taxi back, rather than walk several blocks to the Knightsbridge Tube. That didn’t work out so well; the ride was £15, due to slow traffic. (What did I say yesterday about gridlock?)

Anyway home, take a nap, ready for another night out.

6pm, off to see & Juliet at the Shaftsbury theater. Easy route, four stops East on the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road.

For supper I looked around with google maps and picked Zizzo, a trendy pizza place between the Tube and the theater. Easy to find, too, I thought: come out of the station, turn right on Tottenham Court, take the first right, the first left, boom.

Coming out of the station onto the busy street, I got another rush of excitement at being part of an amazing hive. I’ve read other people saying that kind of thing about NYC, the buzz they get from just being there; but I didn’t get the same thrill from Manhattan as I have a couple times here. Part of it might be, that a lot of my Manhattan experience (of two years back) involved being stuck in gridlock traffic in a Lyft or taxi. London (thanks, I gather, to rigid control on vehicles entering the city?) has a lot less gridlock. Even at rush hour, traffic on the main streets flows.

Executed my plan to perfection but — no pizza place. Turns out I didn’t come out of the station onto T.C. Road, so I was 90 degrees out. Anyway, found it eventually. Large place, many tables, packed with the young professional demographic. Ate most of a very good pizza. No beer on the menu; eschewing wine I had a soda. And so around the corner to the theater. Here’s the stage just before the music started.

I hadn’t known this in advance, but & Juliet is a “jukebox musical” in the vein of Mama Mia, in this case using the many hit songs of Max Martin (and some others, I recognized “Eye of the Tiger” late in the second act, and that isn’t one of his). Among many other hits, Martin wrote “I kissed a girl” for Katy Perry, and it is used in an unusual way in this play.

The conceit of the show is that Anne Hathaway has a night off from minding the kids down at Stratford, and comes to see husband Will rehearse his new killer ending to Romeo & Juliet: they’ll both die. She objects: why can’t Juliet just… move on? So she and Will alternate extending the play, adding characters, sub-plots, and twists to undercut each other’s changes, as the troupe performs the modified script.

The actors, singers, dancers were all as skilled as you’d expect for the West End (i.e. very). The music was as loud as you’d expect for rock anthems(*). The staging was very complex, with scenery flying in from everywhere. The stage floor had a trap that rose and fell, and a large circular platform that rose and rotated, while a larger ring rotated around it; and there was smoke, and fireworks… more stuff happening than at The Lion King. This is one show they won’t be mounting in local theaters. It was fun, and everybody found their true selves and true loves at the end.

(*) funny thing about the loud music: during the curtain calls, five musicians came out from the wings to take their bows — but they were carrying acoustic instruments, a violin, a guitar, etc. No bleepin’ way, I said. Where’s the electric bass that has been giving me chest CPR for the last 2 hours?

Wednesday, 2/12/2020

What a nice morning this was! It’s hard to explain; just everything seemed pleasant. Several times I was just walking along and stopped to think, wow, this is nice.

I went around the corner to Cafe Les Filles, which was being run by two women, so name checks out; they had nice pastries and made a very elegant cappuccino, not only with a little heart inscribed in the foam but a band of cinnamon across it. Only problem with this as a coffee shop: no internet. But not a problem; I had adequate cell data service.

Back to my room to plan the day; and I looked at the weather app and realized today was to be sunny but tomorrow, cloudy and rain. Back in November I had booked a ticket for The View From the Shard for Thursday. It would be better today, for sure. Hop on the net and, yes, no problem, I can book for today at 10. (One of the advantages of being a tourist in the dead of winter.) So I did, and then realized I had no way to print my bar-code ticket; but then worked out how to upload it to my Google Drive, and open that on the phone, and voila, a bar-code on the phone.

Out the door at 8:30 and I decided to walk diagonally across Hyde Park and pick up the Tube at Hyde Park station. The morning was crisp (40F) but bright and clear, everything was green, and there were daffodils coming into bud and snowdrops blooming and… just a lovely walk. Here’s a view with me casting a long shadow.

Lots of commuters on the same route. I’m really enjoying people-watching. So many interesting, slightly eccentric people. (And, ok, pretty women.) I picked up the Underground, one stop on the Picadilly line to Green Park, change to the Jubilee line to London Bridge. You can’t see The Shard from close up. Here’s a view of it from the Tate.

The doors to The View experience opened promptly at 10, and I was one of only three people total waiting. There were friendly staff persons directing the traffic at each stage of the multiple lifts up; it must be a zoo in summer. Today “the traffic” consisted of: me. (The other two people stopped to buy tickets, while I already had mine.) The Shard is the tallest building in the UK, sixth tallest in Europe, per Wikipedia. Here’s a view from the 69th floor viewing area.

I looked around for what seemed quite a while but when I exited one of the friendly staff persons said, “that was quick.” And it had only been 15 minutes. Well, it was bloody cold up there, too.

Next was to walk half a mile to the Tate Modern. This took me past the Borough Market, an old market with nice ironwork.

A little further along I reached the riverbank and, looking East, saw wonderful bounce-light illuminating the under-structure of Southwark Bridge.

That took me back! In the 70s, Marian and I made a project of photographing every bridge on the Thames. I can remember other times of standing on the river bank, waiting for good light to come and make a bridge stand out like this one did today. OK, now I had to go and check. Here’s our shot of Southwark from 1976. Note that all the buildings have changed. (I’m pretty sure this is from the South bank, as above. But if it is from the North bank, then even so, no building like that 10-story ugly exists any more.)

A little further I passed under the South end of the Millennium foot-bridge. We walked that bridge on our return visit in 2005.

And into the Tate Modern. I’m not going to try to comment on art. Well, one general impression. 24 hours before, at the National Gallery, I had been noticing the rich, glowing, saturated colors the 15th Century painters had used (and being amazed at how well they had lasted). Here the contrast to the early moderns, up to the 1970s, was very noticeable. All their colors were dark, muted tones or bleached whites and beiges. And that ends my art commentary.

From the Tate I walked half a mile to the Southwark station. Four stops north, two stops west, and two blocks to the hotel. Total for the morning: 5.8 miles, 13K steps. Well, I’m impressed.

Now to do a bit of laundry and prepare to go out for a play.