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.

 

Tuesday continued…

So after a short nap I headed out for shopping. I have it in mind to buy a sweater. My favorite sweaters were ones I got in New Zealand several years ago, and they’d sprung holes and had to be retired last year. I’d like a nice soft wool sweater to wear as a second layer, preferably dark gray, dark green, or dark brown. And where better to find a wool sweater than London in winter? How to get to Oxford Street where all the big stores are? I was going to take a bus, as Apple maps suggested, but the nearby stop it led me to had a sign, “Buses do not pick up passengers here.” Apparently it’s just for parking? I couldn’t see where the next bus stop would be, but hey: right down the block was a cab-stand. I hopped into the front one and said, “Selfridge’s, please.” Which felt very cool.

I was delighted to find from a sign inside that the cab now accepts Apple Pay! Which it did, and that makes the London cab almost as convenient as an Uber.

Selfridge’s bears no relation to any image you (or at least, I) might have about the traditional British department store. (Maybe another day I’ll take a train out to Richmond and check out Bentall’s, where we used to shop in the 70s.) Anyway, today’s Selfridge’s is just achingly modern. Wide-open floors, brilliantly lit, just shatteringly trendy wares. And crowded with shoppers. We shoppers, almost all of us, looked quite dowdy beside the brightly colored and wares and glass cases. Demographic note: London is at least as multi-cultural as San Francisco. Women whose dress and appearance suggested the middle east were crowding the perfume counter for some kind of demonstration. Upstairs in the men’s department, at least a third, I think more, of the display mannequins represented black men, which quite a few customers were.

All the men’s wear was arranged in areas by designer, familiar Ralph Lauren and Polo and many others I’d not heard of. Open racks with clothes hangers spaced out on them, no place you could go to look at sweaters, you have to search every rack. Nope. I’m not a Selfridge’s shopper. More a Marks and Spencer guy. And the big M&S was right next door. Here the store was more like, say, Macy’s in Stanford Shopping Center — well, brighter and more mirrors than that, in fact I am going to see our local mall hubs as dowdy after this. But at least the goods were more by kind than by brand. Some cashmere sweaters, even, but none with the color, or collar shape, I wanted.

I ambled through a couple more stores before calling it quits. I was at the west end of Oxford street, and there was the Marble Arch station of the Central line. Down; one stop west to Lancaster Gate; and up. Not, however, up the 78-step staircase. I took the lift.

Hung out in the room for an hour until I was hungry, then went out around the corner to The Mitre, which advertises itself as a “traditional” pub. Ate supper there with a pint of… Kronenberg. Yes, German lager, which was the waiter’s suggestion when I said I didn’t like IPAs.

Tuesday, 2/11/2020

Funny how body clocks work. During the night I woke up several times feeling very hungry. That despite having had a good supper only a few hours before. But it was about 2am UK time, which is just about supper time back home.

Anyway I mostly slept from 9pm to 7am and should now be pretty well synced. The hotel breakfast was a nice spread of stuff to satisfy a tourist from almost any country. However, tomorrow I’ll go out to the nice cafe I see up the street that opens at 7.

First, indeed only, scheduled item today was the Churchill War Rooms. To get there I walked a few blocks East along Bayswater road to the Lancaster Gate station of the Central Line. The following experience was a rush, in several senses. I had waited until after 9am just to let the morning crush pass, but it hadn’t. So you start by charging down an amazing winding staircase amidst a hurrying line of  people going to work (there is a lift, but no commuter would wait for that). Then on the platform you wait for the next train. Trains come every 2-3 minutes. The first one in was packed sardine-like at every door. Nobody got out, and nobody got in. “Mind the doors!” and off it went. I stood back and made a video of the next one. Imagine a strong breeze and rising sound from the left and then… 

(Notice the guy’s coat-tail hanging out the door?) I didn’t board that one, either. But the next one, 3 minutes later, had a lot of free standing room, so I was off. The sounds in the train are fun, also; the motor picking up speed sounds like a turbine winding up. Two stops to Bond Street, and change to the Jubilee line (which I’d never ridden before; it was built after we left England) and two stops to Westminster.

And up to ground level in a famous spot, just under the Clock Tower. “They are cleaning it.” (Firesign Theater reference that nobody will get). It was a lovely morning, brisk chill breeze and racing clouds. I walked around a bit before ambling off to the edge of St. James Park and the Churchill War Rooms exhibit. This was quite good. During WWII Churchill, his cabinet ministers, and the major military figures, all had offices in a warren of rooms under what is now the Imperial War Museum. Much of this has now been restored to its 1943 state. In the center is a museum of Churchill’s career, but before and after that you wander past room after restored room, offices, bedrooms, telephone exchanges, map rooms, etc. Here’s one of many.

During the summer it would have mattered that my entrance ticket was for 11am, but now it didn’t, and I went right in at 10. There were only a few other tourists, mostly German I think from what I overheard.

Well, seen that, now what? I decided to walk to Trafalgar Square and take a first pass at the National Gallery. En route passed Horse Guards Parade where two lines of Horse Guards were sitting still facing each other. I took a picture of a London police officer’s horse, inspecting its colleagues.

From the steps of the NatGal I looked back at Nelson facing his glory.

Admission is free to all the major museums. My only charge was to pay 2 pounds for a map. From it I learned that the Gallery has over 60 numbered rooms. I set out to visit them in approximate numerical order, checking off each one on the map. I got through less than half, and only to the 1600s, before I was full up with images.

I decided to go back to the hotel and looked for the Tube. The only entrance to the Charing Cross station I could find was chained off in a rather permanent looking way. There had to be other entrances, but I didn’t see them. Since I was now standing on The Mall with a steady stream of traffic, I thought I’d take a taxi, but the first six or so to pass were occupied. Well then… Uber? And I had an Uber back to the hotel. No free taxis passed in the five minutes I had to wait for my Uber to arrive.

My room was not yet made up (2pm) so I’m in the hotel bar doing this entry. Later, after a nap, I shall sally forth again.

Monday, 2/10/2020

I’d paid for “premium” seating on Virgin, and it was more spacious than the usual, although, to my surprise, my bag did not slide all the way under the seat ahead, which it had done on the flights to Greece. That complicated my foot positions. Oh well. On the return flight I’ll put it overhead; since premium boards first, there’ll be room.

After an OK supper they dimmed the lights for about 6 hours of the 9.5-hour flight. During that time I estimate I actually slept 4, with frequent wakings. Felt fine on arrival. Apparently LHR Terminal 3 was busy, as our big 787 parked out on bare tarmac, and we all exited via stairs to waiting coaches, which meandered through the industrial underbelly of Heathrow to a ground level door, from which of course we had to go up a couple of escalators in order to come down to the arrivals hall. The E-gate (automatic passport check with facial recognition) worked fine and I was loose in the UK. I found my way to the Heathrow Express train, today only running once every 30 minutes instead of 15, due to track maintenance from the weekend storm.

Once at Paddington, I wanted just to exit to the street, and darned if I couldn’t find how to do that. I remembered that British for “Exit” is “Way Out” and I followed those signs quite a while and wasn’t out. Rather than ask, I changed plans and followed the clearer signs to the underground.

Here I did something I’d planned to do later in the day, buy an Oyster card, a refillable transit pass. To buy that, I stuck my SFCU bank card in the slot, and it charged the 50 pounds to it, and didn’t ask me for my PIN. Hmmm. Anyway with that and about five minutes pondering the Tube map, I worked out that I could go just one stop to Bayswater and walk. Which I did, through a sprinkle of rain.

Bayswater is a busy commercial neighborhood with lots of restaurants and shops. Along the edge of Kensington Gardens there are lots of hotels, so a noticeable number of people walking along toting roller bags. My hotel is modest but adequate, as is my room. Once checked in I discovered that the British plug adapter I’d bought for cheap on Amazon was rubbish and wouldn’t give good contact to the laptop power supply. And also that I’d not packed a comb. So back out for a walk around the local shopping. I bought the comb at Boots and a better plug adapter at a funny little market hall, like a Turkish bazaar with lots of little booths (staffed by actual Turks, it looked like) selling computer accessories.

Later I spotted what should be a good breakfast coffee cafe (but I’ve paid for the hotel breakfast for tomorrow, so the cafe will have to wait until Wednesday). Nearby are a veritable UN of restaurants; I can choose between Italian, Persian, Malaysian, Turkish cuisines.

I plotted out my travel for tomorrow’s first attraction, then at 5pm, went out to find supper. I carried my umbrella but there was no rain then. I passed a pub, several hotels with restaurants, and went to the “Taste of Maylasia” just around the corner on Craven Terrace. Turned out to be a good choice. I ordered an entree of beef cooked in coconut milk, a side of pickled veg, and rice cooked with I forget what spices, but it had a floral aroma and taste.

It was all tasty and nicely presented. Beer would have been the perfect pairing, but alas the restaurant is not “licensed” so I had Coke.

While I was waiting for the check I glanced out the window and, oh my gosh it just pissing down out there! Glad for my umbrella, and that I was only a long block from the hotel.

Now my task is to stay the heck awake until at least 9pm so I can wake up at a reasonable hour in the morning. I’ll try the telly.