London Calling...

(We wrote this from the UK, but posted it when we got home, because of so many internet problems we faced in the last weeks of our trip...)

We arrived in London the evening of Sunday, July 1st, the day all airports went to high alert because of terrorist threats. Although the actual air travel was uneventful, it took well over an hour to hail a taxi as they were required to wait off-site until passengers required them rather than to queue at the curb in the usual manner. Once we were finally aboard, we sped off for our friend Clare’s house in Acton, northwest London where we would spend our first week.

We had a relaxing time and the weather was gorgeous—cool, dry with a light breeze most days—an apparent surprise to all of the UK since there had been record rainfall and flooding to date. In fact, there was so much flooding that we had to cancel our previous plans to join our friend Gillian on a journey out to the English east coast to explore the countryside. Instead we unwound at Clare’s for the week and explored London.

We had a quiet day on Monday and on Tuesday Amy had a meeting in town. Kathy met Amy and Amy’s friend Sally at Gulshan Tandoori, our favorite Indian restaurant on Exmouth Market.

On Wednesday, Conn, who is taking care of Clare’s home until the family decides how to settle the estate, returned from his time with family in Ireland. That day was our first major adventure, including a stop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington for the Surrealism exhibition (Surreal Things, now ended). Dali’s witty designs mixed with Miro and Ernst sets created for Diaghliev’s ballets; Schiaparelli’s gowns decorated with raucous crustaceans provocatively accentuating certain particularly erogenous bodily zones, dresses and coats made of fabric cut against the bias in off-angle patterns, a “shoe hat” and many other witty puns turned into sculptures, paintings and interior designs—such as a door painted on a wall between two functioning doors—were some of the more memorable parts of this wonderful exhibition that served, among other things, as a lively reminder that postmodernism antedates Foucault!

On Thursday, after Kathy got her hair cut by Anna (with whom Kathy had originally found the bravery to cut her hair very short and let it go to its natural salt and pepper grey!) at The Klinik on Exmouth Market, we ate jerk chicken at Cotton's, the new Caribbean restaurant on the market and then walked to Oxford Circus to buy new mobile pay-as-you-go phones. Then we headed to the Old Vic to see a mystery-thriller play at old Vic, Gaslight, for which we had gotten half-price tickets at Leicester Square, walking through St. James Park where they were setting up for the London leg of the Tour De France. Gaslight, written by Patrick Hamilton and ably directed by Peter Gill, is a melodramatic Victorian period piece first staged in 1938, on which the movie featuring Ingrid Bergman (for which she won an Academy Award) was ultimately based. This version was brilliantly acted with grace and restraint. Rosamund Pike played Bella with perfect pitch and balance, not over-the-top.

We ate a late light dinner at Tas on The Cut, enjoying several Turkish meze dishes—a yoghurt/cucumber dish similar to tzatsiki, some delightful prawns in garlic, and hummous—and headed back to Acton on the Piccadilly line, which, not unsurprisingly, was delayed in the tunnel, putting us back at Clare’s after 0100. Needless to say, we slept late the next day.

Friday, our friend Gillian came into town from Grantham and we ate dinner with her at Clare’s, catching up on all her news of the last few months. The next day, we moved to Carlton Court, a studio apartment located in central London on Maida Vale, part of the Interval Hyatt Timeshare system. A great location, (right next to Jude Law’s house! whom Kathy spotted in front of his house twice on her walks around the area) we nonetheless found the facilities below par and wondered if we would make it through the week.

Later that day, despite having vowed not to venture into the center of town over the weekend, we somehow found ourselves right in the middle of Tour De France activities as we attempted to meet Gillian at the Gourmet Pizza restaurant on the South Bank before seeing Shaw’s St. Joan at the Royal National Theatre. A high energy and timely production of Shaw’s interpretation of the story of Joan of Arc, we found the play both imaginatively staged and ploddingly tedious. Ann-Marie Duff plays the role convincingly; her very physical acting is an inspiration. But Kathy felt she might be coming down with a cold and so we left at intermission and made it an early night.

Monday we awoke with great enthusiasm. Eager to be free of our less than adequate housing situation, we decided quite spontaneously to head out to the Cotswolds to stay at our longtime favorite B&B Farncombe in Clapton-on-the Hill, run by Julia Wright. We were in luck and booked our usual room overlooking the valley and Bourton-on-the Water for two nights.After an old fashioned roast chicken and chips dinner at the local pub, The Manse, and a great night’s sleep and Julia’s full English Breakfast, including her home-baked bread, we set off for what amounted to an 8 mile walk.

The fields were a bit wild, wet and overgrown as we hiked down from Clapton. Luckily Kathy had borrowed Julia’s knee high ‘Wellys’, and we made good time along the river into Bourton-on-the Water arriving before the buses of tourists swarmed in for the day. The fresh air smelled wonderfully clean as we trotted through fields of poppies and wild flowers, no other humans in sight. From Bourton, we crossed the fields working our way up river first to Lower- and then Upper-Slaughter. These smaller villages are postcards of the rural English countryside where it seems as if little has changed in the last hundred years or so. Suddenly we encountered a bus load of smiling, bowing Japanese tourists making their way single file along the country path that leads from Upper to Lower Slaughter.

Having worked up quite an appetite, we lunched in a flashback-in-time, The Westbourne, a several hundred year old, low-ceilinged pub with a beautiful outdoor patio right abutting the Windrush River. Amy enjoyed a blanched pear stuffed with gorgonzola cheese set upon a glazed onion salad and Kathy had a sandwich of bacon, brie and avocado with chips and then we finished off with lovely cappuccinos as birds chirped overhead.

Wednesday we hired a car to take us to Oxford and the train back to London. But before leaving Farncombe we enjoyed a delicious French toast breakfast and took one last hike, accompanied by Julia’s two dogs, energetic stick-chasing Rex and Bess, the old black. We left the Cotswold’s at noon and, after dropping Kathy in town in Oxford, Amy paid a visit to a colleague in the village of Iffley, who will be celebrating her 90th birthday later this year.We reunited back in town later in the afternoon for a light dinner, sitting outside in the afternoon sunshine at the Head of the River Pub and then headed back to London.

Our last days in London were quiet days spent in the British Library, with the exception of a fabulous performance at Sadler’s Wells of the new Matthew Bourne dance The Car Man. Loosely based on Bizet’s Carmen, the production was a high energy, mesmerizing tour-de-force, exactly the sort of show that makes you come back to London again and again, despite the noise, the expense, and the incredible rudeness one encounters merely walking down the street.

Friday was our last night and we met friends Valerie and Rawdon at Les Trois Garçons, a chic, pricey restaurant in the Shoreditch area of east London, recently turned into a trendy, bustling center of night life. Our reservation was for 730 PM and after a challenging effort to get to the street on which the restaurant is situated, turning and returning through a maze of one-way streets, we settled into our table and took in the high kitsch atmosphere that the ménage-a-trois of antique dealer/owners has created. Bric-a-brac decorate the walls and from the ceiling in the center hangs a “chandelier” of antique evening purses that dazzle and sparkle in the candlelit interior.

Amy selected a dish of bream, steamed and served with fettucine, while Kathy, Valerie and Rawdon enjoyed Roti du Porc, which came arrayed on a bed of delicate seasonal vegetables. We were all set to share the tarte Tartin, but the waiter informed us that it took twenty minutes to prepare; our time at the table had expired. Kathy couldn’t resist explaining that, in the future, customers should be informed of such time constraints in dessert ordering, which in any case, she added, wouldn’t have been encountered if the main course had arrived on time…The waiter didn’t seem moved to contrition and we left to explore the LoungeLover bar around the corner, owned by the same trio.

Saturday we packed and happily left the overly hot and disappointing Carlton Court for the peace of Ireland, the last leg of our journey....