Wisley and Farewell

The car was a saga. Late Wednesday night, Vicki and John went over with jumper cables to try to start it, but neither of them could find anything that looked like a keyhole anywhere on the car. So, returning to Brentford, John called Hertz. They arranged for the AA (that's the Automobile Association here, not the other AA) to come first thing Friday morning. It was not easy for Vicki to get John up before seven o'clock, but she accomplished it.

The AA man showed them how the keyholes were hidden under plastic and he succeeded in jumping the car. What he could not do, however, was turn off the lights. He told them that the something must be wrong with the electrical system of the car, and advised them to contact Hertz.

So, we all got in two cars and drove to the Hertz return at Heathrow. Of course, when we got there, the lights turned off automatically the way they're supposed to. That always happens when you take it into the shop, doesn't it? But Vicki volunteered to take us to Terminal 3 on Friday morning and we just left the little Golf there.

We had initially planned to go to Brighton today with Vicki, but it was late and the BBC was predicting some showers. So Jerry suggested that we go to Wisley, and that proved to be a superb idea. Wisley is the home of the Royal Horticultural Society, and is its largest demonstration garden. It is absolutely huge and completely amazing. We came in through a charming old mansion which houses the RHC library.

There are acres and acres of gardens designed in a wide variety of styles using almost every plant imaginable.

Tropical and desert plants are grown in beautifully-designed greenhouses. John had Vicki and I pose outside of one of them.

In the evening, Jerry took us all to a fantastic brasserie in Chiswick. We had a wonderful dinner. We are going to miss them so much. I have no idea how they put up with house guests for so long. These are the two most fantastic people in the British Isles.

So, thanks everybody. Soon it will be back to hearing about the Academic Performance Index and the budget crisis and all of that. It has been a good break for John and me, and we thank you all for sharing it with us.

Very British, Indeed

Wednesday was a very British day for us.

After the usual late start, we took the Tube - Piccadilly Line, of course - into Central London. We left at Westminister where we walked passed the houses of Parliament. There is a sweet little park just beyond the Queen's Entrance where we found a familiar work of art.

Our destination was that most English of all art museums, the Tate Britain. Most of the major works of English art from 1500 to the present are housed here in a grand old building. We took the audio tour. It was fantastic. They not only provided great and interesting narration, but by using the a device which looked rather like an iPhone they also provided a additional visual materials as well. We were not supposed to take pictures, but John slipped a few snaps of the camera in. Some of them came out better than others. Here's a favorite - a really bizarre Elizabethan picture.

This was not included on our audiotour, so I have minimal idea what it was all about. But I was surprised to learn just how highly symbolic many of the most apparently realistic pictures could be. It made me aware of my own limitations as viewer and how I create meaning when I look at art - oh, well, deconstructionism is best left to another day. The real glory of the Tate is its huge collection of paintings by JMW Turner. There are about ten galleries just devoted to him, and these only show a small collection of what the museum has at any time.

More surprises for me. I usually think of Turner for his impressionistic paintings, like the one above, but these were disparaged in his lifetime and were not publicly displayed until the postwar period, long after the French impressionists had been accepted as great artists. The English seem baffled by people like Blake or Turner who do new things in art as much as they love people who are merely eccentric.

And eccentric was the theme of our next museum adventure. We went to a museum which even most Londoners know little about, The Sir John Soane's Museum. This astonishing little place is in a row house near Lincoln's Inn, one of the two ancient law schools.

They made us check the camera at the door, so I do not have of my own pictures to give an idea of the insanely cluttered interior of the house. I did find a few on a Google image search, however.

The real glory of the collection comes in the "Old Painting Room" where they have the original oils of Hogarth's series, The Rake's Progress.

After leaving this oddball museum, we went to Soho where we sat at a cafe on Old Compton Street and drank some mineral water while watching the world pass by. John was absolutely certain he saw Rupert Everett walk down the street. We were hungry, so we decided to eat at a small Chinese restaurant which had an available outside table. Soho is filled with these cheap all you can eat Chinese buffets, and I suspect they are all are dreadful as the one we chose. But we had a minor celebrity surprise here. John yelled out to a guy passing down the road, "Hey, Pete." We had seen a documentary at a film festival in Los Angeles and this guy was one of the principal subjects of the film. John had to get his picture taken with him.

After this minor brush with fame, we walked over to Trafalgar Square. It was an unusually hot day for London with temperatures in the high 80's. So people were cooling down by frolicking in the fountain there.

I hope that boy was just wringing out his pants....

We bought half-price tickets to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a comic retelling of the classic Hitchcock film. It was quite amusing, and the little bits of comic shtick helped you understand just how absurd the plot of that story is.

We caught the last train west for the night. Unfortunately, the day did end on a sour note because when we arrived in Hanwell where we had parked the car near Boston Manor Station, we found that the battery was dead. We took the bus back to Brentford, and dealing with the car will be part of our last full day's adventures.

Black Knights and White Gardens

We woke this morning to the sound of the cathedral bells. We had breakfast in the conference center refectory which looked out on to a lovely patio. We then went over to the church for some thorough examination before the crowds came in. There were some interesting sights. One was the tomb of the "Black Prince", Edward Plantagenet.

Another was to find some of the original wall paintings. We tend to think of the Middle Ages as very gray and black, but the truth is that medieval people loved color. All those statues on medieval cathedrals were painted bright colors and the walls were covered with frescoes. Canterbury Cathedral probably looked something like the Tiki Room at Disneyland. Most of those paintings were destroyed by the Puritans during the Civil War, and the rest were simply allowed to deteriorate. So it is pretty astonishing to find some still visible.

After we finished exploring the Cathedral, John wanted to go to one of Canterbury's tackiest tourist traps, The Canterbury Tales. This place is straight out of Knott's Berry Farm - except for the nod to English literature. You walk through the little rooms listening to a retelling of parts of Chaucer's stories while different life-size figures light up and occasionally move.

John had read about this farmer's market in Canterbury where a top chef prepared meals from meat and produce sold there. The always helpful tourist office showed us where it was on the map, and after checking out of the hotel we found our way there. It is a little out of the center of town right next to one of the railway stations. The market itself is not that big.

We were not famished, but the food looked so good we stayed for lunch. It was probably the best meal we have had on the entire trip, and at 42 pounds, was not that expensive.

Back in the car, we set course for Sissinghurst. This was the house of writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. While the house itself is quite small compared to Knole, where Sackville-West grew up, it is famous for one of the most celebrated gardens in England. The "white garden" that Sackville-West designed has been copied thousands and thousands of times. Alas, we found it in less than stellar condition. The southeast of England has been hit with a long hot dry spell, and the garden was not provide with irrigation to deal with this problem. The lawns were marked with big brown spots, and many of the plants were obviously looking parched. But there were some beautiful moments, and parts of the house, particularly the tower, were nice.

And here is a view of some of the garden rooms from the top of the tower.

 

We were not quite ready to head back to London, so we asked Ken to chart us a course for the Rye, a small village on the English Channel. Rye is best known as the town where Henry James lived and wrote his most of the later novels. You know, the ones where the sentences go on and on and on and on.... This was his house.

Rye also had one other famous writer, Radcliffe Hall. Her 1928 book The Well of Loneliness with its vague suggestion of a relationship between two women outraged the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin which had it banned as a "danger to the well-being of the nation."

We were struck by how dramatic the tides must be at Rye. Looking at the boats stuck in the mud of the river flats, both John and I recalled seeing the same thing at the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.

After a couple hours we had seen everything there was to be seen in Rye, so we headed back to London.

Canterbury Tales

We're on the road again. Both of us are ready to be back home, but since we have a few days until the flight home on Friday, we're seeing more of England's green and pleasant land. So Monday morning we headed off toward Kent in the Southeast. We drove through this area fast the other day when we were returning from France, so now we are back to take a closer look.

England has towns which would be the names of tacky suburban housing developments in America. We stopped first in the village of Sevenoaks. The attraction here is the great manor house of Knole. Alas, we did not check carefully and the house and gardens are shut on Monday. But the enormous deer park which surrounds this 365 room Tudor mansion was open. And there were lots of very, very tame deer. This one just seemed to want someone to give him a nice scratch.

From Sevenoaks we continued on to Canterbury. Our first impressions of this ancient city were not too positive. The modern post-war development is pretty ugly. But the closer you come to the heart of the town the cleaner and more charming it becomes.

The tourist office offered an inexpensive walking tour of the town, so we went on it. Our guide was quite informative and delightful. For much of the year her speciality was escorting school groups, and she had some good stories about some of them! One of our stops - one which the kids invariably like - was the "crooked house". It was not built this way, but started leaning after some unfortunate remodeling of the interior in the nineteenth century. The underlying medieval structure was so strong it did not fall down, and the current owners have used modern construction techniques to keep it in this quaint state of apparent disrepair.

The big attraction, of course, is the Cathedral with its tomb of Thomas a Becket. Much of the east end is under scaffolding to repair crumbling stone work The west end is most still visible as you can see below. We are staying at the Cathedral Lodge which is within the cathedral grounds. We can see the towers from our window. It's nice because we can wander around the grounds at night and in the early morning when the general public cannot.

We attended Evensong at 5:30. The resident choir of men and boys are off on term break, so visiting choirs are filling in to do the daily services. Yesterday we were listening to some Dutch choir which specializes in English music. John pretended to be just moving his camera when he took this picture during the service. They were not that great - the Americans we heard in Southwark on Sunday were way, way better.

After Evensong, we wandered around the town for a bit, taking pictures and taking in the ambience.

Tomorrow we are off to Sissinghurst, one of the most famous English gardens of all time, and then back to London.

Southwark Adventures

Our Sunday in London started out as a traditional English Sunday should - in church. We attended the Sunday service at Southwark Cathedral on the south bank of the Thames.

Although this has only been a cathedral church since the early 1900's, the building itself is dates to the early 1200's. It is much older than the church buildings in London which were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.

This would have been Shakespeare's church when he lived in London and did his work at the Globe Theatre. His brother is buried in the church, though we never did find the grave. Here is a memorial to Shakespeare which adorns one of the side aisles.

I'll spare everybody a review of the service other than to say that the visiting choir - this is summer so the usual choir is on vacation - was really good. Even if they were from Dallas....

One of the reasons we went to Southwark Cathedral is that we had tickets to see a production of Euripides' Helen at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. This reproduction of an Elizabethan theatre is located only a few blocks away on the south bank, right next to the Tate Modern Museum. It was strange show to see at this theater since it is a very, very modern interpretation of a Greek comedy presented in a Tudor setting. Here is the stage with some rather odd stage stuff.

Here is the seating of the theater. There were benches instead of seats - John was not keen on that - and standing area in front. We were glad we had seats even if they were benches. We had enough standing last night at the Royal Albert Hall.

Here is an exterior shot of the theater.

After the play - the plot is too strange to recount in a sentences or two - we went to have lunch. Then we headed over to Chelsea because John was scheduled to speak at a meeting there. While he was doing that, I wandered around Chelsea and Battersea Park. I actually found some people playing cricket.

We drove back to Brentford where Vicki prepared a fabulous dinner for us. She is so wonderful. Why does she put up with us?

An Artsy Day back in Old Blighty

We had a late start on Saturday, even though we had arrived back in London at an earlier hour. It was cloudy and gray and it seemed easier to sit around and chat and drink coffee. Vicki brought the cats home from the cat day care where they had been when we were in France. They were purring up a storm.

When we finally did get moving, we caught the tube at the Boston Manor station in nearby Ealing and headed into town. Our first stop was the theater district in Leicester Square. John really, really wanted to see Arcadia, the play by Tom Stoppard. The play was first produced in London in 1993, and we saw in in Los Angeles a few years later at the Mark Taper. John fell in love with the play there; I liked it but was not quite as overwhelmed. Does this surprise anybody?

Some of Act I deals with changing styles in English gardening, and since we were considering how to landscape our house at that time, it seemed to make a strike a response on that level. The Taper production seemed to stress this aspect by putting actual live grass on portions of the stage. However, watching this production I was struck that landscaping seemed like a fairly minor theme overall. There's a lot about the play online, so I will not spend any time going over the plot.

I liked this production. The acting was good, as it usually is in this country. I keep having to remind myself, however, not to get the actors too much credit for their outstanding English accents.

Onward, we headed towards Kensington to catch one of the Proms. The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts have been a British institution for a hundred years. They are sponsored by the BBC which broadcasts them live. They are held in the Royal Albert Hall, the gigantic auditorium built in the mid-nineteenth century as a memorial for the Prince Consort after his death.

Tickets to the Proms are not that expensive by U.S. standards, and one of the features is that about a 1000 tickets are sold for standing room on the day of the concert. This means that you have a chance to get in to even sold-out performances if you are willing to go without a seat. You have a choice of the "arena", a flat area in front of the stage well-suited for hosting a boat show, or the "gallery", a walkway high above the second balcony. We chose the arena line. Here you can see Vicki when the line was about half-way into the hall.

The hall itself is quite handsome. The enormous Willis organ in the back is somewhat hidden by the attempt to create an acoustic shell for the orchestra. It only partially works: the sound in the Royal Albert Hall is famously poor. But, like the Hollywood Bowl, perfect sound is not what the prom concerts are all about.

This concert was by the BBC Scottish Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Choir. The chief item on the agenda was the Beethoven 9th symphony which explains why the concert was sold out.

The first item on the concert was the most interesting, Stravinsky's score for the ballet Orpheus. Strangely I don't think I have ever heard it before. The conductor was named Ilan Volkov, and I assume he was Russian. He seemed to really have a feel for the piece, though I cannot compare it to previous performances.

I was less taken by the Beethoven than my companions. The sound seemed muddy to me - I blame that on the hall - but there was a lack of crispness and driving rhythm in the performance I think may have been the orchestra itself.

We had Indian take-away for dinner which was quite good. They do have better Indian food in London than in LA, but, of course, they have a lot more South Asians.

Tomorrow on to our first visit to the rebuilt Globe in Southwark.

Monet (and some moaning)

We did a lot of driving and not that much sightseeing on Friday. We're back in London now.

In the morning, John and I packed up. As Vicki was doing the same, we took one last walk around Honfleur. Such a pretty place!

We drove inland, past Rouen, to arrive at Giverny, the home of Claude Monet. Here we got to see those water lilies in person. They look pretty much the same as water lilies elsewhere.

I had a good time, but in retrospect I really would not go out of my way to come here. The place was absolutely packed with tourists. It was the most international crowd I have seen in France with lots of Japanese and Chinese tour groups. At points, it was hard to move in the garden. I began to wonder if there was some kind of impressionist-industrial complex working throughout the world. We had to take a lot of pictures to get shots of any of us alone, and even this picture of John in front of the Monet house was cropped to eliminate some tourist.

 

The house is small, but very sweet. It is absolutely packed with nineteenth century Japanese woodprints. John liked the dining room which is painted completely is a garish shade of mustard yellow - obviously I thought it was a little much. The gardens are odd. Most of them are laid out in neat rectangular rows as if the Monets were growing vegetables.  Yet the flowers are tossed  together higgledy-piggledy in the fashion of English country gardens.

From Giverney we drove to the Tunnel. We were a little ahead of schedule, but not enough to feel comfortable to take a detour to Le Touqet or Calais. Traffic was pretty light on Friday, so they put us on an earlier train.

The Road to Ruins

Il pleut! Merde! When we got up this morning it was raining again. Not a hard rain. Just a little more than a drizzle. But it was enough to make everything look dull and ugly.

So we thought, well, maybe this is just a coastal thing. Maybe if we go inland for a bit it will all go away. So after drinking way too much coffee, we all piled into the car and headed west in the direction of Rouen. This time we avoided the motorway and chose the country lanes leading through the little villages on the edge of the Seine estuary. A few of them were cute, but in the rain we were not much inclined to stop. But about the time we reached the largest of these towns, Pont Audemer, all that coffee had caught up with us and we HAD to stop. Besides, Michelin gave a star to this little place, and who are we to disagree with our guidebook? Pont Audemer, like so many towns in Normandy, is basically modern and not that attractive, but it has about 10 blocks in the center which preserve the historic character. It calls itself "The Venice of Normandy" because at one time it was filled with canals. Some of these are still left as you can see below.

Of course, when you learn that the wealth of this town in the middle ages was built on tanning leather, you realize that the "canals" were really nothing but open sewers which carried cow guts and toxic chemicals into the Seine. It must have stank to high heaven during those years. Ah well. Now it is all just sort of cute for the tourists. Like us. Notice me clutching my Michelin guide. A truly dedicated tourist.

We continued on down the road, guided as ever by Ken, the name we gave to our Tom Tom GPS, towards the Abbaye of Jumieges. Michelin had given three stars to this, and we were not about to miss a three star attraction. As we came close to the Abbaye, we figured out that we were on the wrong side of the river. But Ken simply intoned, "At the end of the road, take the ferry," and sure enough there was a ferry waiting to take us across.

The Abbaye of Jumieges was at one time one of the most important Benedictine foundations in France. It had been founded in the seventh century, but the original buildings were sacked and burned by those darned Vikings. Undaunted, the monks rebuilt something much larger, and the new church was consecrated in the presence of William the Conquerer himself. (Unlike Antonio Villaraigosa, who will show up for the opening of a car wash, William did not have to beg for votes, so you know this must have been a big deal to get him to put in an appearance.) All went pretty well for the monks until 1789 and that darned French revolution. The citoyens of the new Republique did not like monks, so they sent the poor lads packing and sold off the land and the buildings. The Abbaye was bought by an enterprising stone merchant who proceeded to blow much of it up and sell the rock. This created the ruins that we see today.

It is a pretty amazing ruin, and the only place I can compare it to is Melrose. (No, not that Melrose. The one in Scotland.) Now an official French national monument, it attracts a lot of tourists, even some priests and nuns.

 

The Abbaye had been rescued in the 19th century by some family who loved the idea of having a huge ruin on their property. They stopped the demolition, and started conserving the remains. They also built a petit chateau nouveau, probably the early French equivalent of a McMansion, behind the Abbaye, so that they could contemplate the ruins from their formal gardens.

But, merde! World War II arrived, and I can only assume that the chateau must have been occupied by the Nazis because on the outside you can still see extensive bullet holes.

Vicki was feeling rebellious by the time we arrived and announced she had had enough of churches, ruined or not, no matter how many stars they received. (She is a Catholic school product, so this is somewhat understandable.) She had tea while we prowled around taking photographs.

We headed back to Honfleur. It took about an hour, driving again through some lovely countryside. I saw so many haystacks and crows I thought I was going to have to cut my ear off. But before I could find the knife we were back at our little house.

However, to our delight, the sun was out in Honfleur. So we postponed supper and took a walk through town. It did look tres jolie in the sunlight.

  John and Vicki stopped in lots of shops. John bought a Breton sailor's shirt I doubt he will ever wear back home. He also had Vicki and me pose for a picture when he was inside a shop.

He started just clicking away with his camera, and when he could not get us to pose, he managed to take pictures of himself! I did like this one, however, which he took in the courtyard of a small hotel.

We walked to the top of a small hill called the Cote de Grace. At the top you have a great view of the Seine estuary when it empties into the English Channel. (Of course, in France, this is "La Manche" and calling it anything English is like talking about the "Civil War" in Mississippi.) You can see the white cliffs on the other side, and somebody stuck a big cross there. The impressionists went gaga for the vista and painted it over and over again. Alas, the view is marred now by oil refineries and other industrial monstrosities. We were less than impressed. But we found a footpath down the hill with a more pleasant view, that of Honfluer itself.

We had dinner. Vicki watched some awful French movie (which had Christopher Walken and Jill Clayburg in it - I guess foreign movies are what happens to fading American stars), John went into town to listen to a band play on the old port, while, I, dear readers, wrote this entry.

And now, bonne nuit from Honfluer. Tomorrow we head off to Giverny to see Mr. Monet's garden, and from there back to London.