High Culture

I sometimes have planned a great many adventures for each day of our travels. But other times John and I improvise a bit. Sometimes those are the best days of all. This was one of them. We have been to most of the major London museums over the years, and we have been to some of them more than once. So at breakfast John asked our hosts Andrew and Richard if they had any recommendations. They suggested that we might want to go to The Wallace Collection and pointed out that it was not far away at all. It was absolutely perfect.

Although I admit that I had never heard of this museum, it turns out is one of the most important art collections in the city. It is named for a certain Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of some duke or marquis. Despite, or maybe because of, his son’s somewhat irregular social standing, the father decided to give him the entire family art collection and the house near Grosvenor Square. After Richard died his widow, perhaps thinking that philanthropy is best social revenge of all, donate the collection to the Crown. And so was born The Wallace Collection, a superb collection of art and decorative arts. 

The paintings in the museum concentrate mostly on the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. 

Perhaps the most famous piece here is Franz Hal’s Laughing Cavalier. 

But as the audioguide pointed out, this is a misleading title and certainly the artist would never have connected  it to this painting. Instead, it is probably the portrait of a young groom around the time of his marriage. The rich detail on his silk jacket helps to identify the purpose of the picture.

Almost equally famous, and again not correctly named, is Lady with a Fan by Velasquez. This is probably the portrait of a young French woman at the Spanish court.

One of our favorites is this picture of two young lovers whose fate is describe in the Inferno. Dante, in red, and his guide Virgil, in green, stand on the right reflection gone their fate. 

VICTORIA AND ALBERT

After a lot of art and design, we needed a bit of coffee and a sweet in the lovely courtyard restaurant. As we were there, John proposed that we try to see if we could get into the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was a trifle skeptical as I had looked at the ticket sales online and seen that it appeared to be sold out until late this month. But I agreed to give it a try.

John was also determined that we would get from the Wallace Collection to the V and A by riding bikes. London has an extensive bike rental system, and I was willing to give it a try. The directions were actually pretty simple.

At the museum, John asked a helpful docent with a strong Irish accent, if there was a chance to get tickets for the McQueen show. She walked us halfway around the museum and put him in a line. John always seems able to get tickets for things that are sold out and his luck did not run out today. He was able to buy to tickets for the four thirty shaw. After getting the tickets, we first wandered around a bit in some of the medieval galleries. John was taken with the needlework on this chasuble. 

We knew that there was a tour of the theater collection at two o’clock. We found the tour, led by a very enthusiastic curator. There was a lot of interesting stuff here. John was really delighted with the stage models like this one for Long Day’s Journey into Night. 

And this one which looks like it was for some kind of French or Restoration drama. Look closely at the mirror at the back of the set. Do you notice somebody familiar?

OPERA

Day of Rest

This was probably the quietest day of the trip so far. I woke up a little later than usual because the weather had turned English. It was overcast, almost gloomy, and you could tell that sometime during the day it was going to rain. We knew that meeting up with Vicki for tea was going to be the big event of the day. But we had not really planned anything for the morning. I figured I would go to church and John was thinking about going to a meeting. We had no firm plans. 

I finally decided to go to Saint Alban’s Holborn for Mass. Each time I’m in London I check another famous church off the list. All Saint Margaret Street was closer, but I had been there a couple years ago. And I was running too late to make it to Saint Martin-in-the-Fields. Saint Alban’s was a mile or so away, but it was a famous nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic slum church. With my iPhone giving me directions, I headed down Tottenham Court Road.

Sometimes church services are uplifting and sometimes they are vaguely depressing. This was more of the latter. The church is an interesting place architecturally. It was almost completely destroyed in the Blitz, and after the war it was rebuilt in a curiously British mixture of modernism and Gothic-revivalism. The chancel is dominated by an enormous mural entitled The Trinity in Glory. I cannot say I much liked it. 

Nor did I much like the service. I counted only about twenty five people in the nave, and they may have been outnumbered by the clergy, the choir, and the servers. The liturgy seemed mostly taken from the new Roman Catholic mass instead of Common Worship. I was not quite sure of what the point of the sermon was. The vicar greeted me after Mass and half-heartedly invited me to the undercroft for tea. I demurred that I had to meet some friends and left. 

It was not entirely a lie. We met up with Vicki about an hour later. John wanted to go to a museum, but we really did not have enough time. So she suggested that we stop by the new site of Foley’s, London’s best and most famous bookstore, located only a few blocks away. 

John found a little corner of the store just made for him:  LGBT, Musical Theatre, and Drama Education all right next to one another. He bought a bunch of books on teaching theater. 

This clerical gentleman looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of a novel by Trollope. I half thought he would be counting out some shillings. 

It was starting to drizzle as we headed toward The Langham for tea. This is one of London’s great old nineteenth century hotels. It was perhaps the most fashionable place to stay in England for decades and both the famous and the fictional enjoyed its hospitality:  Conan-Doyle had Sherlock Holmes eat dinner at The Langham. It fell into disfavor and in 1946 the BBC used it for offices. But it was sold in the 1980s and over the course of a couple decades gloriously renovated. Our afternoon tea was in the Palm Court. This is decorated in a somewhat update Moderne style.

The food was scrumptious, particularly the scones. I was pretty much stuffed by the time the tea cakes arrived.

This was Vicki’s way of celebrating my birthday, and since I had spent the actual day depressingly enough at the Dolman buffet, it was a splendid belated celebration for me. 

When we left it was genuinely pouring. We took a cab back to our bed and breakfast.

We hugged Vicki and all promised to get together soon in Los Angeles. John and I then went to our room in carbohydrate overload. 

In the evening, we were uncertain what to do. Most London theaters are dark on Sunday, so we were not going to a play. The weather was not conducive to merely strolling, so we decided a movie would be in order. We had been planning to see the documentary on Amy Winehouse anyhow, and it seemed perfect to see it here in the city where she self-destructed. We stumbled around until we found the Odeon on Shaftesbury Road in Covent Garden. The theater was sort of a dump, but the movie was depressingly good. 

Tomorrow will be our last day in London, and the last day of our vacation. 

Wanderlust

My first item of business for the morning was to pick up my laundry. I managed to do that quickly, and we had a bite of breakfast at our accommodations here in Fitzrovia. I have been eating Italian colazione  for the past few weeks, so when we came across a jar of peanut butter and a toaster here it seemed like home! No doubt I am just better off with a cappuccino and a small roll. 

Our plans for the day were to meet up with our friends in Brentford for lunch and then return to town for a play in the evening. John had purchased tickets to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time before we left Los Angeles. However, when I pulled the order out of my binder this morning I noticed that he had bought tickets for the matinee, not the evening show. I am glad I caught that one! So we made some quick calls to rearrange the schedule and discovered that we had about two hours to fill before the show. 

We had been to London so many times that it is hard to do something for the first time. So looking on the map I was happy to discover one cultural attraction that we had never checked off our list, The Royal Academy of Art. John seemed a little doubtful about both the destination and my ability to take us there with the aide of Google Maps, but he went along anyhow. 

The Royal Academy is one of the oldest art schools in the world. It was set up to “improve” British painting in the eighteenth century. The idea was the young painters would study there with established painters, and that both old and new painters could exhibit their work there for the public. It still does the same work today. 

John thinks that a museum building is as much a part of the experience as the collection. So I had a feeling he would like the Academy as it is housed in a grand old Palladian palace. However, since it’s an art school, the young artists have to put their stamp in the building with cool things like this staircase. 

 We stumbled across a tour of the private apartments. The academy was originally the home of the Earls of Burlington. The third Lord Burlington had William Kent redesign the house and paint classically-themed scenes on the ceilings. This is one of them. That front-facing camera on the iPhone is so useful when it is not giving me a tragic reminder of how old I am! 

We had a rather enthusiastic — well, for a Brit — guide who pointed out all the features. We spent a good deal of time looking at a famous work there, William Powell Frith’s A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. While I had seen reproductions of the work before, I never had much of an idea what it was about. Our guide provided the fascinating details to explain why the Victorians so loved this work. 

It is hard to get a good picture of the work with a phone, so here is the same picture courtesy of Google Images. Almost everybody in the painting was a well-known person at the time. Anthony Trollope is on the left with the big white beard. William Gladstone, the prime minister, is just to his right. The Archbishop of York stands upright in the center of the painting and right next to him is the less-than-upright mistress of the Prince of Wales! Our guide asked who the tall many behind on the right might be.

John immediately identified him as Oscar Wilde. Our guide was impressed and explained how the picture as a whole is an attack on Wilde and the aesthetic movement he represented. 

From there we went on to the Summer Exhibition. This is not like your usual museum show because everything there is for sale! But as they are English and putting price tags on things would be rude, when you get your ticket you get a small book which discreetly tells you the price of each piece. We loved the updated version of a Greek kouros which could have been ours for a mere £12,000. 

Art galleries are not usually painted in bubble gum colors.

We came across this piece and couldn’t decide if it was a photo or photo realism. At any rate, it reminded us that school will start all too soon. 

The most important show, at least without price tags, were the works of Joseph Cornell. I have to be honest and admit that I had never heard of this American artist who died in 1972. Calling the show “Wanderlust” is deliberately ironic because he never left the northeast United States. He was one of the first Americans to work in assemblage and his signature works were carefully designed shadow boxes like this one. 

On leaving the Academy, we admired monumental sculptures old and new in the courtyard. 

The Royal Academy is across the street from Fortnum and Mason and we stopped in there briefly to admire perfectly formed and displayed carrots on sale for £10 a bunch. I wonder if anybody actually buys food there or if the whole purpose is to just convince Chinese tourists to part with a fistful of Yuan in exchange for some tweedy tea towel. 

We also walked past Saint James’s Piccadilly where a wedding was going on. I suspect that if anybody could afford to buy their groceries at Fortnum and Mason, this happy couple could.

We went on the the theater. Our original tickets warned of a “partially blocked view,” but when we picked them up we were told that they had been switched and that our new seats would be great. And indeed they were. Seated in the second row of the Grand Circle, our view of the stage looked like this. Of course, I have to follow rules so this picture is an official one for the press. The set is probably the most important thing about the play. The floor and all three walls are covered in thousand of tiny LED lights and the whole stage at times seems to explode in pulsating light. The play, for those of you who have not seen it or read the book on which it is based, is about a 15 year old autistic boy who tries to discover who killed a neighbor’s dog. In fact, the play opens with the rather realistic corpse of the dog with a pitchfork stuck in it. 

John was not wowed by the first act, but by the end of the play he was really taken in by the story. Being vaguely “on the spectrum” myself, I found the family drama not that engaging. But it is a lot more interesting than the usual West End stuff, so I am glad it is a big hit. 

We found our way to Waterloo station and then went off to Brentford to meet with our friends Vicki and Jerry. 

They live on the old Grand Union Canal. There are swans there. 

London!

Today started early. And I mean early. We had a knock on the door of our hotel at 2:00 AM telling us that our taxi to the airport was already here. We knew it was going to be an early start to the day, but after going to bed so late this was really painfully early.

We finished packing and loaded our luggage and our bikes into the van. We had the same friendly driver who had taken us from Malta to Gozo three days before. He drove quickly through the now deserted streets of Victoria and Mgarr to the ferry terminal. We had to wait about 45 minutes for the boat. John slept most of the time. Our driver allowed us to stay in the van during the short passage, and John slept some more. 

Once at the airport, we had a couple hours before the flight and the airport is no place to try to sleep. Like so many smaller countries, the Malta airport has the feel of a shopping mall with transportation options available to qualified customers. It is hard to get from one part to another without yet another duty-free shop. 

The flight to London went smoothly. We were surprised and pleased to find that Mary Abraham, the American woman we had met at the cathedral on Sunday, was seated next to us as was her daughter Eva. We had all chosen to pay a little more for the exit rows, and were glad that we did. Once the flight took off, we all fell asleep for most of the three and a half hours.

We cleared immigration and customs quite quickly. I had bought tickets on the Heathrow Express into London and John was shocked that we were at Paddington station in only 15 minutes. It takes well over an hour on the Piccadilly line of the tube. We had a little trouble with Uber, our first driver being unable to find us, but we finally made it to our small bed and breakfast in Fitzrovia. We are on Colville Place, a small alley off Charlotte Street.

We were met by a young Israeli guy who works for Andrew and Richard, the owners of the bed and breakfast here. It is a small place with just three rooms. Ours is on the second floor, or as they would say here, the first floor. We came in, unpacked our things, and promptly fell asleep for a couple hours. 

Our first stop, after we woke us, was a laundry on Soho. After the past week in Malta, all our stuff is filthy. This place, right next to the site of the house where William Blake had been born, only does wash and fold so our stuff should be ready tomorrow morning. After that, we wandered down towards the TKTS office in Leicester Square. On the way, John decided to get his hair cut. Gino, his barber, turned out to be an Italian whose family comes from Agrigento in Sicily. So that gave us all a good deal to talk about while a good deal of John’s hair ended up on the floor!

It was a warm day for London and the streets were packed with people. We walked passed lots of shops and John posed by this one for his friend Jerry Jaeger.

Jerry is a costumer who has always generously helped us out on our school plays, and he certainly defines Third Street style!

Leicester Square was so packed with people it was hard to see is blade of grass on the ground. While John pondered what play he wanted to see tonight, I was reminded that the grand old British tradition of binge drinking is dead.

We bought tickets in the end to a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. David Suchet, the English actor who had a career of playing a French detective, was starring and Lady Bracknell and the reviews in all the London newspapers had been quite positive. We did not have enough time to go back to the bed and breakfast, so we went to a restaurant on Greek Street that was listed as one of London’s “Top 100” and was also supposed to be reasonably priced. It was a bit of a disappointment. For £40, we had a few small plates of vaguely Mediterranean food. We could have had far better in Italy for half the price. 

The play, however, was not a disappointment at all. Not only was Suchet great, but the actors playing Algernon and Cicely were also outstanding. On the way out, we snapped picture of the picture of the marquee. Some old English guy walking by us made some snide comment about tourists taking pictures of signs, but frankly we just wanted the memories more than approval.

Festa!

Today was the day I fell in love with Malta. I think it may have been the very best day of the trip.

We had a good bike ride yesterday, but we did not feel like getting on the bike again. We decided that we would go to Victoria, the only real city on Gozo. We knew that there was a walled section of the city here, and we hoped it might be something like Mdina. Buses do not run quite as frequently on Gozo, so we were waiting in the hotel lobby until it was time to catch the bus. There was a old print of Gozo in the 1950’s on the wall. It does not all that much different now. 

A young German couple was asking at the desk where they could rent bicycles. We impulsively just offered them ours for the day. They seemed a little uncertain at first if we really we were offering the for free, but they finally accepted with smiles. As we left on the bus, John and I decided that we either the nicest or the dumbest thing we have done in a while. 

Victoria is not Mdina. It is more of a real town and the old section is still under extensive construction. But it was a fascinating place to spend the day. As we had read, there is a walled section in the middle of the city.

But these walls are still in the process of being rebuilt largely funding from the European Union. 

I was a little surprised by all this work. I believe that the usual practice these days was to preserve things in their existing condition rather than trying to reconstruct what we think it used to be like. We roundly slam our nineteenth century forefathers for clumsily rebuilding Gothic cathedral and Greek temples. Could we be doing the same kind of vandalism here? Or does the need to increase tourist trump everything? 

The old section is dominated by the cathedral. It is not a particular impressive edifice either outside or inside. The earthquake that destroyed Ragusa and Noto also destroyed the old cathedral here. They started to rebuild it in the grand baroque manner, but ran out of money. 

The dome was never built, and there is a trompe l’oeil picture at the crossing above the high altar where the dome should be. That is the most interesting thing about the cathedral, but a there was a number of older women making sure that no tourists took pictures. 

There were no pictures allowed either in the cathedral museum, but there was only one woman at the desk and she did not seem to particularly care. So we quietly snapped some pictures of charming shadow box of the Last Supper

and a really disturbing one of the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The basement was filled with croziers, chalices, and pectoral crosses.

Apart from the pleasure to taking surreptitious photographs, there was not much of interest in this collection of ecclesiastic bric a brac. We went on to some of the other small museums. The history museum had prehistoric,

Roman,

Christian,

and folk art.

We also looked in the old jail and in a tiny natural history museum. The eighteenth graffiti on the walls of the jail was interesting. Although the Knights were supposedly a monastic order, they were apparently not a particularly devout group of young men. When drunken brawling resulted in death, offending knights were imprisoned here on Gozo. They evidently dreamed of a time when a ship would come and bring them back to Malta again. 

We walked around the battlements now turning into restaurants. 

Again, we noticed how much of it remains to be rebuilt and wondered how much of this would have been just rubble a decade ago.

We caught the bus back to our hotel and enjoyed some time in the rooftop pool. 

We learned on our bike ride two days ago that tonight would be the festa in Kercem. But we also knew that it would not really start until around nine at night and that bus service would be finished by that time. So we talked to the clerk at the desk who made arrangements with a taxi driver to take us there and pick us up later on. As it turned out, the driver was from Kercem and even though he barely spoke English at all we could tell that he was delighted that American people were coming to his town for the festa. Still, when we arrived we wondered if maybe this was the wrong evening. The streets were absolutely deserted. We amused ourselves by taking photographs of the sacred and the profane, sometimes in the same picture.

We walked toward the center of town. 

The parish church was packed and we could hear the sound of not only a chorus but a small orchestra. They were concluding  their celebration with the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. 

We thought that the festivities would start as soon as people left the church. But nothing at all seemed to happen. John asked one of the men sitting in the street when things would become lively. Not until about eleven, he said. We knew we had to leave for the airport in the middle of the night but we had no intentions of missing a festa. As it grew dark, the church was illuminated in gaudy colors

and the lights in the street came on. 

More and more people steadily filled the streets. We finally convinced these young boys to pose in the jerseys that had been made specially for the occasion.

John stumbled across some guys with a vintage World War II American jeep and they insisted he get his picture taken in it.

Two complete marching bands started to assemble. 

There were people sitting on every street corner. 

Although we could figure out no particular signal, the band began to march and play. 

 

 

And then we caught sight of the Virgin carried by a dozen men. They were wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with our Lady of Succor of the front side and the sponsoring crane rental firm on the back.

 

 

Denys Turner, an English Roman Catholic theologian, says that Protestantism is an “eithe-or” faith while Catholicism is a “both-and” religion. I thought about that as I watched the men carry these heavy statues. Kercem is a place of “both-and”, not “either-or”. The sacred and the secular are not separate worlds here. Nobody here thinks it odd to have the virgin on the front of a tee-shirt and a business advertisement on the back. Nobody sees the community as something separate from the church, or the world as something distinct from the faith. It does not strike people here as scandalous or even ironic to celebrate Our Lady and have a party at the same time. And as the evening progressed it turned into one glorious party. Villagers came up and offered the men carrying the statue cold beer, and they gratefully accepted. After a while, the platform holding the sacred figures also was lined with cans and bottles of the local lager.

 

 

Although the village of Kercem is barely 250 meters from end to end, it took hours for the bands and statues to slowly move down the central street. 

 

 

 

As it slowly passed, people threw confetti from windows and children gleefully played with it. 

 

 

But as it grew late, some young people could not stay awake.

 

 

The local police were watching, but their presence seemed completely unnecessary. I have seldom felt so safe in my life.

 

 

In fact, at one point, John left his phone behind and some children came up to reunited him with it. 

 

It was well past midnight and the party seemed to have only barely started when we reluctantly decided we had to leave. 

 

 

My festa in Kercem will be a night I will always remember.