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.
