Birthday Boy

Today was my birthday. As a child I never liked having my birthday on the Fourth of July. People squeezed my cheeks and said stupid things like, “You’re just a little firecracker, aren’t you?” As an adult, though, I came to appreciate always having the day off work and having special things happening on my birthday, even if obviously they had nothing to do with me. Celebrating the day abroad, as I often have in recent years, I find myself feeling a little miffed that the world is carrying on, utterly oblivious to the occasion. Fortunately, I was surrounded here in London with people who had remembered that I just turned 61 today. As I joked to Vicki, “If I am no longer in my prime, at least I am a prime number!” Vicki gave me a plate of croissants for breakfast surrounded by strawberries with candles in them. It was so sweet. I ate a couple with some peanut butter, a culinary atrocity, of course, but somehow it seemed like an American touch for the day. 

Having fed myself, I also thought I might feed the local swans.

Jerry had to leave for Leeds today where he is in a golf tournament with friends from his old company. I must admit that I seldom think of golf and Leeds as having much to do with each other, but apparently there is a famously difficult course just north of that old industrial city. Vicki did have the day to spend with me and John, so we had a few adventures. I knew that we would be going into the West End later in the day, so when they asked me what I wanted to do this morning, I asked to see Kew Gardens again and a couple sights in the area that I have never seen. It turned out that Vicki, who has lived in this area for most of her life, had never seen them either, so it worked out well for all of us.

Our first stop was Strawberry Hill. This is not one of England’s great stately homes, but it is monumentally significant in architectural history. It was the estate of Horace Walpole. Horace, who sometimes preferred to be called Horatio, was one of the strangest characters in a country that seems to produce any number of strange characters. His father was Robert Walpole, the man who not only was England’s longest serving Prime Minister, but the man who more or less invented the office during the reign of King George I. Robert Walpole, born a minor country squire, became the first Earl of Orford and a very wealthy man as well. Horace was his youngest son. He was an odd child who probably would have been severely bullied at Eton had he not been the son of the monarch’s most trusted advisor. As an adult, he was bone thin and extremely pale. He seemed to glide more than walk, and he had an odd kind of voice. He never married at a time when marriage was socially required, and his biographers have speculated that he was probably gay and for a time may have had a relationship with a former schoolmate. He tried to follow his father into politics, but despite holding a few seats in the Commons he never made a name for himself as a Whig politician. Instead, he made himself famous by inventing the Gothic Revival. 

At a time when all houses in England had followed the rules for architecture that Andrea Palladio had derived from his study of Roman buildings, Walpole chose to flout just about all of them. He bought a small estate called Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, then quite far out into the country. There was already a house on the land, apparently a small and rather uninteresting place built in a simple classical style. Horace changed all that. He knocked out the window and put in weirdly shaped stained glass. He built a turret. He placed fake arrow slits on the roof line and added gargoyles for extra effect. He broke every possible rule, and adopted all the touches that Palladio and his disciples had derived as barbaric elements of the Dark Ages. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, but the world was apparently ready for something different. Strawberry Hill Gothic became the rage for much of the remainder of the eighteenth century until far more extreme forms of Gothic architecture would take its place. In the library of this house, Horace wrote The Castle of Otranto, one of the first pieces of Romantic prose in English, a clunky preview of far better later works like those of the Brönte sisters, Bram Stoker, or Mary Shelley. 

By the nineteenth century the estate had fallen from fake ruin into actual ruin. Walpole’s heirs sold it to Saint Mary’s College, the first Roman Catholic university in Britain since the Reformation. The grounds of the estate became the campus of the school. In recent years, Saint Mary’s with the help of a private foundation has refurbished the interior to suggest what it might have looked like when Walpole lived there. It was, unfortunately, closed when we arrived. That did not stop John from pretending to seek admittance. 

Our second stop on the tour of Twickenham was Eel Pie Island. There are a about three dozen aits or small islands in the Thames River. We know that one of these islands was home to a small inn as early as 1743, and by the early nineteenth century the island was a popular day trip from London. The inn served pies made of local eels — the British loved this dish back then — and hence visitors began to refer to Twickenham Air as" Eel Pie Island.” By the 1900 the inn had been replaced with a large hotel and dance hall.

This dance hall became one of the most celebrated music venues of the 1960s. All kinds of bands which later became huge like The Who and the Rolling Stones played Eel Pie Island when they were just starting out. In fact, Pete Townsend named his music publishing business Eel Pie Music. Unfortunately, the owners of the hotel had difficulty with the Richmond Council over various issues, and the storied place mysteriously burned to the ground in 1990. 

Today, Eel Pie island is home to a boat repair business and a couple dozen artist studios. It is about the most bohemian spot in London. It seems remarkably reminiscent of Venice, California before Julia Roberts and Google moved in. 

There is a kind of old hippie art everywhere.

Sometimes you are not even sure if it is deliberate.

Several fake crows had been placed atop some steel bars outside of one artist’s studio, and John and Vicki tried reenacting scenes from The Birds.

My favorite place on the Island was a boat that had been converted into a home and a studio. It reminded me of the boat on the beach in Great Yarmouth where the Peggotty family lived in David Copperfield. 

Vicki was ready to move to Eel Pie after we finished our walk. But we had a few more things to do on our last day in London. We left Twickenham and drove across the river to Kew Gardens. 

The Royal Botanical Gardens is one of the largest and most important botanical gardens in the world. Yet it was not planned originally to be anything other than a summer home for aristocrats and later for the royal family. The gardens there were laid out for the diversion of the monarch and family. But Victoria had no interest in keeping Kew as a summer home, probably because it was by then fairly close to London itself. So in 1840 the Royal Horticultural Society convinced the crown to make it a national botanical garden. There are elements of its days as a royal residence.

During the nineteenth century, the great draw was the greenhouses. These allowed Londoners to see plants during winter. There was the Palm House and the Temperate House. The later has been remarkably restored to its 1848 perfection.

The interior is a stunning open space.

But to a Southern Californian, it was also a little disappointing because most of the plants grown there can be found in many of our back yards. We were hoping for something a bit more exotic. But I suppose for the English they are.

Despite this, we could have stayed and explored Kew all day. But we were scheduled to meet Kris, our niece Rebecca’s husband, for dinner that evening and we had a play in the West End. So we planned to take the boat from Kew to Westminster. It is not all that much slower than the Underground and it provided a lot more interesting sights. Unfortunately, for an amateur photographer it was not easy to capture the buildings on the side of the Thames in a way that really caught their history or occasional beauty. Most of the industrial buildings than once lined this river have been demolished and huge glass and steel apartment complexes have taken their place. Although these no doubt provide a great view of the Thames, the size and materials used are completely out of place with the gentle flow of a small English river. The older architecture has a much better sense of place and style, particularly the utterly lovely Albert Bridge. 

As we grew closer to Westminster Pier, we could see the House of Parliament. Despite its Gothic appearance, this building is not really all that old. It was build in the 1840s, making it a younger structure than the American Capitol. Much of it is always under renovation.

The London Eye, one of the many unfortunate results of the Tony Blair years, is not far off. 

 

We met up with Kris in Covent Garden after a short but pricey pedicab ride. We had a pleasant dinner in a small Greek restaurant there. 

Our last event of the evening was to go to one of London’s hottest shows, Tina. This is a musical version of Tina Turner’s life. John jokingly called this my “birthday present” because he knows he likes this sort of stuff way more than I do. We did not have very good seats, though we had no problem either seeing the stage or hearing the score from Row Z (remember, say “zed”). I was not surprised that I was pretty bored and quite critical of it. I was surprised that John had just about the same reaction. 

We took the tube and Uber back. Tomorrow, we leave for New York. Sigh. Our trip is almost over. 

Two Plays ... and a Winning Play

Today was pretty good day for us, and a pretty good day for England! I’ll explain that last part a bit later.

We had coffee and pastries as usual with Vicki and Jerry as we plotted out our day. Their deck overlooking the Brent River is absolutely one of my favorite spots in England. The weather has been unseasonably hot for London as it was last week in France. Fortunately, London is just a few degrees cooler than the Rhone Valley, so it seems just a bit more like normal Los Angeles summer weather to us. Vicki drove us up to the Northfields tube station where we caught the tube. It wouldn’t seem like a trip to England without at least one trip with that calm voice saying over and over again, “This is a Piccadilly Line service to Cockfosters.” John amused himself by taking pictures of people on the train. 

We got off at Leicester Square and headed towards the TKTS booth. We wanted to go to the matinee of An Ideal Husband and I was sure that we could get the tickets for the show cheaper than buying them online. As it turned out, the discount was not that great and we only saved about 10 pounds this way. I suspect that the internet has somewhat undercut the role of the last minute ticket sales offices in places like New York and London. But I have bought so many tickets to shows there over the last thirty years that it seems almost wrong to pay a visit to London without looking at the listings on the board — now, alas, electronic — on the booth in Leicester Square. 

John was not feeling his best, and I figured that some lunch might be in order. We decided to have at the Peter Jones department store in Sloan Square. John and I hopped on a double decker bus and enjoyed the sights as it went down Regent Street and Piccadilly, past Green Park and the Wellington Arch, and through Knightsbridge. I have no idea why I did not take some pictures here as John managed to grab the front seats on the upper deck. 

The attraction of the Peter Jones store is certainly not the building itself, a rather ugly bit of concrete, glass, and steel that jarring contrasts with the red brick and terra cotta of the Victorian buildings that surround the rest of the square. The appeal is the view from the cafeteria on the sixth floor.

The food is decent for cafeteria fare. They offer salads and things like that, but you know when you’re in England you just need to be a little old school sometimes and order fish and chips or the bangers and mash!

We were running a little late, so we ordered an Uber rather than trying to mess about the the tube. John has fascinated by the elephants that were a temporary art installation on the square.

Our afternoon performance was Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Vaudeville Theatre on The Strand. Once again, I seem to have forgotten to take some pictures here, so this is one borrowed from some London theater website.

You will notice is that picture that the play is The Importance of Being Earnest. This theater has done new performances of all of Wilde’s plays as its season this year. I am rather sorry I was not there to how they adapted De Profundis for the stage. Nevertheless, I was definitely curious to see what they would make of An Ideal Husband. The play is something of a mess. The plot is rather complicated even by the standards of the time. It concerns Sir Robert Chiltern, a wealthy, Liberal member of Parliament, considered one of the most morally upright members of the House of Commons. At a dinner party at his home, Mrs. Cheverly, an English woman who now lives on the continent, approaches Sir Robert and asks him for his support of a canal scheme in Argentina. Sir Robert tells her that he considers this scheme basically a fraud, and that he cannot support it. She tells him that if he does not she will publish a letter revealing the source of his wealth. Many years earlier Sir Robert had sold a wealthy Austrian a Cabinet secret, telling him to buy stock in the Suez Canal company three days before the British government announced its purchase. Not only would revealing this secret destroy Sir Robert’s career, but Sir Robert knows that his wife Gertrude would be devastated to learn that he was ever dishonest. Lord Goring, a dandy obviously based on Wilde himself, manages through a series of rather farcical scenes to obtain the Mrs. Cheverly’s letter and save Sir Robert’s from ruin. Along the way, though, Gertrude has to learn not only to forgive her husband for not being morally perfect, but she herself is caught in a situation that could appear compromising. The play is generally considered a comedy, but all the real energy comes in the scenes dealing with blackmail and secrets. This was obviously stuff that Wilde knew and understood well. 

The cast at the Vaudeville did an great job with this material. Lord Goring and his father were played by a real son and father, Freddie and Edward Fox. The latter is one of the most distinguished of British stage actors, and he brought both humor and gravitas to an fairly minor role. Frances Barber was a great Lady Cheverly, though she is considerably older than Sally Bretton, who played Sir Robert’s wife, so it seemed hard to think of them as former school mates. I will admit that the casting of Faith Omole, a black actress, as Mabel, Sir Robert’s sister, seemed a little jarring in a production that otherwise was could have been the original staging of the play. She was, however, quite good in the role. 

From The Strand we made our way across the Thames to the South Bank. Vicki had arranged for us to have dinner at the Wagamama near the Royal Festival Hall. It was quite a busy scene down there this evening. After that, we walked over to the old County Hall building to see Witness for the Prosecution. Built between 1911 and 1922, this impressively large edifice was the center of London government for about 60 years. But in 1986, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, tired of the resistance of its policies by the Great London Council and “Red Ken” Livingston, the mayor of London, abolished London regional government and transferred its powers to the various borough councils. For the past 25 years the building has been largely empty although sections of it have been converted to a hotel and various tourist attractions. 

For this performance, the old council chamber had been converted into a courtroom of sorts. A thrust stage had been constructed in the center of the room below the the dais. 

A few of the seats were designated as the jury box and the people sitting there were asked to serve as a jury of sorts (though, if you know the story, they had to find the defendant not guilty). The play followed the movie pretty carefully and probably the book as well, though I will be honest enough to admit I have never read any Agatha Christie. The actors were all fine, though I do not think anybody could top Marlene Dietrich’s performance as the loyal, then vengeful, wife. But the audience really enjoyed that show, as I did, too. 

Now the reason that Jerry did not come with us that evening was that this was a big day in the World Cup when England was playing Columbia. Even though football was invented in England, the English team is famously bad. Nobody expected them to advance very far, but after beating Tunisia and Panama, England was father along in the World Cup than it had been in many, many years. Lots of people, including, oddly enough me, kept checking phones surreptitiously during the play to check on the score. For most of the game England held a 1-0 lead, but right as the clock was about to run out, Columbia tied the game. It was in the penalty phase as we left County Hall. People clustered around a little television to watch. 

And then, England scored and won the game. Everybody started cheering!

In a few days, England will now play Sweden in the semi-finals. More immediately, tomorrow is my birthday and our last full day in the United Kingdom. Almost time to go home.

Bristol Fashion

John and I both woke up early this morning, and we set out to find some coffee. This gave us an excuse to wander about the neighborhood. Brentford has a reputation today as being a bit of a down-at-the-heels neighborhood in an unfashionable borough. This is certainly an understandable response to a stroll down Brentford High Street or a visit to the Beehive pub, but there are a number of interesting and sometimes quite affluent neighborhoods here, and there is an astonishing amount of history. 

Brentford is situated on towards the eastern end of the Borough of Hounslow when the River Brent meets the River Thames. Brentford is a Celtic word and it means “a place where the River Brent can be crossed.” Yet that definition is rather misleading as the Brent is a fairly small tributary of the Thames and it could be far more easily crossed a little further north in Hanwell. So what was fordable here was not the Brent so as the Thames. Brentford was the first spot, about 80 miles west of the open sea, where the Thames could be forded by cattle or horses. And this is quite historically important. Brentford is the most likely spot for the battle between Julius Caesar and the British tribal king Cassivellaunus in 54 BC. A bit of history here: after conquering Gaul, Caesar demanded the submission of the British tribes. Not surprisingly, they refused and Roman legions invaded Britain, landing at the mouth of the Thames and moving west along the south side of the river. At Brentford, Caesar moved his forces successfully across the Thames even though the north side of the river was apparently well-protected with sharp oak stakes. The British tribal forces were beaten by the better-armed Roman legions, and Cassivellaunus fled. This woodcut image is how a nineteenth century illustrator imaged the battle.

Cassivellaunus's location was later disclosed to Caesar by rival British tribes and he surrendered to the Roman leader. Although many have questioned Caesar’s accounts of his own successes, this one appears to be fairly accurate. When the Brentford Dock, right by Vicki and Jerry’s house, was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, the ancient remnants of the sharp oak stakes were unearthed. 

Another important battle was fought here in 1016, this one with a better outcome for the English. Canute, the Danish King, invaded Britain, one of many Norse incursions into the British Isles, and his forces were repelled here at Brentford by the English King Edmond Ironside. This was one of Edmond’s few victories, and what was left of his kingdom fell into Danish control after his death. Ultimately the Danish victory was somewhat short-lived as the Norman would invade England and take control of the country in 1066. 

Oddly enough, Brentford is not mentioned in the Domesday book though nearby Hanwell to the north is. Possibly this area was considered part of Hanwell at the time, and the land is that part of Middlesex County was owned by the monks of Westminster Abbey. The first known building in Brentford was the establishment of Saint Lawrence’s church in the twelfth century. It is not easy to get a good picture of this building, so I took this one from Wikipedia (consider that attribution). 

The stone tower dates from the 15th century, while the rest of the church was rebuilt in 1764 in brick. The parish was closed by the Diocese of London in 1959, and the building has been vacant ever since. In the redevelopment of the high street planned by an Irish firm, this building will be saved but converted into something, possibly a fitness center. Given the historical significance of the spot, it seems like it deserves more than that even if it is an ugly building. 

Other than a minor battle in the Civil War, not much happened in Brentford until the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Grand Union Canal was built to link Birmingham and other Midland industrial centers with the port city of London. Portions of the River Brent were incorporated into the canal route, and the Thames was dredged at this time to make it deeper and more accessible to shipping. In the middle of the century, a train line was built to link the Brentford Docks with the Great Western Railway. Like much of Middlesex County, Brentford changed from a fairly bucolic farming area to a largely urban and somewhat industrial one. Much of the work was to build the railways and canals was done by Irish laborers, and a good bit of cheap housing was built for them. The area was largely spared the devastation of the Blitz, though several bombs were dropped on the docks just south of Brentford High Street. 

Today, Brentford is being slowly changed into a high-end residential neighborhood. The factories that once lined the Great West Road on the north of Brentford have now been replaced with skyscrapers housing major firms like GlaxoSmithKline and Sky. The Hounslow Council has approved demolishing most of the structures between Brentford High Street and the Thames for a mixed commercial and residential use. I suspect we will see the same kind of tall apartment building with a river view here that now line much of the rest of the Thames. The old canal is now becoming a natural area, and as two centuries of industrial contamination is clean up, fish and birds are now returning to the area as the following canal-side plaque describes. 

But enough history, even if it is one of my obsessions. Our big adventure for the day was a trip to Bristol to see Zöe and her husband Arden. Zöe and Sandra, as you may recall from previous entries, were our two new best friends on the barge trip. Zöe helped us arrange our plane tickets to London, and invited us, probably not expecting we would accept, to visit her in her hometown of Bristol. But she was delighted when we let her know a couple days ago that we were coming out for lunch and some sightseeing.

With some minor problems, we took the train from Paddington Station. While not exactly a bullet train, the express from London toward Bristol made remarkably good time getting us nearly from one side of the country to the other in about two hours. We disembarked at Bristol Temple Meads Station. Zöe met us there and introduced us to Arden.

Zöe explained that the neo-Gothic station was the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the man responsible for the Great Western Railroad itself. While I had never heard of Brunel, I learned later, thanks, of course, to the internet, that he is absolutely revered in the United Kingdom and placed second, ahead of William Shakespeare, in a BBC poll of the 100 greatest Britons. I will grant Brunel’s engineering genius, but the station is as ugly as anything build during the nineteenth century as far as I am concerned. 

Zöe is an indefatigable booster of her hometown, and I like that about her. Britons today generally lack that sense of what Italians call “campanilismo,” the enthusiastic love of where you were born and raised. But such reverence for your roots, without that absurd sense of chauvinism one sometimes finds along the Pacific coast, is the heart of a truly authentic local culture. Zöe pointed out to us that one of the many creative people who has made Bristol their home is Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit. To honor his contributions, Bristol has placed many statues of the laconic inventor and his faithful dog around the city. Different individuals and companies have decorated them. We found one just as we entered the harbor area looking for lunch. 

We had a lovely tapas lunch at a restaurant overlooking the harbor. We could see a reproduction from there of the ship that John Cabot sailed from Bristol to Newfoundland. Cabot, whose real name was Giovanni Caboto, was a Venetian navigatorand explorer whose 1497 discovery of the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII of England was the first European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse expeditions of the eleventh century. 

After dropping off Arden, an talented saxophonist for a rehearsal, we went on to the look at some of the landmarks of the city. Bristol was very badly damaged during the Second World War because it was the home of the the Rolls Royce aircraft factories, and Germany was intent on destroying Britain’s industrial capabilities. Many important buildings were destroyed in the bombing, but quite a number survived. One of them is the church of Saint Mary Redcliffe, a building Queen Elizabeth I once called "the fairest, goodliest, and most famous parish church in England.” And who am I to disagree with the Virgin Queen herself? It is a large parish church, almost as large as some cathedrals, and it is a magnificent example of perpendicular gothic. Take, for example, the ceiling of the bell tower.

The nave is astonishingly lovely.

The stained glass windows, unfortunately, we destroyed during the Civil War by Cromwell’s forces, and the tile on the floor is an unfortunate bit of Victorian “restoration.” Otherwise, though, it is just about perfect. 

Since it is a landmark, Saint Mary needed its own Gromit statue as well. 

After our visit to the church, we were all ready for some ice cream. Zöe is an ice cream connoisseur. She took us to a place down the street from the University of Bristol which had some pretty cool flavors. John tried Charcoal Vanilla. He said tasted just like regular vanilla, but it did look like something that they use to patch potholes. Arden joined us as we were eating. Apparently it was a really short rehearsal. They took us over to see one of the first pieces done by the guerrilla artist called Banksy. 

Zoe was clear that she had a pretty good idea who Banksy is and that he was a resident of Bristol. Checking this out a little more online, I discovered that she is probably right about that, and that a local artist named Robin Gunningham is most frequently identified as Bristol. Cunningham was a student at the cathedral school here. And speaking of the cathedral, that was our next stop. 

Bristol was not one of the medieval cathedral cities, and the building that is today Bristol Cathedral was an Augustinian abbey until the Reformation. The building was still unfinished at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries until King Henry VIII, and the nave of the church was not built until the middle of the nineteenth century. The most historically important section of the church is the old chapter hall which dates from the Norman Era. Somehow, I did not get pictures of this. A few snapshots, though, of the choir

and some details of the stone work.

Zöe and Arden invited us to see their house. It is modern and not dissimilar to Vicki and Jerry’s house. They have the most darling dog, a poodle and spaniel mix. She’s about nine, but zipped about like she was barely two. 

They also have a horse in the back yard.

Not a real one, obviously. We had some coffee and chatted a bit. But it was finally time for us to try to catch the train back to London in order to try to see if we could get some last minute theater tickets. They drove us back to Bristol Temple Meads Station. Along the way, we stopped to admire Brunel’s famed bridge over the Avon River. It looked pretty enough from where we all posed,

but it was only later when I did a bit of research on it that I finally understood why it was a big deal. This is the angle I wished I had seen the bridge from.

This bridge predates the Brooklyn Bridge by about a decade.

The trip back to London was pretty crowded at first. We did not get a seat until after a large number of passengers disembarked at Bath and even then we did not have seats together until near Reading. Our efforts to get theater tickets for the night were ultimately fruitless, but we did get tickets to the the Tina Turner musical for July 4.