Rich and Poor

After yesterday, I was all set to once again see a couple of plays. But John, strangely enough, felt like he did not want to see more than one play today. Instead, perhaps because it was a pleasant, sunny day, he wanted to go out to Hampstead. For any of you who are not regulars to London, Hampstead is one of the wealthiest section of the city. It just a plain little village for centuries, but after the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666 wealthy Londoners began to move here to be out of, yet close to, the city. A few decades later, a doctor claimed healing powers for a spring there and it became a fashionable spa town. By the late nineteenth century, after a rail line linked it it with central London, it became the affluent suburban community it remains. 

Yet it has also been one of those affluent suburbs that has always appealed to an arty, literary crowd. It seemed like just about every other house had one of those London County Council historical markers. 

Just to the north of the center of Hampstead lies Hampstead Heath. A heath, I learned from doing a little research, is a shrub land area with sandy, acidic soils. Some heaths occur naturally, while others are the result of human activities such as cutting forests for grazing land. I am not sure which kind of heath Hampstead Heath is. References to Hampstead Heath occur as far back as the Domesday Book, and at one time the monks of Westminster Abbey owned the rights to the land. 

Today it is a large public park, though there are portions of it that are in private hands. John and I were not up to exploring every part of the park. We just wandered through a bit of it and found ourselves, completely by accident, in Hidden Hill Gardens. These gardens, dominated by a huge pergola, were once part of the estate of Inverforth House, but are now in public hands. 

The gardens were originally built when Inverforth House was owned by William Lever, a poor boy from Manchester who made a fortune selling soap. He discovered a way to make soap more cheaply and effectively by using vegetable oil instead of beef tallow. With his brother James he established Lever Brothers, the manufacturer of, among other products, "Lux Toilet Soap." In the 1930s, Lever Brothers sponsored a weekly show where current movies were turned into radio dramas. It was called "Lux Radio Theater" and John loves to listen to episodes of it - there's about 800 of them on YouTube - as he falls asleep each night. Isn't it amazing how things connect?

In the garden, I snapped a picture of a robin. The European Robin is a completely different bird from the larger American bird of the same name. And I think they are much cuter. 

After spending a good bit of time trying to figure out a way to get out of Hidden Hill Gardens without going back the way we had entered, John and I made it to North End Way, one of the streets that run through Hampstead Heath. We saw The Old Bull and Bush Tavern, a public house that proudly announced it dated back to 1721. 

It had an outdoor patio, and we were hungry. Lunch was in order, and, I am pleased to say, it was quite a good one. Afterwards, we did not feel like walking back to the Underground station on the high street, so we took an Uber back to Leicester Square. 

In the evening we went to see the Aaron Sorkin version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Late summer is not the best time to go to London to see theater. Most of what is on at this point are the big musicals that have been running for decades like Les Miserable, Lion King, or Phantom. We had no desire to revisit any of those and what was new largely seemed pretty lame. We thought about the revival of Anything Goes, but Sutton Foster had left the production and I know just about every line of that play. So, we settled on Mockingbird. 

This version of the story follows Harper Lee's story fairly closely, but the dialogue and the sensibility are distinctly those of Sorkin. I have never been a fan of his work - I found The West Wing intolerably smug and irritating - and this play did not turn me into an admirer. He casts adult actors in the roles of the children. According to the reviews I read, this was supposedly because they were reflecting on the events from a later time in their lives. I did not particularly see that. 

Atticus had to be made less of a hero here, particularly after the publication of Go Set a Watchman. 

And the Ewalls, not particularly likeable in the book, have to be made even more vile because in Sorkin's imagination they are the incarnation of the Trump voter. I am not sorry I went to see the play, but like so much contemporary drama it had a preachy quality about it that is the antithesis of art to me. 

It was late when the play was finally done. John and I wandered down Old Compton Street for a while being jostled by the crowds. We finally stopped at a Japanese robata joint on Wardour Street. 

Tomorrow we leave London to visit our friends in Hampshire. 

Two Plays, a Museum, a Concert, and some Laundry

I usually plan our trips well in advance and research all the possible places to stay and things to do weeks and weeks ahead of our travel. But I was not sure until about two weeks before we actually left if we were really going to go or would have to postpone our trip. So I had not been willing to make any hotel commitments in London until I was sure we were actually going to be there. 

About three days ago, I decided I had to find something. And I was quite excited when I discovered a studio apartment for rent just off Leicester Square. I immediately reserved it. But as soon as the confirmation email came, my heart sank. "The flats are located over three floors of the building," it read. "There is no lift." I wanted to immediately wanted to cancel it because John has difficulty with stairs. But there were no refunds. 

And indeed, once we had arrived, I figured out that our unit was indeed on what the British call the third floor and what we Americans would call the fourth floor. It is set back a bit above the roofline here so you cannot even see it from the street. 

John was apprehensive. He thought the neighborhood was perfect and the building was charming, but he had no idea if he could manage all those stairs. 

As it turns out, he has recovered a great deal of strength since his heart surgery and he managed to get up the stairs without too much difficulty. 

This morning I left our apartment early to take some clothes over to the nearest place I could find offering wash-and-fold service. It had the wonderful name of the Boswell Laundrette. I had images of people sipping tea and reading Life of Johnson as they awaited the end of the spin cycle. As it turned out, the reality was far more prosaic. 

The laundry was near Russell Square, about a mile from where we were staying, so it took me about an hour to drop the laundry off and walk back. When I was almost there, I called John. He told me that he had walked around the block to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. I joined him there. 

I had been to this museum a number of times, so I just visited some old friends like this one by Monet

and this one by Turner. 

John likes pictures that tell stories. He wondered how long you can keep an expression on your face after you head has been cut off.

Leaving the museum, he wanted to stop in at Saint Martin in the Fields. To our surprise, there something that was a cross between a concert and a service going on. The music, drawn from various composers, were all settings of the eucharistic hymns of Thomas Aquinas. The singers were brilliant. We had to endure some commentary by Sam Wells, the vicar, formerly of Duke Divinity School, who clearly could not grasp Catholic theology. 

Before he went to the museum, John had bought some theater tickets at the TKTS booth. In the afternoon, we went to see Life of Pi, an adaptation of the best-selling book. I was not rude enough, or maybe courageous enough, to take my own pictures during the play, so this is a publicity picture I found on Google. This is a scene at the beginning where Pi is exploring different religions. 

 

The big attraction of the play is the use of full-size puppets for the various animals, particularly the tiger. This really was quite well done. 

I was not a big fan of the book, and in the end I was not moved by the play, either. Still, the staging was fantastic. It was exactly the sort of thing that you can only do in London or New York with theaters specially adapted for this specific play. 

In the evening, we went to see The Mousetrap. This play has been on stage in London since 1952. We have been too sophisticated to go see if for forty years, but we decided that we should finally just check it off the list. As it turned out, it was a fun evening. 

It was a busy day for two old guys, but a really happy one.