Klee’s Walpurgis witches, Tamarind’s Saag Gosht, Hal and Falstaff, air fencing on Iron Age monuments, cliff walking in Wales, where to start? At the beginning. Lynn, Robert and I are just back from a couple of weeks in the UK.
Lynn and I flew Virgin Atlantic Upper Class over the water and it was a treat as it always has been in the past. Nothing beats sleeping flat and the difference it makes in the first day. After we arrived and rendezvoused with Robert, the three of us walked a bit, spent more time than Lynn would have liked looking at hand painted soldiers and knights at a shop in the Piccadilly Arcade, then hoofed the short distance to Queen Street and Tamarind, my favorite restaurant in London. They serve, in their words, “traditional Moghul cuisine,” prepared meticulously with fresh ingredients. I’ve never had any other Indian food that even came close, even in the UK. That night we tried Dal Makhni, (slow cooked black lentils), which were a revelation. I don’t even like lentils. Correction: there was a time when I didn’t like lentils.
As we walked back to our hotel, the Swiss Howard on the Thames across from the National Theatre, we walked through Trafalgar where there was a curious exhibition of automotive factory robots re-tasked to write text on a circular screen that on-lookers had sent from their cell phones. Someone wished someone happy birthday; the arms of the robots swung and reached in unison as they wrote. There’s always something going on in Trafalgar it seems. I was more drawn to a large ship in a bottle on a pedestal that looked like some kind of Asian homage to Nelson and HMS Victory but could have been something entirely different.
The next morning we breakfasted early at Pret-a-Mange then, after the requisite raptor’s eye view of the city from the Eye, walked to the Tate Modern. On the way we stopped at a small jewelry store in the XOXO group of shops where we’ve found jewelry for Lynn before. This time it was a necklace by an Irish artist who takes her inspiration from bog artifacts. It’s a strand of carnelian beads with occasional gold circles and a triangular pendant with an abstract design that reminds me of thorny woods.
This time the high point for me of the visit to the Tate Modern was the black and white photographs of August Sandberg and Klee’s “Walpurgis Night.” Each of Sandberg’s images is a richly allusive, frozen story in the way that Vermeer’s best paintings are. They ask you to consider both what’s gone on before and what happened after. Even the portraits and landscapes have that affect. It’s a kind of instantaneous tension. The three witches faces in Walpurgis Night are another thing all together. They ask about the absence of context. And they’re just plain spooky. After lunch in the museum restaurant looking out over the Thames, we were disappointed at St. Paul’s. Like Westminster Abbey it was closed as part of the preparations for the imminent visit of the pope to London which we planned to give a wide berth.
So we were off to the Tate Britain instead. Both Lynn and I wanted to look at the Pre-Raphaelite works there, inspired, in part by having recently watched the BBC series on the artists “Desperate Romantics.” That goal was delayed just inside the entrance by Fiona Banner’s exhibition which consisted of real jet fighter airplanes. One was suspended by its tail from the ceiling; another was on its side in the middle of the gallery. The first was a dusty gray and had feathers hand painted all over it; the second had been chromed so that you couldn’t look at it without seeing your distorted self reflected back. She was inspired by her memories of military jets flying over her during walks in the Welsh mountains with her father when she was a child.
We eventually found the Pre-Raphaelites though. And of course, I couldn’t see Millais’ Ophelia (floating in the water grasping wild flowers) without thinking about the model, Elizabeth Siddal, who’d spent hours in a Victorian bathtub and who had become seriously ill as Millais had allowed the oil lamps positioned around the base of the tub to keep the water warm to go out. But what held me was one of Burn-Jones Persephone paintings. I am deeply drawn to its wintry, gun metal spectrum as well as the characters’ expressions. Pluto, who sits almost at Persephone’s feet, looks at her with such longing and she stares out at us with such clarity, strength and loss all at once. I must also admit that I’m envious of Pluto’s armor; if only fencing gear looked that cool.
By the time we walked out, we were exhausted. “Find me a cab, I’m walked out,” Lynn said as we stepped out on a strangely empty Atterbury Street. Cars were parked all along the road but there was no traffic. Helicopters circled high over head.
Since there were no cabs we started walking east toward our hotel and then we saw the crowds and the yellow vested police. And, as Westminster Bridge came into view, our fears were confirmed: in the midst of the crowds a motorcade was crossing the bridge and in the middle of the bridge was a white vehicle with a kind of dome and a tiny red clothed figure within. In spite of our desires to the contrary, we’d found the Pope who was just arriving in London. A good English mile of walking finally led us around the commotion to a cab who in turn dropped us at a pub with a single tiny table upstairs, institutional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but, fortunately, cold Stella Artois. “Belike then my appetite was not princely got; for, by my troth, I do now remember the poor creature, small beer.”
The next morning, which happened to be Saturday, we rendezvoused with Carolyn Foreman, a friend we’d first met dog-sledding in Svalbard. She lives and works in Oxford and drove down to join us for breakfast at Covent Garden. She was just back from a rough crossing to and from Greenland and was about to depart for South Africa. I felt fortunate that it had worked out so that the four of us could share a lazy breakfast in the sunshine which had been rare in that part of the UK as of late and would be so again very shortly. There’s nothing quite like a lazy, sunlit breakfast in a Covent Garden restaurant to make you feel that all’s right with the world even though you know it isn’t.
After a short sojourn in the British museum, we took a break and then set out to attend the primary and central reason for the trip in the first place: “Henry IV part 1” at the Globe Theatre in Southwark. To be continued of course.
