David: Last Day in London

I just posted a status update to my Facebook page to the effect that I'm sufficiently tired and sated to be ALMOST willing to board that plane tomorrow morning for the long flight home to Portland.

As Carole mentioned, we were whisked to the Victoria & Albert Museum to see their relatively new theater exhibition (which I only now remember reading about a while back, because it features tour costumes of Elton John's and a 1972 jumpsuit of Mick Jagger's as well as turn-of-the-last century prompt books, ticket stubs, and posters. As with many other things, I think I'll be more in a mood to discuss what we saw at length when I don't have a need for sleep before an early-morning departure from our hotel hanging over my head.

In the mid afternoon we were taken to Home House (the Scottish family pronounces it "Hume"), which is now a private club -- probably still renting from the family -- which in turn apparently leases out space for events like our tea this afternoon. Something my friend Jeremy Lillie pointed out before we left which was confirmed while I was here, is that what Americans have a tendency to call "high tea" (such as happens at the Heathman in Portland) is simply "tea" here in Britain. "High tea" is actually a three-course meal -- a working class thing, according to Jeremy -- rather than the dainty thing with crustless sandwiches, cakes, and scones with clotted cream and preserves that we think of as quintessentially British.

During our tea, the theater reviewer for the Sunday Independent, Kate Basset, talked to us about her work, with our theater expert Giles Ramsay prompting her with various questions, and then we all discussed the three plays we had seen while here in London. I asked several other questions, but the one I really wanted to ask was whether she knew of any formal or even semi-orthodox training program for critics. Her background seemed no less ad hoc than almost any other critic's I've heard about (including mine), and I would have liked to discuss whether that's the way it has to be, ought to be, or oughtn't to be. Would critics be any better for a formal education program similar to the one many artists and actors and directors receive? (Basset was an English major in college who was aiming for stage direction and worked as an assistant director at the National Theatre for a while, but then drifted into writing and analysis journalism until she realized she would have to make an irreversible choice, and she did.)

Elderhostel had arranged for our tour to go to a musical concert of Schubert lieder this evening, but again Carole and I ducked out. She had had nervous sneezing and coughing bouts on the QM2, but a real, unmistakable cold only really turned up yesterday, and it was slowing her down today, even with pharmaceuticals to suppress symptoms. She was worried about getting packed and getting plenty of rest, while I wanted to spend my last evening in town walking the city -- particularly along the Thames.

So I took the Tube to the "Tower Hill" station (on the District line, if I recollect correctly; the London subway system has 11 different lines compared with Boston's 4 which I know well). That put me in a position to shoot a couple photos of the Tower of London complex and beautiful Tower Bridge near sunset, and then photos of boats on the river, London Bridge, "Shakespeare's Globe," the Eye (nickname of the ferris wheel-like sightseeing structure that was constructed during the Millennium celebrations) after dark.

I also shot more quotidian sights, such as the interesting juxtaposition of a Dianetics office next to a Casino. (London, and indeed Tottenham Court Road, has many storefront, shotgun "casinos" which are like video arcades that just happen to have a lot of slot machines in them.)

Marks & Spenser, a sort of supermarket of food and goods like Fred Meyer back home, currently has an ad campaign that I've been trying to chronicle, because the same catchphrase -- something about the quality that money can buy -- is plastered across a closeup of a slab of roast beef in one huge billboard and a woman's body from upper thigh to neck in bikini lingerie in another. There are other articles depicted in other billboards (bathing goods, perhaps?) but those are the two I've seen most often, and the similitude is just kind of . . . unfortunate.

I have so many slips of paper, notepads, and sheets on which I've noted down various interesting signs, snatches of conversation, and observations of my own, but I'll have to get to those after we've arrived home and had time to recover.

Note: I'm supposed to be participating in a staged reading of a new play by Joann Farias at Miracle Theatre on Monday night at 7:00.