As it turned out, our Christmas Eve was devoted to introducing our kids to some of our new London friends.

We had been invited by Jane and Paul Gee to visit them in Pleshy. (Jane is the lawyer who Judie recently hired at Bryan Cave and her husband Paul invited me along for the hedonistic Gentlemen’s Christmas. They had come to our flat for Thanksgiving.) So the six of us went over to Liverpool Street Station and hopped on a train to Chelmsford, a thirty-minute ride. Chelmsford didn’t look like much, but as we drove an additional 25-30 minutes to Pleshy, it became increasingly rural. It is kind of amazing that you can be in such a rural spot only an hour outside of London. Pleshy has a population of 300 and Paul and Jane live in a spectacularly renovated old barn. Pleshy is, like seemingly everything in England, incredibly old. William the Conqueror gave the land to one of his battle commanders in 1066, where a “motte and bailey” style of castle was built. Pleshy was an important place in the 1300s, but it was abandoned some time after Richard II executed the then Duke of Gloucester at the castle in 1397. The moat is still there, as is the hill where the fortified part of the castle was. But the stones were all taken away centuries ago. There is a small main street with a number of cute buildings and the town’s pub, the Leather Bottle.

    

We eventually went down to the Leather Bottle, where I met three of the other hedonistic gentlemen (two from the town and Paul’s brother-in-law). We drank beers and had sandwiches at the pub, the only one in town. It’s current claim to fame is that it is owned by Keith Flint, the front man of Prodigy, an electronic punk band who are a pretty big deal, at least in the UK. He is local lad who decided that he wanted to own a “boozer” and sell real ales. (Alex later sent me an article from Billboard saying that Flint had been attacked by the anarchist hacking group Anonymous for participating in a fox hunt in the Pleshy area.) It was all great fun and we got to meet Jane and Paul’s daughters and friends. We ended up going back to their house to drink sherry and have desserts before returning to London.

That evening, we all went to the New Unity Unitarian Church for their Christmas Eve service. This was really following what had become a family tradition in Montclair, where we had been to our UU service every year for over a decade. As a matter of fact, missing that service was something that was a real reminder of how far away we were and how much our lives have changed. I assume that we’ll be back for it next year. The New Unity version was smaller and very nice, although there is no way to compare them. (And I’ll bet that the UU Montclair service had a different feel this year since Charlie, our Minister of the last twenty years, is no longer there.) A lot of the New Unity regulars were not there. A significant portion of the congregation are in their 20s and 30s and I suspect that they had all gone home to visit their families. But we did get to introduce our kids to some people and have mince pies and mulled wine after the service. (Both of these things are everywhere in the Holiday period here. It would be hard to find a pub or restaurant or street cart that is not selling mulled wine in the latter part of December.)

After that, we took the bus back to Finsbury Square and got back to the flat for our tradition of a seafood dinner after the Christmas Eve service. I had bought Dover Sole at Borough Market the day before and I sautéed it. We had been growing these pink mushrooms in kit we had bought and my idea had been to have them along side the sole, but I burned them. But we still had chanterelles from Borough Market, so, while it was annoying not to get to tasted the mushrooms that had been growing in our living room for ten days, it didn’t really matter. Photos follow.

     

The day that our kids left, while we were in the midst of trying to reschedule James’ flights to New Mexico because his plane was badly delayed, we got an e-mail telling us that Gigi had died.

Gigi was Judie’s roommate at Smith and really her best friend, other than her sisters. She lived in the house next to mine when I was on exchange at Smith and then the next year she came to Bowdoin on exchange and lived in the adjoining suite in the Senior Center. During that period, she met and fell in love with my suite-mate, Paul Weeks. They eventually married and lived happily in Maine, where they had two children and, more recently, two grandchildren. Because they were up in Bangor, we never saw them as much as we wanted, but the bond between the four of us and especially between Judie and Gigi was unbreakable.

She wasn’t like the stereotypical image of women at Smith. Maybe it was growing up on the beach at Long Boat Key in Florida and I imagine it had a lot to do with her mother. She was just a free spirit. She played a stand-up base that was considerably taller than she was and had a stuffed animal head hanging in her room. She was up for any adventure. Because I am away from our photos, the only photo I have is one that my friend Chris sent to me yesterday. It is the two of us at the Carnival of the New World, a multi-media show I co-organized my senior year at Bowdoin in which I convince Gigi to be one of the dancing girls. (They did two numbers–one a kick line (with me) and the other a sort of Busby Berkeley umbrella routine).

Don’t we look young?

In the past decade or so, Gigi has been in varying states of poor health. She developed skin cancer from working for many summers as a life guard. She had a whole series of surgeries. We discovered that she had an indomitable toughness and an ability to weather adversities that would have been too much for a lesser person. She never lost her sense of humor and remained a great friend to many.

This is a loss that we will never really recover from. Our hearts go out to Paul and the Weeks family, as well as to her many friends who I know were devastated by the news.

I’ve missed writing about so much, it is hard to know where to begin. Going backwards was my original thought, but the day I started this was so unexpectedly crazy that I need time to process it all. So I think I’ll begin with New Year’s Eve.

It was Alex and Lucy’s last day in England and we wanted to make the finish memorable. So, after sleeping in, we went to Sushi Samba, a fusion Sushi/South American restaurant on the top of the Heron Building on Bishopsgate Street. It is nearby and you can see the lights of the restaurant from our flat. A number of people had recommended it and it had nice views (we were fortunate that it was a rare clear day in London) and good (if pricey) food. It was lots of fun, especially the glass elevator which zipped up to the 39th floor. A few photos follow:

        

For the evening, we had planned a package thing that was to start with dinner at an Italian restaurant, followed by a boat trip on the Thames to see the fireworks. It all started in disastrous fashion. After just missing the bus to Tower Hill, we were a little late to the restaurant, which seemed to have no idea about the package, although they did have our reservation. (The restaurant was in this pretty development called St. Katherine’s Dock, which was on the Tower side of the river. It was a combination of renovated warehouses and newer buildings, with lots of restaurants and shops, all around a marina which I imagine must have been a a busy shipping spot back in the day.) It was disorganized. There was no section for the people going on the trip after dinner and no directions to the pier were provided. So we and two other couples got lost, missed the boat and ended up at the wrong pier. Fortunately, there were so many of us that they turned the boat back and came and got us. A bit stressful, but the ride was worth it. We went up and down the Thames twice, going from Tower Bridge, to somewhere past Chelsea and Westminster. The buildings were all lit up and there were thongs of people on all the bridges and along the sides. At one point a huge, half-moon rose over Tower Bridge, which was lovely.

After a while we settled into a spot just off the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abby. The whole area was so chock full of cruise ships of various sizes that there was no way to go anywhere. We were standing out on the back of the boat, facing Bug Ben and the London Eye, drinking wine and beer. It wasn’t all that chilly and the rain from earlier in the day had stopped and it was pretty clear. As midnight approached, the crew handled out champagne and then the fireworks began. They were the best I think I have ever seen. It was like a twenty-minute finale. One of many cool things was that some of the fireworks shot out of the London Eye ferris wheel, so there were rockets going up and exploding at various heights while other rockets where shooting out of the circle of the wheel. I’ll have some pictures at the end, but they don’t do it justice and the video is just to big to embed. We eventually got back to the dock and, because that is the one day that London keeps public transport running late, it was pretty easy to get home. All in all, a great evening, despite the early confusion and stress.