Lawrence After Arabia”: Last Thursday we went to the Hampstead Theatre (which has turned into our “go-to” theatre—a bit like The New York Theatre Workshop or the Public) with Barbara and Mike (Judie’s friend from high school in Korea and her husband who are visiting) to see “Lawrence After Arabia”. This was another one of those historical dramas, which they seem to do very well here. Of course, often history can be so interesting that it really beats anything that you might make up. T.E. Lawrence was certainly such a figure. This play focuses mostly on the time after World War I, when Lawrence wanted to get away form the limelight and enlisted in the RAF under a false name. At the same time, he was friends with George Bernard Shaw and his wife and was spending some time with them and trying to edit a sort of memoir he had written about his experiences. Most of the play takes place in Shaw’s sitting room. While Shaw is trying to finish “St. Joan” (by dictating to his long suffering secretary, Blanche Patch), Shaw’s wife, Charlotte is looking after Tom (Lawrence) and helping him with his book. There are occasional flashbacks to the war and scenes with Prince Feisal and Field Marshall Edmund Allenby. And Lowell Thomas, the American journalist who became famous by covering the story of Lawrence of Arabia, appears occasionally to show the sort of pressure that Lawrence was under. One of the big points of the play is that Lawrence was tormented by his role in World War I and felt that he had double-crossed Prince Feisal by assuring him that there would be a unified Arabia after the war with a capital in Damascus. Feisal and the Arabs fought successfully against the Ottoman (Turks) (it is referred to as the Arab Revolt) and helped the British win that part of the war. But at the Peace conference, the winners simply went back to their old, misguided colonial habits and arbitrarily divided Arabia into “countries” that the French and English got to exploit. Lawrence argued that this would never work and that Europe would be reaping a whirlwind. In a private meeting with King George V, he declined a knighthood for his services in the Arab Revolt in protest of the treatment of the Arabs. So there is a contemporary political element to the play, as it portrays Prince Feisal as a potentially effective leader, who might have unified an Arabia that would have been functional, independent and friendly. Instead, we have ended up with dysfunctional countries like Iraq and Syria, etc. and our current mess, which one might arguably trace back to this mistake As is always the case at the Hampstead Theatre, this was a wonderful production with particularly great sets and a top-notch cast. Jack Laskey (who you would know if you watch “Endeavor” on PBS) was very good as Lawrence and Jeff Rawle was a very convincing and charming Shaw. Probably the most famous actor in the cast was Geraldine James, who has been in countless plays movies and television dramas and played Charlotte. William Chubb had a few great moments as Filed Marshall Allenby and Rosalind March’s understated portrayal of Shaw’s secretary was just great.

Oxford Pub Crawl: On Saturday we took the train up to Oxford (seventy minute from Paddington Station) to meet Jane and Paul Jee and their friends for the day. The plan was that Mike and I were to join Paul and his friend Jeremy for a pub crawl, while Judie and Barbara were to join Jane and her daughters and Jeremy’s wife and her daughters for sightseeing and shopping. (Actually, in the end it turned out that one of Paul’s daughters, Charlotte, and a friend of hers, Lizzie, joined the pub crawl, so it wasn’t as sexist as it looked like it was going to be.) We met everyone at the Turf Tavern for lunch and a couple of pints. The Turf Tavern is a very old pub, reputedly the last place where cockfighting was legal in London and the spot where Bill Clinton didn’t inhale while he was at Oxford and, I’m pretty sure, a regular location on “Inspector Morse”. I’m not certain of the names all the pubs we went to on the crawl. I know that we went to The Bear Inn, one of the oldest pubs in Oxford and one which, for some reason, displays pieces of ties, presumably worn (and then donated) by patrons. We also went to the Eagle and Child, a pub famously frequented by the Inklings, a literary and drinking group whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S Lewis. I’m pretty sure that we ended up at the Rose and Crown, a pretty little pub recommended by Lizzie, Charlotte’s friend who was just finishing her degree at Oxford. (It was her “local”.) And we went to two others, whose names I’ve forgotten, including one where we ate some scotch eggs and pork pies and another where we had an extended Brexit debate led by the spectacularly conservative Jeremy on one side and by Charlotte and me on the other (the debate was somewhat heated, probably because it was at pub number 4 or 5, but friendly). Finally, somewhere between eight and ten pints of beer  and three or four miles of walking later, we met up again with Judie and Barbara (who at one point had left the other women shopping and had gone to the Ashmolean Museum) and the others at a restaurant (whose name I had no hope of recalling at that point) and had a wonderful multi-course meal that Paul had arranged (with each course accompanied by wine). We then fell into a cab with Barbara and Mike and went back to our hotel, although we did stop at a nearby pub for a final “cleansing ale”. Quite a day. Certainly the most beer I had drunk in a single day in over 40 years.

Punting in the Thames: Sunday was a lovely and sunny day in Oxford and we spent a lot of it just wandering around the impossibly beautiful town. We spent some time checking out the Botanical Garden, which was in full bloom, and walked past the various colleges to Balliol College, where we met Anna Geier, the daughter of one of our friends, who spent the better part of last year living with us in Montclair. She took us around Balliol, which may be the oldest college in Oxford University (there is apparently some dispute between the colleges), including the Hogwarts-like eating hall. After a lunch at the White Horse pub, we said goodbye to Anna and continued to wander about. I had the idea of going punting on the Thames, since it was such a lovely day. It turned out that lots of people had the same idea and the river was very crowed, which made getting around hard, since the punts are difficult to control. You have long poles that you stick in the water and push off the bottom and then try to control the direction by swinging the pole through the water off the back. It is pretty easy to end up going sideways into a bank or slowly ramming another boat. Shortly after Mike had turned us around to head back (no small feat), I took my turn again. I was pushing us upstream and suddenly the pole got stuck in the mud and I was trying pull it out as the boat drifted along. I should have just let go of the pole, since it turns out that they float, but I had pictures of the pole sinking and us being stuck in the river with no means of propulsion. While all of this is flashing through my mind, the boat just moved out from under me and all of a sudden I realized that I was about to fall in the water and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Sure enough, I fell off the back. It might have been worse. I had given Judie my phone to hold and taken off my shoes since my feet were killing me the first time I did the poling. But I was soaking wet and lost my glasses. A number of other punts came over to help out (holding onto the pole for me was very useful) and I managed to get back into the boat eventually. The river is pretty shallow and I found that as we got near to the shore I could reach the bottom and then get to a point where it was very shallow and easier to get in. But I was soaking wet and fairly muddy and we still had 20-30 minutes of poling to get back to return the punt. But we made it and everyone at the punt rental place was amused. But I was still soaked so, as a result, I now own a new pair of Oxford University sweat pants and tee shirt, which I wore back to London. Oh well, at least I created a memorable experience for our guests (but at the cost of my glasses).