Judie and I were back in the States for ten days around the Thanksgiving holidays. We are returning for good sometime around the end of March and the trip was an affirmation of why this is a good thing.

We have a very comfortable life here in London. For me in particular, my routine of writing, painting, exploring, going to theatre and museums, vacationing and working with the people at New Unity is quite satisfying. I don’t miss having a car and we live in a great neighborhood and in a very nice flat. I truly enjoy walking around the neighborhood, going to the markets, eating the street food and generally sightseeing. Livin’ is pretty damn easy.

But returning to Montclair was a reminder that there is much that I am missing while living across the Pond. What it comes down to is community. The evening we arrived in New Jersey, we went to the Annual Auction at the UU Congregation, an event I had run for about ten years and then helped to run for five more. I was wonderful seeing all of our friends, who were excited and surprised to see us. Judie and I did really feel like returning heroes, which was incredibly gratifying. And I just kept running into people I knew, either while walking down the street or going to pick up coffee or standing in line to get bagels. This, of course, virtually never happens to me in London and it is really nice to be in a location where there are connections everywhere you look. We got to stay with Ivy and Debbie and have lunch with Peter and Andrea and then dinner with Karen & Jerry and Bob & Karen. And then we went to Boston for Thanksgiving and got to see family and many of my lifelong friends. We really got to wallow in love and affection for a week. We will never get those sort of feelings here.

For me, probably more that for Judie, there is another dimension to all of this. In London, I am not even a small fish in a big pond. I am more like plankton, except in the little fish bowl that is New Unity. Judie is more recognized through her work and the connections she is making in legal and business circles here. So for me, it was nice to return to a place where I have at least some level of gravitas as a congregational leader, former councilman and serial volunteer for many causes. It is a feeling that I rarely experience in London and the recognition felt good.

We returned to London, where Judie’s sister Linda and her friend Chris were already at our flat. The next day was my birthday and we went to the Clove Club, a spectacular restaurant located in a part of Shoreditch Town Hall, a 10 minute walk. It was quite a meal, comparable to going to Per Se (only half the price). Very attentive service and a delicious multi-course meal. The menu is below:

It is impossible to pick out the most delicious of these dishes. The most memorable was probably the one that started with a glass of 1908 Medeira. We drank that (amazingly layered tastes and a fabulous nose), while the wine steward told us about the house that made it. We left a little in our glasses and he poured a warm consommé of duck, morel and ginger over it. We also ordered the wine pairing. Judie got the regular one and I go the premier one, so we ended up tasting 20 wines while we were at it. When it was all over, almost three hours later, we blissfully walked home. You can’t do that in Montclair.

The next evening, it was another walk, this time a 20 minute stroll to the Barbican Theatre to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “Cymbeline”. It is one of Shakespeare’s last plays and is rarely performed. It is also one of his few plays that is not based on another story (which he then retells incomparably better than the original). The plot is pretty convoluted. It centers around Innogen, a princess whose two siblings were stolen in infancy. She has displeased Queen Cymbeline (the production changes the king to a queen and the Queen Mother to the Duke) by marrying Posthumus, a commoner, rather than the Duke’s son, Cloten. Her husband is banished and she eventually has to flee as well, dressed as a boy, when Posthumus is fooled in to thinking that she has been unfaithful and tries to have here killed. She is pursued by the vengeful Cloten. In the meantime, in a wonderful parallel to Brexit, Cymbeline and the Duke decide that Britain doesn’t need to be part of the Roman Empire and refuse to pay taxes, causing a war. There are battle scenes, Posthumus returns, Cloten is beheaded by one of the stolen children, now grown, who Innogen unknowingly meets in the forest before taking a draft that makes her appear dead. I’ve left out at least one whole subplot and various twist and turns. There is a pretty implausible denouement in the final scene in which all is revealed and everyone lives happily ever after (except the headless Cloten and the evil Duke). The performances were wonderful, especially Bethan Cullinane as Innogen and Marcus Griffiths as Cloten. We had actually seen much of the cast in “King Lear” a week earlier. There was original music accompanying the play and some clever bits of staging. There is a kind of hilarious scene when Innogen wakes from appearing dead and finds herself lying next to the headless Cloten, dressed in Posthumus’ clothes (too complicated to explain here). It was a bit like the “Romeo and Juliet’ scene on acid. The whole thing was extremely enjoyable, if typically long. So long, in fact, that we had to walk back to the flat to get some food since most of the restaurants in that area were closing.

So the past two weeks was a period in which I was reminded that my heart is in Montclair and that it will be easy to move back home. But at the same time, I was reminded how wonderful it is to live in London. We mean to enjoy the next four months of this experience and look forward to our return to Montclair and to many visits to London.