It has been a while since I have posted. I find it somewhat difficult to write on a phone and I am usually too distracted when we travel back to the States to do anything. This last trip was no exception and it didn’t help that I caught a cold upon arriving. It was a nice trip, if generally uneventful. We stayed at an airbnb in Montclair. It was perfectly nice, although it was a little hard to fit all five of us there comfortably, which gave Hannah an easy excuse to spend most nights staying with friends. So we saw a bit less of her that we had hoped, but (perhaps because of that?) she was in a great mood whenever we did see her.

A few highlights of our trip:

• We went to the UU Montclair Christmas Eve service. It was great seeing everyone and Judie got to sing in the choir. The kids were with us and it was a pleasant evening. The service itself was a bit too Christian for me. This was probably thanks to our Interim Minister, whose style I am not crazy about. But he’s only the Interim and will be gone in six months or so and I know he is supposed to shake things up and challenge us to take a look at how we are doing things. It was certainly a change of pace from Charlie’s services. But the tone of the service was to religious for me and made me uncomfortable.
• I made J. Sheekey’s fish pie for dinner on Christmas Eve. It turned out great. I think the kids were a little skeptical, but ended up enjoying it. The next day, I made a Rib Roast, with wild mushrooms. The airbnb had a nice kitchen that was well-equipped.
• The airbnb host allowed us to hold our Yankee Swap party there and we had a big crowd (in a space that was a little too small for all of us). It was the usual good time. The hot gift was a “squatty potty”.
• We went to the Metropolitan Opera on Boxing Day and saw “The Magic Flute”. It was the Julie Tamor production, so it was visually spectacular, with lots of puppetry and great costumes. It was an abridged version, presumably to make it more child friendly for the holidays, so we got out in less than two hours. But we missed out on a lot of Mozart, although we got to hear two great arias by the Queen of the Night.
• Lots of dinners with friends.

Back in London: Being “on the road” is wearing, even when you are on the road in your home town. There was something very odd about renting a place and staying within minutes of our house. Not unpleasant, just weird. It was nice to get back to London and to our flat. I do think that I am beginning to feel the end coming, which is simultaneously sad and exciting. I find myself thinking about the move to come and the logistics of moving back into our house. At the same time, I keep thinking of things I really need to do before we leave (Visit Scandinavia? A day at the Old Bailey? More Theatre, naturally! Windsor Castle? Question Time at the House of Commons?) The list goes on, as time flies. We have tentatively planned our good-bye party for Saturday, 1 April (I’ve come to prefer the English way of expressing dates) at Super Tuscan, our favorite restaurant.

New Year’s Eve: We got back late on the 30th, so we had plenty of time to recover for New Year’s Eve night. We decided to skip trying to get to the Thames to see the fireworks near Big Ben and the London Eye. It is a mob scene that is so bad that they now require tickets to get any where near the River. We saw the fireworks last year on our boat excursion with the family, so we felt free to skip it this time.

We began  our evening by going to Ba Shan, a wonderful Hunan restaurant in Chinatown/Soho. Preserved duck eggs with chilis, fried prawns, cute little pork rolls, soft-shell crabs in a wok with tons of dried peppers, lamb in a sauce covered with fresh peppers, bok choy cooked with garlic and rice. I don’t know how anyone can have that meal and eat all of the peppers without spontaneously combusting. We picked most of them out and still had burning lips and tongues.

After dinner, we walked over to the Donmar Warehouse near Covent Garden to see Bernard Shaw’s “St. Joan”, starring the incredible Gemma Arterton. (We had seen her last spring in “Nell Gwynn” and I decided that I had to see her in this. I think I must have lucked out on returned tickets, since we go the last two tickets and they were literally in the center of the front row!) Judie was not sure about seeing a tragedy on New Year’s Eve, but Gemma did not disappoint. The play opens with Joan outside a castle and the lord’s men inside trying to convince him to see her, saying “there is something special about her”. He finally lets her in and when Arterton enters, there is something very special about her. She was transfixing from the moment she appeared on stage. The entire cast (the rest are all men) is superior, with some great performances. I especially liked Fisayo Akinade as a charmingly aware and effeminate Dauphin, Rory Keenan as The Inquisitor, and Elliot Levy as Cauchon, but as usual, it is hard to pick anyone out as the acting was so uniformly great. However, Arterton was just mesmerizing whenever she was on stage. She carries it all before her. It was made even more amazing by being so close. It is a performance I won’t soon forget.

The production itself was interesting. The scenes were all set in corporate board rooms, rather than the courts in a 15th century palace, with the scenes linked by “BBC newscasts”. (The first detailed the raise in egg futures since the hens had stopped laying, a problem that is miraculously solved when Baudricourt agrees to send Joan to see the Dauphin and go on to the siege of Orleans.) It made the point that Shaw’s play has real modern themes, without going overboard on it. (Interesting fact I learned: Shaw did not like to be referred to as “George”.) “St. Joan” was written shortly after she was canonized in 1920 (nearly 500 years after her death–the only saint ever killed by the Church itself and probably one of the few to be un-excommunicated 25 years after her death) and shortly after women’s suffrage was passed. It is sometimes referred to as Shaw’s only tragedy, although it also often said that there are not real villains in the play. And it is actually true that the Church and the various other protagonists were stuck in the middle of a French civil war and a war against the English and were struggling to do the “right thing”, at least from their viewpoint. (But I would have to say that the vile Warwick, the Englishman who arranges Joan’s betrayal, capture and ultimate death, seems pretty damn evil to me.) There is a fascinating scene (that is classic Shaw) in which Warwick and Cauchon, the French prelate, discuss the problems presented by Joan. Cauchon and the Church are concerned that Joan is bypassing them and speaking directly with God. (Only the Church is allowed to do that.) She is an existential threat to the Church’s power. At the same time, Joan is the first “Nationalist”, in that she claims that the king has the divine right to rule and that nationhood is supreme. If it is nation and king, rather than the aristocratic rule that resulted from the Magna Carta, this presents an existential threat to the control of the land and money by the English aristocracy. Warwick plans to spend a great deal of money to capture Joan and turn her over to Cauchon, but wants to be sure that she will be burned at the stake. Cauchon, as a cleric, cannot directly agree to that, but by the end of the scene, Joan’s fate is sealed. So the play is very much about men conspiring to get rid of a powerful  and threatening woman. It might have been interesting to set it in political party offices, since there is an interesting parallel to Hillary Clinton.

We got out after the show and Judie’s knee, which had been bothering her for weeks, was now stiff and very painful. We figured we could just take a taxi home, but discovered that all of London north of the Thames was closed to traffic from Westminster to Blackfriars. So there we were in the Soho/Covent Garden area, completely without traffic for once. It was kind of magical and it would have been fun to experience it. But Judie really couldn’t walk, so we found a pedicab to drive us to where the cars were allowed to go, finally caught a taxi and made it home in plenty of time to ring in the New Year. We went out on the terrace at midnight, but couldn’t see much. But we could certainly hear constant, deafening explosions for the next 10-15 minutes, while we watched the main event on TV. They really do the fireworks celebration well here in London. New York can’t really match it at all, since their ceremony is in Times Square, which is unsuited for a massive fireworks display.

Happy New Year!