The Women’s March: The highlight of last week came on Sunday when we joined countless thousands of people in London for the Women’s March. I was the organizing force behind the turnout from our New Unity congregation, making announcements, figuring out a meeting place (the Animals in War Memorial on the edge of Hyde Park) and getting everyone formed up to march together. Going in, we had a picture of us all marching along with banners and signs and we believed it would be a good opportunity for a little free publicity for us. So we had a new banner made, which you can see in the photos below. We also had reusable signs made, but they never turned up. I thought we had a banner saying “Birthplace of Feminism” (in reference to Mary Wollstonecraft), but we couldn’t find it. Anyway, 25-30 congregation members met up with us at the Memorial and we added some miscellaneous Unitarians who were attracted by our Standing on the Side of Love shirts. So the organizing worked very well as we set off on the two block walk to Grosvenor Square, where the march to Trafalgar Square was scheduled to start.

Unfortunately, we never really got to march. As I understand was the case at venues around the world, the march organizers were apparently overwhelmed by the size of the turnout. Grosvenor Square was shoulder-to-shoulder and no one could go anywhere. After being there about an hour and half, we had made it half way around the square and were nowhere near starting the two-mile march. But we all had fun together, reading all of the signs and talking to the people around us. Judie and our friend, Susan, had both brought these combination cane/seat things for the march, since their knees are killing them. You can see them in the photo below. We all sang songs. “We Shall Overcome” and the UU standby “We Are a Gentle Angry People” (with improvised lyrics like “We Are Nasty Nasty Women” and the like). We weren’t moving but we were spirited. At about 1:30 Judie, Susan and I decided we’d had enough (and we were meeting people in an hour), so we left the march by getting out a side street. Judie and Susan were resting on their devices when we saw the rest of our group walking down the same street with the banner. They ended up walking along with a large number of people who had given up on the main march route, but they never reached Trafalgar. It was just as well, since I heard the next day from someone who had made it there that when he and his wife arrived it was so packed that no one could enter. (The official police capacity of Trafalgar in 20,000 and the CrowdSize app says it is 35,000. But there were lots of people who, like us, gave up along the way or left when they couldn’t get in there. A total of 50,000-100,000 marchers does not seem unreasonable.)

South Africa and Julia Child: On the same day as the march, we had made arrangements to meet our friends, Jane and Paul Jee, at the British Museum and then have them over to our flat for dinner. They wanted to see the special exhibition there about South African art, having gone on a two-week trip to South Africa in early December. It was a nice, relatively small exhibit, which combined ancient art and more recent native art, with recent works by current artists which drew on the history of art there. The exhibit sort of followed South African history, which for the last 400 years was most about how unspeakably awful the Boers, but more importantly the English, treated the local populace (which in the case of the English include the Boers). It is almost impossible to overstate the genocidal viciousness of the English during their long colonial period.

On the way back, Paul directed us to two wonderful pubs for drinks. The first was The Princess Louise, which featured a late Victorian interior of etched glass and dark wood and a number of little glass booths around a central bar. See below. You could imagine seeing it in a castle or a museum, but it was pub. The next one was the Cittie of York, another very old pub that has gone by different names over the centuries. Its interior had a very high ceiling and it felt like Henry VIII might come in after hunting at any moment.

The plans for the march and museum made trying to figure out dinner a bit problematic. (and they had invited us over to eat too often to go out to a restaurant and possibly end up fighting over a check.) So it had to be something that could be mostly made ahead of time. I ended up making the Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is perhaps her classic recipe (which is said to have led to the publication of the book), which I’d made before. This was by far the best one I’d ever made and, as a matter fact, was the best one I’d ever tasted anywhere. It may have been the fact that I used really nice meat or that I used a bottle of good Malbec or that I made it the night before and it got a chance to sit and soak up flavors. I served it with the classic sautéed mushroom and braised onions and sliced, boiled baby potatoes and a really nice Aloxe Corton. Heavenly.

The Moth in London: Earlier in the week, we went to a story slam in Shoreditch, which was a part of the NPR show, “The Moth”. Alex gave it to us as a Christmas present. They have these all over the US and they now have them in London once a month in Rich Mix, an arts center on Bethnal Green Road, less than ten minutes from our flat. Each event has a theme. The one this time was “Voyage”. When you arrive, you can put your name in a hat to be called to tell a story that can be no longer than six minutes. There are audience judges who rate each storyteller. Judie and both put our names in. I suspect that in an event like this in New York, there would have been 30 or more names, but the actual stories limited to 10 people. So I doubted that we would get picked. But I did! (We found out later that there were only fifteen volunteers.) I got up and told a story about water communions and the time that Hannah fell into the Nile trying to get some Nile River water to bring home. She was six years old and when she fell in she completely disappeared from view–much to my shock. As adrenaline rushes were coursing through my veins and I was about to race the three or four steps to the water’s edge to dive in, the boatman who had given us a tour of the lake was walking by and casually reached into the water and pulled Hannah out, depositing her, sputtering, sobbing and soaked on the shore, still clutching her film canister of water. It was a good story with a nice arc and a beginning that linked up with the end. (The majority of the other story tellers really did something closer to a stand-up routine about travel, rather than a real story.) I thought my story was pretty good, but I wasn’t close to winning. The judges who were all under 30 (like 95%+ of the crowd) seemed to vote for the ones they thought were funniest, rather than whether they were a coherent stories on the topic. But I’m not really complaining. It was fun. At the end, they had Judie and the other four folks who weren’t picked, get up and tell the first line of their story. Judie’s would have been about the importance of toilet paper when she was a student in Senegal. It was an entertaining evening and I’m glad we discovered the arts center. We’ll try to return.

The P.M. is desperate to such up to Donald: British governments, especially the Conservative ones, all go on and on about the UK’s “special relationship” with the US and its president. I’m not sure that US Presidents ever had the same reciprocal warm and fuzzy feeling. As Teresa May has declared in favor of a “Hard Brexit” that will separate Britain from Europe, she needs to find a way to show that this policy is not simply screwing the UK economy by cutting off free access to its largest market. Thus, she hopes that Trump will be her lifeline and that they can develop some sort of trading partnership as soon as possible (which may legally not be for more than two years). Trump said nice things about Britain in a newspaper interview conducted by a creepily sycophantic Michael Gove (Cameron’s former Legal Minister and Brexiteer, who destroyed his career–at least for now–when he double crossed Boris Johnson after Cameron quit). Of course, it is extremely doubtful that Trump knew what he was saying or meant anything by it, but hopes a running high at No 10 Downing Street. May is racing over to visit the Donald shortly.

Health Updates: I don’t ever want this blog to evolve into a health commentary, but having mentioned stuff in the past, it seems fair to give an occasional update. Judie’s knee is not getting any better and she is going in for an MRI shortly. The blot clot in my leg (DVT) is basically resolved and I’ll be off blood thinners in a month or so.

Visa Problems: When we got our new visas last summer after Judie changed firms and our old visas automatically expired, they were good for six months. So they expire on the 9th of February. We had raised this with the K&L Gates immigration lawyer months ago and she advised us that there was no need to get an extension. Now she has changed her mind and we both need to get extensions. The problem is that (a) it will now be much more expensive since we are doing it at the last minute and (b) we have to apply from the US and have our fingerprints retaken there. It is idiotic, but there is not much we can do. Judie was already scheduled to go the D.C. in about a week, so it may be possible for her to get her visa at the same time. In theory, I could go along, but the solicitor hasn’t confirmed that either of us could actually get a visa at the end of January. It is all sort of up in the air. I doubt we will be deported or anything, but it is a bit of a mess.

Something We’ll Miss About London: Free museums and reasonably priced theatre tickets. I was looking at Broadway ticket prices the other day and was horrified.

Something We Won’t Miss About London: How dark it is in the winter time. Between the seemingly perpetual overcast and the shorter days this far North, it is just depressing.