Untimely death was a bit of a theme this week:

I learned during the week that my friend Ed Billy had died. He was a guy I knew from Montclair. Our sons James and Thomas were buddies and we were both UUs. He was a jazz lover and I always looked forward to running into him. Always a smile and a friendly word. When I was the UU Montclair President, he had volunteered to look after the building and we worked together frequently. But one of my strongest memories of Ed was when we were called to the Montclair Police Station, where our sons were being held for trespassing in a parking garage owned by a car dealership. The police were pretty relaxed about it, perhaps in part because I was on the Town Council at the time and knew a lot of them. Ed was simultaneously bemused and annoyed at the kids and forever after referred to them as “the knuckleheads” whenever we met. Ed was one of those people who, while he was not in my inner circle of friends, was an important part of my life for many years and I will feel the hole created by his loss for years to come.

The deaths of Alan Rickman and David Bowie, both coincidentally dying in the same week at the age of 69 from cancers that neither had publicized, probably struck people harder here in London that it did in the U.S. Both were products of London and Londoners and Brits identified with them in a deeper way than most Americans. Bowie in particular seemed to have place deep in the hearts of working class Brits of a certain age.

David Bowie was a larger than life sort of figure, a visionary artist who was one of the first to merge performance art and rock and roll. He was much more than a rocker or a pop star and I always thought that there was a deep intelligence and creativity underlying his many personas. He was introduced to me in the early 1970s by Bill Cifrino, who returned to college in the fall of whatever year it was having become a big fan. (I think this was in the Ziggy Stardust period.) Bowie never fascinated me the way that he did some, but you always were curious about what he was going to do next.

The death of Alan Rickman was a sadder occurrence for me. I think this is partly because of the special feeling of “discovery” Judie and I had seeing him playing the Vicompte de Valmont in “Liaisons Dangereuses” on Broadway in 1987. He was just slimy, repulsive, sexy and brilliant in a performance that combined not just his voice but how he moved his body. You couldn’t take your eyes off him and kept thinking as the play went on “My God, who is this guy?” Within a year or so, he played Hans Gruber in “Die Hard” and the rest of the world had the same feeling. He was not just a great actor, but, according to the many articles about him appearing the media here, was just a very nice person, a fact that was confirmed on Sunday when someone at the New Unity congregation lit a candle for him and reminisced about how well he had treated her when she was a young nobody working at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre.

This past weekend, my sister Norah and her husband Hugo made a ridiculously quick visit to London. Hugo had to come over to hopefully finish wrapping up his brother’s estate. Robert was a Jesuit minister who died about a year ago while teaching at Roehampton University. Because this was the first anniversary of his death, his parents wanted to come to visit his grave, etc. (The ended up having to fly standby from Uganda, so Hugo spent the first day when he was here checking on which airport they were in and whether they were going to get on a plane.) Since Hugo and his parents was going to be here, Norah decided to come along, even though she needed to get back to work after the holidays. It was wonderful to have them here. Hugo’s parents came to our flat for a visit. Their visit was a bit of a production, since they were staying somewhere southwest of London and Hugo’s mother doesn’t get around well . But they got a ride, we ordered Indian food from Cinnamon on Brick Lane and really had a nice visit. Some pictures of Norah, Hugo and Hugo’s father follow:

  

As I noted, Hugo had a hard time getting his parents to London from Uganda. British Airways used to have a direct flight, but they recently abandoned it when Turkish Airways undercut them in price. So now, to get to Uganda, you apparently have to fly via Istanbul or Dubai. It is all a part of the general difficulty of flying in Africa. You can’t fly directly within the continent in most cases and, instead, usually have to go to somewhere in Europe (generally based on colonial history) and then fly back. So to get from Nairobi to Dakar, for example, one would have to fly all the way to Paris (Probably on a British airline) and then fly to Senegal (on a French airline). This lack of the basic travel infrastructure that we take for granted has got to be a severe drag on African economies.

A Day of Theater: On Saturday, we went to both a matinee and an evening show, something we used to do fairly when we were younger. For the matinee, I saw that “Mr. Foote’s Other Leg” was on half-price and recommended it (and then decided to see it agin myself). It really is a wonderful play and a great production. As an added bonus, it had moved from Hampstead Theatre to Haymarket Theatre in the West End, which was the theatre that the real Foote performed in. (I won’t repeat what I wrote about the play back when we saw it in September. You can always go back and read it if you  are curious.) I hope it makes it to NYC. I could definitely picture it at BAM.

In the evening, we went to see “Guys and Dolls”. That musical is a Lewis family favorite, but Hugo had never seen it (not even the Sinatra and Brando movie version). It is such a great show, with a series of memorable songs and a wonderful, funny book, that it is impossible not to have fun watching it. The guy who played Sky Masterson was very good, as was the Nicely-Nicely actor (although I’m not positive that I approve of changing “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” into a big production number). The actor playing Sister Sara Brown was good, although her voice needed to be bigger for at least one of her songs. I was not crazy about the way Adelaide was played. The actor never got Adelaide’s accent right (which is an important part of the humor) and hammed it up too much. She didn’t spoil the part, because it is so inherently funny that you can’t, but she could have been so much better. (In general, the British actors had trouble capturing the Runyanese of the book.) All in all, it was a competent, high-energy production, with some really good performances and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

New Painting: Im not entirely sure I’m finished with this one, but I’ve been fiddling with it and I’m getting sick of it and I’m not sure that I can actually improve on it, so I’m calling it done, at least for now. If you have been to our place in the Catskills, you will hopefully recognize is as a painting of the pond (a.k.a. Lake Jim). I’m thinking that I need to do something in a different style next. Anyway, here it is:

Christmas: Christmas day is utterly dead in London. The stores are all closed. I imagine that I could have found milk or bread somewhere if I’d had to do so, but I’m glad that I didn’t. In retrospect, it occurs to me that I should have gone over to Brick Lane to see if they stay open. There must be some equivalent tot he Chinese restaurants that feed the Jews in New York on Christmas day. The big difference is that there is no mass transit. Not a switch to a special holiday schedule, it is a complete shut down. That left us with no way to go anywhere, even if there was some place to go. Since this country is not especially Christian, I have to assume that this is all a reflection of tradition and maybe the power of the Unions to insist on a holiday for the workers.

Since we had nowhere to go, we slept in and had a quiet Christmas with the kids. Small presents under our little tree (see photo below). Each of the kids was incredibly thoughtful in picking the gifts they gave. Perhaps the limitations of size, weight and number force you to think a little harder about what to get. We had a nice dinner, featuring free-range prime rib, roasted purple brussels sprouts, glazed small parsnips and popovers that failed to pop. (See photo below.) We watched television, played board games, drank some wine and generally had a very nice family day.

     

The Royal Opera: One night, we went with Alex and Lucy to the Royal Opera in Covent Gardens. We saw Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”, an opera which I was not familiar with. The theater was beautiful and I thought the singers were good (especially the tenor), although I’m not sophisticated enough to really judge. The plot is ridiculous, even for an opera, and, at least in this production, there was a certain number of ballet sequences mixed in. This meant that a number of the scenes had separate dancers and singers, sometimes on stage at the same time, which was a bit confusing at first. The Opera House itself seems to be set up with countless ways to take your money, with any number of special rooms where you can eat and drink during the intervals (and pre-order so it is there waiting for you). Maybe the coolest part was that when we got out, it was raining and everyone was scurrying around looking for taxis and hiding under umbrellas. I felt like running over to shelter under the Covent Garden colonnade and see if a flower girl would approach us. (“Look at her a prisoner of the gutter…”) Instead we walked over to a pub across the street, which was surprisingly empty (wrong type of crowd?), had some ales and caught a cab back to the flat when the crowds had thinned out.

James’ Birthday: On the 29th, James turned 23. He had been dying to see the new “Star Wars” movie, so we all went out to a big shopping mall in St. Johns’ Wood where there was big multiplex and saw it. (There really are no movie theaters near us. Other than the Barbican, which doesn’t show first-run movies, the closest is probably in Leicester Square.) We had a great time. It was designed for long-time fans like us, with the return of favorite characters and scenes, great effects and a good amount of humor. I guess you could complain that it was a bit predictable and I’m certain that you could find lots of holes in the plot, if you wanted to go through the process, but I found something joyful about it. James had been waiting to read all the web sites and chat rooms about the movie and spent a few hours being geeky and telling various tidbits that he had learned. Later in the day, we went to the Dennis Severs house, which is a block away from our flat. It is one of those little gems that people recommended to us. Designed by artist Dennis Severs over his lifetime, it attempts to recreate the lives of a Huguenot weaver and his family over a period from the late 1700s to about 1900, by presenting a series of rooms, each carefully composed to look like the residents had just left. We had been there with Ivy and Debbie and their kids and wanted to see the Christmas version. It isn’t one of those things that blows you away, but it is a fascinating work of art. After that, it was on to Koba, a good (and kind of expensive) Korean restaurant in Fitzrovia, as Korean food on birthdays is a bit of a family tradition. It was supposed to be one of the top Korean places in London, but the restaurants in Little Korea in Manhattan or the ones in Bergen County, New Jersey are better.

Shopping challenge: Judie had the brilliant idea of giving everyone ￡20 for Christmas, with the requirement that everyone go out one day and buy themselves a gift and we would then try to guess who bought what and say whether we would want to take it if this were a “Yankee Swap”. The phot below is the result.

High Tea and other Gourmet treats: As a Holiday gift, Ivy and Debbie treated us to a High Tea in the City. We scheduled it for the afternoon that Alex and Lucy returned from Scotland. They were late, but they finally made it. The tea was fun, with lots of sandwiches and sweets to go along with the tea. That night, we had a fabulous meal at Super Tuscan, which, along with the Rivington Grill, are our current favorite spots to eat. We have been to Super Tuscan enough that the owner came out and chatted with us. He convinced us to get a special dish made with shaved white truffles for Alex, which was delicious, and talked about his favorite restaurants in Paris. High Tea photo follows.

There are certainly more memories generated over the holidays, but I think it is time for me to move on with the present. Maybe I’ll have finished a painting by my next post!

I’ll try to get back to finishing up my Holiday Stories soon. I’ve been doing a little painting, although I had to go out and buy new brushes and paint, since everything but the canvases mysteriously disappeared sometime after my painting table in the kitchen was appropriated for a jigsaw puzzle. My sister Norah and her husband Hugo will be arriving on Friday morning, so I’m unlikely to finish anything this week.

Last night (Wednesday), we went back to the Hampstead Theater, this time to see “Hapgood”, a revival of a Tom Stoppard play from around 1988. It was a spy thriller sort of play, loosely in the Le Carré style, with double and triple agents and all kinds of “spycraft”, centered around a complicated plot aimed at finding the mole in the Secret Service. But, since it is a Stoppard play, it wasn’t just about spying. It was also about quantum physics and science. The way that the science was woven into the plot was incredibly clever. When the physicist/agent is questioned about whether he is a good guy or a traitor, he discusses the duality of science and how you can never tell where an electron is (or where it is going) or whether light is a particle or a wave and that the square root of 16 has two answers, 4 and -4. The problem with the interrogator’s question is a version the Heisenberg principle, that observing a phenomena changes it. The act of interrogation shapes the result. It was all reminiscent of “Arcadia” and could not have been written by anyone else. One of the interesting twists was that the central character, who was running the English spy rings, was a woman, played by Lisa Dillon, who has different sorts of attachments to her various male counterparts. The cast was typically great, with a number of actors who we know we’d seen on some BBC show or other, and the pace and staging were very good. Although the play was first produced a year or more before the collapse of the Soviet Union, its ending was prescient. Hapgood, her ring of spies all blown, decides to give it up and tells her colleague that the game is over and that the KGB and the Secret Service are just keeping each other in business. This wasn’t the greatest of plays, but it was immensely enjoyable and, like all Stoppard work, it made you think. As an added bonus, Jeremy Irons was in the audience. He still looks pretty good.

Brief Political Update: When I was a political science major, one of the things I learned is that the Parliamentary system differs from the American, not just because the executive and legislative branches are combined, but because party unity is central to its operation and that if the majority party cannot remain unified, an election is called. Not any more.

On the Labour side, Corbyn has always been in a weird spot. He has solid support of the rank and file party membership, but the actual Labour MPs often disagree with his positions (and I suspect a good number do not respect him at all). As a back bencher, Corbyn had been a rebel himself, so when he took power, faced with a divided group of MPs on his side, he decided to go with the “big tent” approach. But since the media have decided to portray him as impossibly over his head, this only made him seem weak, especially when he was undercut by Hilary Benn, his own Shadow Foreign Secretary, in the debate on whether to bomb Syria. So when a reshuffle of the shadow cabinet was announced, it was expected that it would be a “revenge reshuffle”, where Corbyn would get rid of those who have disagreed with him on major issues like Syria and the Trident defense system. But when push came to shove, Corbyn only sacked a few minor guys and left the high-profile squeaky wheels like Benn in place. One has to assume that he made an internal political calculation and decided that there would be a huge revolt if he did what it appeared he wanted to do. So, in the end, given the opportunity to look strong and make a major statement, he just ended up looking wimpy, perpetuating the rumors of his eventual demise as leader.

This whole mess took the spotlight off Cameron’s own troubles. His big problem (and the danger facing the UK generally) is the movement to take Britain out of the European Union. The Conservatives have a substantial number of Eurosceptics, who are often outspoken proponents of that withdrawal. (The far right and far left are actually joined on this, although for completely different reasons.) Cameron had to promise a referendum on the issue in the last election and now that the vote seems to be approaching, he is under pressure. He had previously taken the position that the party would take a position on the issue and that he would expect the others to toe the line, but on Tuesday, in the first Question Time after the holidays, he folded. He announced that Conservative members would be free to take whatever position that they wanted and to campaign for either side of the referendum. He supported this with utter blather that it is really “the people’s decision”. This is really the major issue that faces the UK and is one that will have an enormous impact on the future of the country. A “Brexit” is almost certain to have dire economic consequences, at least in the short-term and probably the long-term as well. It could well lead to the exit of Scotland from the UK, with the possibility of Wales following the Scots out the door. EU opponents may now begin campaigning in earnest, helped by the rampant xenophobia resulting from the whole refugee crisis. In the meantime, the EU supporters don’t know what they are campaigning for, since Cameron is going through this charade of negotiating a new and better deal for the UK with the EU. The whole thing is a mess and Cameron just made it worse. But it didn’t get the notice it deserves because Corbyn’s blundering stole much of the spotlight.

On Boxing Day, we all took the train to Paris, where we spent two and half days mainly eating drinking and walking around. We stayed in an OK hotel next to the Gare de Lyons. I’m still amazed and kind of entranced by the fact that I can hop on a train and in the amount of time it takes to get from New York to New Haven, I can be in Paris.

Eating: We had a few great meals in Paris, which, of course, isn’t hard and is one of the great reasons to go there. The first night we went to Monsieur Bleu, a newish, sleek and elegant restaurant across the river from the Eiffel Tower. (Unfortunately, our main memory of that evening will probably be the misguided decision to walk to the restaurant from the hotel, not realizing just how far that was.) It was a wonderful experience and Hannah’s foie gras slider appetizer was probably the most memorable dish. The next night, we went to Bofinger. It had been recommended to us by the owner of our favorite Italian restaurant in London, Super Tuscan, where we’d had a great meal with the kids earlier in the week. Bofinger is a classic old brasserie near the Bastille. In addition to the classics (like incredible onion soup), they specialize in Alsatian dishes based on sauerkraut (see photo below). To make it even better, it had a relatively reasonably priced wine list, which allowed me to order an Aloxe Corton burgundy. (Alex is named after that wine. We actually considered naming him Aloxe, but cooler heads prevailed.)

  

We also had nice food while walking around. We had delicious savory crepes on the Ile Saint Louis and stunningly good bruschetta during our long stroll to Monsieur Bleu. We stopped at Brasserie called George V for lunch on our final day. And we also had coffee and croissants, etc. It was a good thing we didn’t stay there longer. I might have exploded.

Museums: Alex and Lucy decided that they really wanted to go to the Musee d’Orsay and Hannah and James decided to go too. It is a spectacular place and they had a special exhibit, so it was hard to argue with them. But Judie and I had been to that museum on my birthday trip a month earlier, so I left them there and walked over to the Jeu de Paume. (Judie had some work she needed to get done, so she stayed in the hotel.) I saw a retrospective of the photography of Philip Halsman. He had an amazing career. He took countless iconic portraits of various celebrities and for the covers of magazines like Life. He worked over decades with Salvador Dali on some very weird photos, most of which had Dali in them. He was assigned to shoot some starlets around 1950 and decided that one of them, named Marilyn Monroe, was going to be the one. That began a long relationship in which he took countless pictures of her, doing everything from posing to jumping to lifting weights. But my favorite series was one in which he asked his subjects to jump in the air while he shot them. He believed that one would be thinking about jumping, thereby lowering one’s guard and exposing one’s true self. He published a whole book of these. All kinds of people did it. Nixon, Marilyn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ray Bolger and Martin and Lewis. Some examples of his stuff are below.

      

  

Sightseeing, etc.: Paris is so impossibly beautiful that the best thing to do is just walk around the neighborhoods. I imagine that Paris can be as ugly as any city when you get out of the old center. But there has clearly been a real effort in urban planning to maintain the look and feel of the city. This actually goes back to the 1850s and 60s, when Haussmann redesigned the city, knocking down the old medieval buildings to create the boulevards and squares and fountains that we associate with Paris today. It helped that Paris was largely untouched during World War II, unlike most of the rest of Europe. So we marched up the Champs Elysees, checked out Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite and took pictures by the Arc de Triomphe. (Napoleon almost built it where the Bastille had been. An obelisk is in the Bastille square instead.) We tried togo the Eiffel Tower on our last day. But the lines were just horrendous and when we determined that it would take more than two hours to reach the top, we gave up. The Metro was a bit confusing, especially the big stations where multiple lines met. But we gradually figured it out and, after the first night fiasco of a trek to Monsieur Bleu, we were glad to be able to speed from one part of the city to the other. I am also convinced that you get to know more about a city by taking its mass transit witht real people who live there. Some family photos follow:

  

 

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.

    

Here’s hoping that everyone has had (and will continue to have) a wonderful holiday season. It has been simultaneously joyful and a bit exhausting over here across the pond with the kids here.

I haven’t had time to do any art at all. I actually have been having urges to do something, especially after going to museums and touring around Paris, but there just isn’t time (and my painting table was appropriated to do a jigsaw puzzle that Judie got for Christmas).

And I’ve fallen behind on storytelling as well. In the next week, I’ll catch up with what we’ve been doing (although it sometimes seems like all we have been doing is eating and drinking and walking around).

We are in the midst of having the whole family here, so I’ve had less time to write on this blog or to paint. I feel a sort of responsibility to keep everyone entertained, although the kids are sometimes perfectly happy just hanging out in our flat, talking and watching television. James has been here for well over a week at this point and I suspected that he is starting to get sick of spending time with me, so I sent him off with Hannah today to do some sightseeing on their own. Meanwhile Alex and Lucy have taken off to Scotland to visit her ancestral home in some industrial town between Glasgow and Edinburgh whose name slips my mind. Spending the winter equinox in Scotland where it is perpetually raining, windy and dark this time of year wouldn’t be my choice, but I imagine that they are having a good time. It has been gratifying that the kids approve of Shoreditch as a cool neighborhood in which to live. Hannah was in one of the countless vintage clothing stores within blocks of our flat and said that I could just leave her there to die and James loves all of the street food opportunities.

On Saturday night, we took everyone to see Kenneth Branagh’s production of “Harlequinade”. For the this year, Branagh has his own theatre company at the Garrick Theatre on Charring Cross Road, where he is putting on a series of plays in repertory. We missed getting tickets to “The Winter’s Tale” with Dame Judi Dench joining Branagh and others (they sold out in a flash), so we opted to see Sir Ken and Zoe Wanamaker in Terrance Ratigan’s “Harlequinade” and “On Her Own”. Zoe Wanamaker performed “On Her Own”, a fifteen minute monologue about a widow living on her own and having a conversation with her dead husband. It was very well done and maintained a certain dramatic tension as you wondered where it was going to go. It is the kind of thing that you don’t see in theater that often. “Harlequinade” is a farce, written around 1948, about a theater troupe touring the English hinterlands, bringing culture to masses as part of a post-war program that actually existed. (The play starts with a newsreel about the program fro the period.) Branagh plays the head of the company who is playing Romeo, although he and his wife are too old for the parts and sort of realize it. He is fatuous, egotistical and dotty and, as one of the other characters describes him, utterly incapable of doing anything other than acting. He is terrific and hysterical. The program notes say that Ratigan based the character on John Gielgud, who directed Ratigan in a student production of “Romeo and Juliet” while they were both at Cambridge, and on Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who appeared in a number of his plays. There is a character in “Harlequinade” who is given one line in Romeo and Juliet by the Branagh character and is a running gag as he repeatedly rehearses and mangles it. It is the same part that Ratigan played when directed by Gielgud, and he is reported to have said his one line so badly that it always got a laugh. It is all a cute piece of fluff (which couldn’t quite figure out how to end) that was acted very well. It was written at the peak of Ratigan’s popularity. In less than ten years, his style of writing had been eclipsed by the likes of John Osborne and the post-war realists. (Branagh is going to be in Osborne’s “The Entertainer” in the spring, playing the role made famous by Lawrence Olivier.)