nickinshoreditch

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.)

         

James and I went to see the new Calder exhibit at Tate Modern. The theme was performing sculpture. It started with his wire sculptures, which are works of pure genius. The wire portrait of Leger was worth the visit by itself. Then, according to the show notes, Calder visited Piet Mondrian in his studio and his entire world changed. He pretty much gave up most of his representational art in favor of abstract. There were a lot of motorized works from the 1930s, many of which had never been shown together since they were made. And then the mobiles, some of them with gongs worked into them, so they would randomly make sounds. It was all magical, in a way that few artists other than Calder can be. My only objection is that there were not enough breezes wafting through the exhibits and the mobiles were too static.

Judie and James and I were wandering around Mayfair, looking for a place to eat. We were walking up Regent Street, checking out the incredibly gaudy Christmas decoration, when we decided to cut down a little side street called Heddon Street. One of my discoveries in walking around central London is that there are lots of little side streets and alleys that are sometimes lined with restaurants and pubs. This was a tiny, L-shaped street with six or seven restaurants. We decided to try Heddon Street Kitchen, which advertised itself to be a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. We were eating our dinner in the lounge area (the dining room was full), when James said he thought he saw Gordon Ramsay. We scoffed, figuring why would he come to this little place out of all of the big and famous places he operates in London. But on the way out, we looked closer and it was him, sitting at a table of people including several who looked a lot like him. I read in the paper the next day that he was visiting his family from the US.

A few days later, James and I are on the Underground and I grabbed a seat next to this older, well-dressed guy and began to read my Evening Standard, the free paper that they give away all over the place. All of a sudden this guy across the way begins talking to the gent next to me. He had a ridiculous Cockney accent, so I couldn’t understand him at first, but I eventually figured out that the guy next to me was some sort of manager of the West Ham footie team. (I checked later and it was Sam Allardyce, who was the manager of West Ham, but is now the manager of Sunderland.) After an extended, semi-understandable conversation between the two, I ended up taking a cell phone photo for the fan guy.

After that, we got off the Piccadilly line in Leicester Square to go the Soho Theatre where we going to see an Australian comedian (who turned out to be pretty funny). We could barely get into the Square and it turned out that we had stumbled into the Star Wars premier. It was a madhouse, although we almost got to where the red carpet was somehow. (The security wasn’t great at that point.) We didn’t see Harrison Ford or any of the stars (although they were there later and the pictures were on the front page of the papers). After the comedy show, we went to dinner at this restaurant in Chinatown that we like and were walking back to the tube and found ourselves completely surrounded by people carrying light sabers. They accompanied us all the way back to Liverpool Street. See below. We were safe in case Sith warriors attacked.

I went a private doctor last Thursday to get my bandage changed and learned the needles that are used to give jabs (shots) are called “sharps”. Thus, after giving a flu jab, the doctor is instructed not to throw the sharp in with the regular trash.

One of the things that Judie and I have noticed is that you never smell marijuana when you are walking around, which is very much unlike New York or other US cities. This is certainly a place with a drinking culture, but we both find it surprising, especially in a young, hip place like Shoreditch. Do the police crack down very hard on that sort of thing here? On the other hand, you do see people rolling their own cigarettes a lot in this neighborhood (more than in other parts of London). Maybe there is something in there in addition to tobacco?

Another thing you don’t see here are ads for Viagra and similar products, in contrast to the US, where you can’t watch sports on television for twenty minutes without being subjected to one. My British friends might contend that this says something about English men versus American ones, but I suspect it is probably more about the drugs being covered by National Health.

James arrived yesterday, after an endless, three-flight trip from Greensboro. The rest of the kids arrive during the week. Judie and I have been planning for this for months and are looking forward to the next few weeks.

I decided to some research about the building we are in. According to the Internet it was built around 1900 as a telephone exchange. It seems like a huge building for that, but I suppose that this was in the period when a human being would have to make the connection and this place was filled with operators. But that use could not have extended through the Twentieth Century, since I am sure that automatic switching took over by the 1930s at the latest. Fro the rest of the century, this must have been a nice structure in a fairly terrible neighborhood. Wikipedia refers to the building as an Art Deco tobacco works, so maybe that was its later use. The building led the gentrification of the area when it was converted into a residential building in 2000. (That would have been a great investment.)

Commercial Street (where we are) is a relatively new street for London. It was built in the 1830s to connect the east-west thoroughfare through Whitechapel to Spitalfields Market to the North. It was eventually extended up to the Shoreditch High Street. and when it was further connected to Old Street, it became a route to get around central London (which was actually the goal of the planners in the 1800s). It is now at the edge of the Congestion Zone. (In London, you have to pay a significant daily fee to drive in the center of the City.) This explains why there is a perpetual traffic jam outside our building until late at night.

Here’s an embarrassing way to join a museum: I decided to take James to see the last day of the Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Royal Academy. But when we got there, the ticket taker pointed out that the tickets were for 5:00 AM (they had kept the museum open 24 hours for the exhibit’s last day and I’d read the website wrong.) But they agreed to credit us with the unusable tickets and let us in if we became members on the spot. Oh well. I like joining museums as a matter of principal and now our visitors can attend future exhibits….

If you are subscriber to the website of Robert Parker, the noted wine critic, you know about his Hedonist’s Gazette. It is a periodic column in which he talks about meals and wine tasting in great restaurants around the world. It is somewhat fun to read, even if it reviews restaurants that you will never be able to go to and describes wines that you will never afford. On Friday, I had a hedonistic day and what follows is my gazette. It was the 15th Annual Gentlemen’s Christmas. I was invited to join it by Paul Gee, the husband of a lawyer who Judie just hired at Bryan Cave and who came to our flat for Thanksgiving. One of the usual eight mates who normally participate had dropped out so there was an opening. One of the rules is that everyone has to wear a suit and tie.

The whole thing began at Hawksmoor Guildhall, one London’s finest steak houses. (This branch is located in the City  and there is another across from our flat in Shoreditch). In retrospect, I probably should have had the steak and eggs, but I thought I should pace myself, so I just got Eggs Royal (Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon instead of the bacon). I met John and two of his friends from Pleshy, the country town about an hour from London where they all live. The four of us split a bottle of English sparkling wine and each had a bloody mary. We were supposed to meet four other at the Seven Stars pub, so after finishing breakfast, we wandered across the City, stopping to check a roof view from next to St. Paul’s and making another stop for more coffee.

The Seven Stars pub is right behind the Royal Courts of Justice and is a hangout for lawyers after leaving the Old Bailey. The owner is the marvelously-named Roxy Beaujolais. We got there around 11:00 to discover that the other four had yet to arrive and, worse, that the Seven Stars was closed for a private party until noon. (Who would schedule a one-hour pub party before noon, one might wonder.) So after making some phone calls, Paul led us off to the Cheshire Cheese, an ancient London pub, dating back to the Great Fire. It was closed (and he received considerable grief for all of this), so we ended up at a ancient Portuguese wine bar called El Vino, on Fleet Street, where we had two bottles of sherry and the rest of the crew gradually found us. Then we went back to the Seven Stars, since that was a traditional part of this pub crawl, and had a pint of bitter.

From there, we walked over to the Quality Chop House (according to my iPhone, I walked over 19,000 steps that day). This is a restaurant that I actually first read about in a Parker Hedonist Gazette, so I was looking forward to it. We were led to a private room where we started with a magnum of Pol Roger champagne and proceeded to eat an incredible game menu over the next three or four hours. The Brits like to eat birds that most Americans would never touch. We began with a game tea, a very rich game broth, which we had with the rest of the champagne. That was followed by a pigeon leg that had been deboned, made into a pate, put back on the leg bone, fried and served with cranberry. This was accompanied by a game terrine with brioche and a jam made of damson fruit. By this point we were switching over to a Fleurie. We then had a course of teal breast (a kind of duck) with beetroot and horseradish. Then it was on to woodcock (a smallish ground bird), with a chicken liver pate and a fruit called greengage. Somewhere around here we switched over to a Dao wine that was fuller bodied than the Fleurie. By now, we reached the main course, pheasant and wigeon (another sort of duck). These were accompanied by amazing sides, including an incredible roast cauliflower with black truffle. Then it was on to truffled Tunworth (a kind of cheese) and then a meringue-based dessert. Somewhere in here, one of the gents pulled out a liqueur called Kummel, which is made from caraway seeds, much to the groans of much of the rest of the group (it seemed to be a running gag). I tried it and it was very sweet and had an interesting flavor, but I have to say it was hard to drink too much of it. We concluded with armagnac and other digestifs.

Some of us then staggered over to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society, where one of the guys was a member. It has a huge number of single cask whiskeys which you can try. We each had two or three. This was the real killer for me, pushing me over the edge from pleasantly wasted to completely drunk. But it was fun trying the different flavors. I really needed to take a taxi home at this point, but it was rush hour so it was impossible. Fortunately, I was next to the Farringdon tube stop, so I somehow managed to get home.

A few things I learned: (1) You don’t toast the Queen until dessert. (2) One of the gents was going out shooting the next day and told me that it is shooting etiquette that you cannot shoot the pigeons that the beaters scare up into the air until you have shot a larger bird. (3) They are completely mystified by the US approach to guns, although I explained to them that the Second Amendment is all their fault, as it resulted from the British taking the guns away from colonial militias. (4) The Donald would probably be happy to know that he was a conversation subject. Horror mixed with bemusement seemed to be the prevailing attitude. (5) The British (or at least some portion of British society) really do like to eat various odd small birds and animals.

I slept very well that night.