nickinshoreditch

Our trip to France was filled with all sorts of interesting events and places where we learned a great deal about what happened a hundred years ago. Before I go through them, though, I have say that our overall feeling was one of sadness, mixed with a certain bewilderment at the totality of what we were seeing and hearing. The war itself was unspeakably awful. The trench warfare, the endless bombing, the sides separated by less than 100 yards at many points, forested areas reduced to stubby and muddy rubble, the ever-present danger of poison gas attacks, and countless men dying in miserable conditions. And what for? So the Kaiser could have an empire to match the English and French? Because the British seemed incapable of going more that 20 years without getting  into a war? Just because these nations and monarchs had been fighting in Europe for untold centuries and just did it out of habit? Just a mind boggling waste of human life.

Nobody was there: One of the eerie thing about touring around this area was how empty it was. There were very rarely other people at any of the battle sites or monuments, except for an occasional American at a cemetery. And much of the area is farm land, so, other than a random guy on a tractor there was no sign of life between the towns. But what was really weird was that the towns themselves were empty as we drove through them and most of the houses were shuttered. Maybe they all go to work in the bigger towns like Verdun? But we also didn’t see any kids. It gave it all a surreal quality.

Trenches, bomb craters and other remains of war: Early on the first day of touring (as opposed to traveling), we stopped along the side of a road through the wood that had once been a Roman road. When I stepped a few feet off the road into the woods, I immediately saw a large hole and then about ten or twenty feet to my right was another hole. And crisscrossing area were linear cuts into the earth. These were old trenches that had been built along the road and artillery craters caused when the trench system along the road had been systematically bombed. The craters and trenches had been filled in over the years by leaves and stuff, but they were still clearly visible. The incredible thing was that they were just everywhere you looked that wasn’t being farmed for miles and miles. The landscape was still seriously scarred, even after over a century. But these weren’t the biggest scars. Those were enormous craters, often twenty or more feet deep even today and up to hundred feet or more in diameter, caused by mines. Both sides had engineers who would dig underground tunnels out to a certain point, fill the end with explosives, backfill and then set it off. This mining could be offensive, since it would destroy whatever was above it, but it was also defensive, as it would create a deep crater that would stop tanks and that no soldier in his right mind would venture into. These were everywhere too. The first place we saw a lot of them was at a bluff overlooking the Saint Mihiel Salient, a hell hole similar to the one I describe below. This is where Great Uncle Arthur’s regiment had left for the Battle of Saint Mihiel. We also saw the remains of concrete bunkers and fortified gun emplacements.

      

Butte de Vauquois: This was an incredibly powerful example of the lunacy of the War. Vauquois had been a little town up on a woodsy hill, overlooking the valley leading to Verdun. The French and Germans fought over it for four years. The town was completely destroyed, all the vegetation was blown to bits and the two sides were dug in on opposite sides of the top of the butte, separated by around 30-40 yards. In between them were a series of extremely deep, undoubtedly muddy craters caused by huge mine explosions, which must have made any direct assault all but impossible. But, just in case, there was barbed wire and those iron spike things, which are sill rusting away there. The trenches and craters are also still there, as are the communication trenches snaking down the hill and many smaller craters caused by artillery attacks. You can stand there now, surrounded by grass and trees and flowers and can admire the view down the valley and the small monument. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to realize that you are standing in a place that was once hell on earth.

   

Machine guns and other weaponry: I think I had always imagined World War I as soldiers in trenches firing at each other across a no-man’s land in a sort of fighting that was essentially close quartered. It turns out that, while that was true, weapon technology had changed the style of war in the Twentieth Century. Large artillery could fire accurately over ten miles and the smaller artillery had ranges of many miles. What was even more surprising to me was the range of the fixed machine guns, which was well over a mile. If you were charging across a field, you wouldn’t even hear the shots before the bullets reached you. The machine games were positioned and aimed so that they would fire obliquely against an advancing line, trying to hit down the line, rather than spraying fire by moving the gun. As a result, when troops were advancing across open terrain, they would avoid staying in a line and would be separated by as much ass 30 yards, so that incoming artillery could not take out groups of men. You had to imagine those poor soldiers going through an open field, probably slogging through mud and over barbed wire, sometimes up and down steep hills and getting mowed down by machine guns and artillery so far off that they couldn’t possibly see them. And the soldiers they were trying to actually engage might be ahead in the tree line, in trenches or other reinforced places, firing at them as well, and possible also out of sight.

Uncle Arthur: I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical about going on a trip that was focused on Nancy’s Great Uncle’s death. It seemed like we would be spending too much time on a trivial moment in a larger story. But it turned out that the focus personalized the tour in a way and gave it a larger meaning. Rather than simply going from monument to cemetery to the next battle site or line of trenches (which we did plenty of), we were either following his trail or at least relating what we were seeing to what he must have experienced. His regiment had been in support at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne campaign, but they eventually switched and relieved the unit in front of them. Major Tim determined from the maps and other research that he had been fighting in a forest near Brieulles-sur-Meuse and Dannevoux when he was killed. In the photo below, you can see Major Tim and Nancy, next to those exact woods and certainly no more than a quarter mile from where he died.

Cemeteries: This whole area is dotted with cemeteries. There are a huge number of French cemeteries, which tend to be smaller. (The one below is bigger than most.) Their crosses are often made of concrete, which degrades and, perhaps because there are so many little cemeteries to maintain, they are sometimes slightly overgrown with broken crosses (which Major Tim, of course, attributed to French character flaws). Most of the French cemeteries had Muslim tombstones, which were in a different shape. In some, these were put in a separate area and set facing Mecca (see below), while others were just mixed in and facing like all of the others.

There were also a surprising number of German cemeteries. The regular German soldiers were not sent home for burial and I was mildly surprised that the French didn’t get rid of them. These cemeteries would often have as many as four soldiers to a cross. The crosses were thinner and made of metal and were very attractive. I was interested to see stars of David on many of the crosses, representing, of course, German Jews who had died. Major Tim told us that Hitler had issued an order that prohibited his German troops fro desecrating those Jewish burial sites, on the grounds that they had died for the Fatherland.

The American cemeteries were very different, in that they are very large and immaculately maintained. American families had a choice between bringing their dead home for burial or leaving them to be interred with their comrades in arms. The two that we visited, one for Saint Mihiel, containing nearly 5000 dead and the one for Meuse-Argonne, which contained over 14,000, were gorgeous, with grass that would make a golf course jealous and beautiful rows of trees and flower beds. Nancy was able to visit the graves of four other Maine farmboys who had been in Great Uncle Arthur’s regiment, although he had been sent home for burial.

There is something about the geometry of all of those crosses, especially all of the white marble crosses in the large American cemeteries that was incredibly powerful. The patters and the lines of sight keep changing as you walk through, which somehow reinforces the fact of the number of dead that are present. Some pictures follow, but don’t really capture this.

  

Flags: While we were at the American cemetery for Saint Mihiel, we were looking at the views when Major Tim said “Hey. That looks my friend Jeff.” Jeff was someone who he knew as the superintendent of a different cemetery. He had been transferred and was now in change of this one. He greeted us, showed us around, answered our questions and showed us where they are systematically replacing the old headstones. He took us to his office, where he gave Nancy advice on her searching and told us anecdotes. As that was ending, he said “It’s almost five o’clock. Would you like to help me take down the flags?” The cemetery had two big poles with large flags and we got to take them down. And then he directed us on how to properly fold a flag, so that you end up with a perfect triangle. Doing that, surrounded by thousands of headstones, was a powerful moment.

    

 

This is a bit of a catch-up post, most of which was composed before we left on our various trips over the past ten days.

The Deep Blue Sea: We went with Chris and Nancy to the National Theater to see “The Deep Blue Sea”, a play by Terrence Rattigan first performed in 1952. (It was later a film, starring Vivian Leigh in 1955.) It is a story of a woman who has left a loveless marriage and run away with a handsome pilot who can’t seem to get over the War. But it turns out that he is really incapable of loving her and the attempted suicide ends up terminating their doomed relationship. The play begins with her attempted suicide and doesn’t get much happier from there. Helen McCrory plays the central role of Hester with the usual good supporting cast. (She is one of those actors who is more famous in British theater, although she did play Mrs. Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies.) Her dissolute love interest is played by Tom Burke, whom we saw playing a strikingly similar role in the much more modern “Reasons to be Happy” at the Hampstead. There are some melodramatic moments, but over all the play is so well constructed that it maintains your attention, even if it is a bit dated in some respects. The central psychological drama manages to ring true today, possibly because Hester was an atypical and modern woman for 1950s Britain. The push and pull of her relationship with her ex-husband and lover are key to developing her character, but it is her scenes with the upstairs doctor that are most compelling. The dramatic tension comes from your doubts as to whether she will end up killing herself or pull herself together and get on with the rest of her life. The play does not clearly resolve this question in the dialog, but a the end Hester is left alone and is staring at her lover’s clothing as she is packing it up to send to him and you think, “Uh oh. This is it.” But she had just put an egg on the stove to fry and she is startled out of her reverie and goes and finishes cooking the egg and then sits down to eat her egg sandwich as the play ends. This little bit of stage business gave the feeling that the urge to end it all had past and that she was going to move on with some sort of life. I wonder if it was in the original stage direction?

Painting slow-down: I haven’t been able to get to my paintings much lately, although I have two in process which I can’t seem to finish. One is a study of Jerry Fried and me standing at the end of a nearby alley. Right now it is in a sort of nether world between being realistic and impressionistic. I’m beginning to think it is more cartoonish than anything else, so I may go that way. As for the second one, I’d decided to do something without some much little detail and started painting two frogs sitting on lily pads. I discovered that I am incapable of drawing a decent looking frog, so after several attempts, I just painted the damn things over and now have a perfectly pleasant, if slightly boring, painting of some lily pads. I’m not sure where to go with that one….

We are finally back from a fairly exhausting trip with our old friends, Chris and Nancy, that saw us go to World War I battlefields around Verdun in France and then up to Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye. Lots of driving and riding in cars (something we haven’t done much in many months), plus trains and the ferry across the Channel (so we got to see the White Cliffs of Dover, which always remind me of the movie “Help!”).

The World War I trip was one that we would never have planned, but Nancy has been researching her family history and wanted to go to where her Great Uncle Arthur had been killed. She arranged the whole thing, including our own tour guide, so all Judie and I had to do was get out our credit cards and tag along. I was worried it might be a bit tedious, but it turned out to be both fascinating and fun, thanks in large part to our guide, Major Tim Pritchard-Barrett.

Major Tim: Our guide was a former major in the Welsh Guards (who fought in the Falklands War). He was from an upper crust family in Northern England and went to private schools and Sandhurst (the UK equivalent of West Point). (One twist for him is that he also had roots in South Carolina.) He had that patrician sort of snobby English accent and freely expressed his prejudices against immigrants, gypsies and, especially, the French (lazy sods). So on the one hand he was a bit of a jerk, but at the same time he was interesting and had one of those dry, British senses of humor. Most important, he had encyclopedic knowledge about World War I and military history and really knew the ground we were covering. He had done research specifically for Nancy and was able to pinpoint, with amazing precision, where her Great Uncle Arthur had marched and fought and where he had died when the hand grenade he was carrying was hit by a shot and exploded. While he was a bit of a mixed bag personally (especially since we spent so much time in a car with him), as a guide he could not have been better. Photos below. Notice him studying up for the day.

   

Where We Were and Some Historical Context: Most World War I tours, especially the British ones, concentrate in the Somme area, near Flanders, where the British French and German armies slaughtered each other for four years for no particularly good reason. The American forces never got up to that part of the War and, instead ended up near Verdun, supporting the French troops. This was partly because General “Black Jack” Pershing, who led the American Army, rejected the French idea that American troops be slotted into the lines wherever needed in a piecemeal fashion. Pershing insisted that the Americans be together in one fighting force. So they ended up West, around Verdun. That area is one of those places where battles had been taking place for centuries. It is near Waterloo and other Napoleonic battles, was the center of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (in which the Germans had taken back most of Alsace and Lorraine, leaving France only the area around Verdun) and later World War II. I’d guess that people like Charlemagne marched through there and neolithic cave men probably smashed each other with bones there. The French were absolutely determined to keep Verdun and the Germans were determined to take it, so there had been years of awful fighting in the area by the time the Americans showed up with their impossibly green troops. (Major Tim told us that shortly after the Americans arrived at the lines, the Germans did a quick “Welcome to France” raid in which they killed a bunch of soldiers and withdrew taking over 100 prisoners.) But, of course, more and more American soldiers kept arriving and by the time of the Armistice, Pershing had two full armies and plans to march well into Germany. America may have formally joined the war in 1917, but by the time the Americans were really ready to fight, it was the summer of 1918 and there were only two campaigns in which they fought:

The Saint Mihiel Salient: Saint Mihiel is a town south of Verdun on the Meuse River and on the train line which was supposed to supply the French in Verdun. The Germans managed to capture it early in the War and had never lost it. Their successful offensive had created a kind of triangle sticking into French territory along the battle front, which for some reason is called a salient. It is mostly flat fields along the middle of the salient with wooded hills along the sides. In a battle that went from the 12th to 15th of September, the American and French forces attacked from the sides of the triangle, leaving Saint Mihiel itself alone, until they met in the middle, effectively cutting of the German troops in the town and forcing their surrender.

Meuse-Argonne Campaign: This is the more difficult and well-known American war effort. It is where Sgt. York became famous, where the “Lost Battalion” fought and where Great Uncle Arthur died. The American forces attacked to the North over a terrain of forested hills and ravines, separated by open fields. The Americans, did great the first two days, as the Germans dropped back to heavily fortified lines and then the offensive bogged down and the fighting got very ugly. At one point, there was some pressure to replace Pershing, according to Major Tim, but that never really got anywhere.

Helping us understand all of this were some incredible maps of the American battles, created after the war by Major Dwight D. Eisenhower for book he wrote analyzing the U.S. operations in France. The maps seem to be staple part of many of the newer monuments. See below.

I’ll write more about my impressions of all of this and add some more stories in the next post. But before that, I need to mention a few non-War things:

There had been torrential storms before we came and the rivers in the area were over their banks in many places. You may have read that the had to close the Louvre at that time to move artwork to higher floors. This made the off-road explorations that Major Tim took us on a bit problematic. But it meant that everything was beautifully green and the poppies were growing like crazy.

We stayed at an amazing French chateau (see below) called Chateau du Monthairons. In addition to being beautiful, it had wonderful meals and we ate there twice and once in Verdun. During World War I, it had been used as a French Field Hospital and it had lots of pictures of that. During that period, the composer Maurice Ravel worked there as an ambulance driver and there is a story posted about a moment when this unknown driver found a piano in the hospital and shocked everyone by sitting down and playing beautiful music. (During World War II, the Chateau was German Officers’ Headquarters. There were no pictures displayed of that.)

      

 

Today, Standing on the Side of Love UK held its first action. Five of us went to Finsbury Park to stand in support of the Finsbury Park Mosque, which had been the victim of a hate crime the prior week, when a bag of raw pork was thrown over their wall. Our SSL-UK group had finally gotten beyond it initial organizing phase and it was time to get out and do something positive. It went very well.

As hundreds of individuals and families flowed down the street and into the mosque, most smiled at us and our banner and some stopped to thank us for coming to support them. A few even took our picture. The head of the mosque came out to greet us and had one of his staff stand with us for a time (that’s him in the photo below) and later sent us some lunch and bottles of water. The local police came by and chatted with Rev. Andy and were very friendly and supportive. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

It was a reminder of the power of love and the simple effectiveness of “Standing on the Side of Love” as a social action tool. As people approached the mosque and saw a group there with a sign, you could see them relax and often smile as they read the message. It is a simple one, but it works. It is nice to be one of the “Love People”. When we departed, we left some little biodegradable hearts on the sidewalk as a reminder that we were there.

We are off to a very encouraging start and I am looking forward to seeing where this movement can go. Here is a picture I took of us next to the mosque:

My last post got a bit long. I was trying to get ready for our two-day trip with Robbie and Bob and didn’t have the time to break it up. I appear to have made this one a bit long too.

Stonehenge: On Tuesday morning, we caught a train to Salisbury, rented a car and drove to Stonehenge. Judie and I had been there over 30 years ago and I recall it as a muddy path from a car park to a monument surrounded by a chain link fence and a few signs. It has been fixed up in quite a nice way in the decades since, with a big visitors center, car park and a bus to the site. The admission includes an audioguide, which provides all kinds of information about who built Stonehenge (not the Druids, who came much later), where the stone came from (some of it was a special, magical blue stone all the way from Wales) and speculation on what it was used for. A great deal of archaeological work has been done, both at the site and in the surrounding area in the past thirty years and they know a lot more about it. The weather that day was overcast and threatening and there was a gale-like wind blowing, making for an evocative, if chilly, experience. It really is quite amazing. The idea that Stone Age people hauled chunks of rock weighing as much as 30 tons for many miles and then shaped it using nothing but stone tools and ended up with mortise and tenon joints and rocks that line up perfectly with the solstice is mind-boggling. It had to have taken a big part of the population of the day, not only simply to move and shape the stones, but to feed the workers, make the tools and rope , and organize things. On top of all of that, it is also a simply beautiful piece of sculpture.

      

Bath: There are at least three things that make Bath a very special place. First, it is ancient. The mineral spring that is the reason for its existence drew pagan tribes to the area for religious and possibly healing purposes for many of thousands of years. (A lot like Stonehenge.) The Romans found the springs and built a large complex of Baths on the site, which were covered over for a thousand years or more and then rediscovered (more about that below). Second, it is an architectural treat. When Bath was rediscovered in the Georgian Age by the gentry desiring to get the health benefits of a mineral water spa, the town was redesigned and built-in honey colored local sandstone, mostly under the direction of George Wood and his son, creating a lovely cityscape that is essential unchanged in the intervening 250 years. And third, partly because it is so unchanged, it evokes thoughts of Jane Austen, who lived there, set two of her books, “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey” there and whose other books often seem informed by her experiences there.

Because Stonehenge required a lot more time than we’d planned and we decided to stop at lovely country pub for lunch, we didn’t get to Bath until late in the afternoon. We went to our hotel, Paradise House, a small place located on a hillside overlooking Bath and the surrounding countryside. It had a delicious breakfast, great service and a spectacular garden. It is actually one of the few older buildings in that neighborhood, as most of the area was wiped out in the “Bath Blitz”. (In 1942, the Germans bombed Bath, supposedly in retaliation for earlier RAF bombings of two German town with little military importance. You can still see scars on the buildings in Bath and many had to be substantially restored after the war.) Judie stayed in the room to work and Robbie and Bob and I walked down the hill into Bath, but by the time we got there it was after 5:00 and most of the tourist things to do were closed. With three hours to kill before dinner (Judie had a 7:00 call), we walked around the town , checking out the architecture and general scene, stopping for a glass of wine to rest (Bath is hilly), and then walking some more. The streets of the town are lovely, especially if you ignore the fact that the street level on the commercial streets is mostly chain stores. We walked up a long curving path to the Royal Park to see the Royal Crescent. The Crescent is a spectacular semi-circular ring of buildings built high on a hill overlooking Bath. It was designed by George Wood, who died five days after the first foundation stone was laid, and finished by his son. The most unusual thing about it is that it was built as a facade and then sections were sold to wealthy individuals who had their own architects build the actual premises out the back. So a lovely unified face and a hodgepodge rear. It turned out that the path we walked was built later so that the wealthy people in the crescent could be transported down to the baths without having to go down the main streets. But our favorite place was The Circus, a complete circle of three of these crescents, with a park with big old sycamores in the middle. It was designed by the younger George Wood and was just perfection. We finally made it to the Olive Tree for dinner, footsore and hungry, where Judie met us and we were rewarded with a truly delicious meal.

     

The next day, after spending some time in the hotel’s marvelous garden, we went into Bath and headed for the Roman Baths. Just like Stonehenge, it was much better than the place we recalled visiting over 30 years ago. A lot more excavation had been done and the whole museum area was more informative. And once again the admission included an audioguide, which added to the information about the whole thing that we were able to learn. (The audio guide included additional commentary by Bill Bryson, which sounds like a great idea, but it turned out that he merely stated the obvious or resorted to being annoying.) You could see the spring bubbling and steam rising from it and the whole thing is great feat of engineering. Since we were lat there, they appear to learned a lot more about the religious functions of the baths and the range of people who came from all over the Roman Empire to visit them. Their excavation of the Temple was impressive and cleverly presented, using video to fill in the missing bits and pieces. You could see where the water of the old spring area had been lifted to provide for the King’s Bath in the 1500s. It is kind of incredible that the whole thing was covered over and “rebuilt” by the Brtish and eventally virtually forgotten. The whole tour concluded with an opportunity to taste the spring water, which was warm and oddly “minerally”, but not really unpleasant. The whole tour took a long time, but ti was worth it. With our time to leave on the horizon, we chose to go to the Jane Austen Museum. We learned quite a bit about her life in Bath. She resided in a number of places in the city, partly because she and her sister and mother lost most of their income after her father’s untimely death. Although she wrote “Nothanger Abbey” on her first visit to a relative, the period when she actually lived there was relatively unproductive. But it led to a number of her great works, until she died too young at the age of 41. I suspect there are better places to visit in Bath, but Judie and Robbie are big Austen fans. One other thing about Bath are the references to the fact that it was a social hub in Georgian England, with the entertainment and social scene directed for 50 years by Beau Nash, a dandy and gambler, whose semi-official tile was Master of Ceremonies.

       

Salisbury: Annoyingly, our rental car company closed at 5:30 and had no provision for dropping the car outside of office hours, so we had to leave Bath a bit earlier than we would have liked (or we would have been stuck with the car until the next morning with nowhere to stay). We made good time returning and had an extra 45 minutes or so to go and check out Salisbury Cathedral. It is one of the biggest cathedrals in England and has the tallest spire. The interior is very impressive and suitably ancient, with things like choir stalls dating from the 1200s and the oldest working clock (1386). The interior is immense with high, vaulted ceilings. The choir was rehearsing for an upcoming service, which added a nice touch. There were a few pleasant surprises. First, the walk to get to the Cathedral, through an old part of the town, was lovely. Second, the Cathedral was surrounded, by large modern sculptures, most of anthropomorphic rabbits, and there were more inside. See below. And finally, the Cathedral contains one of only four known copies of the Magna Carta (and it is said to be the best preserved one), set in its own special Charter House, which is a little jewel of a building in intself. (Probably not coincidentally, King John’s brother, who helped negotiate the Magna Carta, is buried in the Cathedral.) We got to go in a see it, accompanied by a guide/docent. Very cool.

     

Judie and returned from Spain Sunday night and were greeted in our flat by Barbara and Mike, who had just finished their tour of Northern England and Scotland.They are a couple we only see rarely and it is fun to catch up with them. Mike is someone who, like me, likes to stay up drinking red wine and talking. Let me just say that I had a lot of recycling to do by the time he left. They left at the crack of dawn on Wednesday to return to Albuquerque. The next day, Judie’s sister Robbie and her husband Bob arrived and a whole new round of events started.

The Chelsea Flower Show: On Friday, we met Robbie and Bob at the Flower Show, after they had spent the early afternoon at the V&A Museum. It is one of the biggest flower shows around and was quite an event. It was mobbed with people checking out an endless number of beautiful flowers and a number of show gardens. It is run by  the Royal Horticultural Society and a good part of it is an incredibly fancy trade show, where you can get seeds and flowers for you own garden, along with garden sculptures, garden furniture, garden gates and pretty much anything that might be possible to put in a garden. Jenny Bakshi, who isa landscape designer in Montclair, was there with Phil and her brother, so we got to meet up with them. There was one “eccentric” garden that would activate every 15 minutes and the trees and topiaries would spin around and bushes would come up out of the ground and flowers would rotate around a little house. Ridiculous , but cute. There was another one that was dedicated to the end of slavery. Many of the big ones had water and/or sculptures and/or houses. And then there were little cute ones that were more like incredibly nice backyard gardens. I’ve been thinking about doing some gardening improvements in Montclair when we get back (and have been since the “Painting the Modern Garden” exhibit at the Royal Academy), so this all gave me some ideas.

Trooping the Colors: The next morning, we were off to see Trooping the Colors. Actually, what we were seeing was a rehearsal of the event. The formal Trooping the Colors before the Queen will be held on June 11th and televised around the country. It is something like the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, only on steroids. It takes place on the Horse Guards Parade Ground, just across for St. James Park, which is about the size of two football fields. A huge number of soldiers with the red coats and black fur hats marched in, each with its own band. There was all of this very fancy marching around, with one of the groups carrying the Colors (which appeared to be a fancy UK flag). Everyone stood when it went by, like a slow motion wave. There were also guardsmen on horses, some with red highlights in their uniforms and others with black, but all wearing shiny helmets. And there was horse-drawn artillery too. There were hundreds of them all on the field. It was really an amazing spectacle, and we didn’t even get the flyover that will end the real event. One has to wonder what all of that pomp and circumstance costs and whether it is really worth it. But it is one of those things that the British do and it has to be said that they do it really well. A few pictures follow:

   

One of the special benefits of going to this event was that our seats required us to enter via Downing Street, which is normally closed to the public. Here we are 100 feet from Cameron’s front door:

A Guided Walk: On Saturday afternoon, we went on a guided walk from St. Paul’s to the Monument to the Great Fire of 1666, via Bankside. We had an entertaining guide (Johnnie) who delivered a sort of stream of consciousness patter as we walked from place to place. A few of the best nuggets:

• An artist named Ben Wilson became famous for creating tiny painting on the chewing gum left on Millennium Bridge. He apparently lies on a yoga mat and paints the tiny bits of gun pushed in the bridge grating. The police arrested him once for doing this, but he could not be convicted since he pointed out that he was not defacing public property by painting on the bridge because he was actually painting on garbage. He may have moved on to different locations (or perhaps a different medium), but there are still numerous of these little paintings all along the bridge. Most people, including me, never see them because your eye is drawn to the beautiful views of St.Paul’s, Tower Bridge, the skyline and the Thames. A sample gum painting is below.
• Next to the Globe Theatre on Bankside is a small and old white building, which has a plaque stating that Christopher Wren lived there while building St. Paul’s, so he could watch the progress from across the river. Good story, but it isn’t true. In fact the sign was put on the house by its Norwegian owner in the 1930s as a joke. That area had been nearly destroyed during the blitz and there were plans to knock down that house and the two old houses next to it for a development, but the sign made it appear to be an important landmark, so it was spared from the wrecking ball.
• All along Borough High Street, there used to be alleys containing pubs and inns. This is where travelers would pull in with their horses or coaches as they approached London Bridge, which was the only way to cross the Thames for hundreds of years. There is only one of these places left, a pub called The George. Its buildings are pretty ancient and it is actually owned by the National Trust, which operates the pub. I have to go sometime. It is nearby the place where the tavern that is in Canterbury Tales was located. It was the place where the pilgrims met and told their stories before leaving.
• There were a series of bridges at the site of the current London Bridge. The most noted one was the one that was covered with a virtual little city of buildings. At the southern edge was a gate and on top of the gate were heads of traitors and criminals and pirates, mounted on pikes. According to Johnnie, the reason it was the only bridge across the Thames for centuries was that the boatmen’s guild was able to pressure the government into not constructing new bridges, thereby protecting their trade. When the Westminster Bridge was finally built, the guild received a large compensation payment.
• There is a theory that theaters like the Globe based their designs on the big inns like the George. The inns would have pubs with rooms to let above them which had balconies overlooking the alley. This would be on both sides of the alley and it is thought that there would b performances at one eld of the alley, with most just standing in the alley and the more well off being able to watch from the balconies.

“Showboat”: On Saturday night, we went to see a production of “Showboat”, the Hammerstein and Kern musical that gave us “Old Man River”. It is seen by some as the first true piece of modern musical theatre, premiering in 1927. It was the first time that the songs in a theatrical piece were completely linked to the plot. And there were scenes about black and white relations that must have seemed revolutionary at the time. We had front row seats, which were actually cheaper than the seats behind us. It was a good production. It actually had an American, Chris Peluso, playing the leading man, which seems unusual in a London production. It seems to me that you see more Brits on Broadway than vice versa.) Gina Beck, who played Nola, the female lead, had a great voice. The actor playing Captain Andy, Malcolm Sinclair, was someone we’d enjoyed in the Hampstead Theatre production of “The Meeting” and he was quite good, although his Southern accent sort of came and went. It was fun and there are a few great songs besides “Old Man River” (the show’s presentation of this song was very moving), like “Only Make Believe’, “Can’t Stop Lovin’ That Man of Mine”, “After the Ball” and “Bill”.

“Elegy”: Tonight, we went to see “Elegy” at the Donmar Warehouse, a famous small theater in the West End. Written by Nick Payne, it is based on the premise that a form of brain surgery can correct brain diseases, but that in curing the disease, you lose parts of your memory. This presents an impossible dilemma to the main characters. Do they do nothing and let a loved one slowly die an ugly death. Or do they save the person, knowing that in doing so they will not be the same person. And by waiting to do the surgery, savoring the relationship that still exists, they cause more memory to be lost in the surgery, leading to a situation in  which all memory of the relationship is erased. The play begins post surgery as Carrie (played by Barbara Flynn) tries to cope with the fact that her wife, Lorna (played by Zoe Wanamaker), who she still loves deeply, doesn’t know who she is. The play then proceeds in backward chrononology, until the end, when the first scene is replayed, but now the audience has the memory or what has led up to it and it resonates completely differently. It is like the first scene is Lorna’s point of view and the last scene is from Carrie’s.

We are off to Bath tomorrow morning with Robbie and Bob, so I have to finish this…..

Saturday night. Madrid. Judie’s Birthday. The Bruce Springsteen concert. The stadium was too far to walk, so we had to figure out how to get there on the Metro. Finding the route was easy and the trains were nice and well mapped (although not in English at all) and the only real trouble we had was working the ticket machines. (Getting back at nearly 1:00 AM was a snap and the streets were crowded along the Grand Via as we walked back to our hotel. Much more so than London, which shuts down the Underground by that time.)

The stadium itself was pretty enormous. It is where Real Madrid plays and is comparable to a football stadium in the US. The security was significant. First we had to go through one long line in order to get on another long line for our gate. The throng was pretty huge but organized and patient. I wonder if this is the same routine that they follow for big football matches there. We noticed that a fair number of people bought beers before getting on  line. It took 10-15 minutes to reach the front, where there were big recycling bins to throw the beer cans. So maybe that is what fans in the know do.

Once inside, we noticed a few things. The directional signs said “vomitorio” with a section number and we found ourselves wondering whether this had something to do with over-drinking footie fans. It turned out that vomitorio refers to the way for fans to spew out of the stadium. Cigarette smoking was permitted in the stadium, something that has been banned in the States or restricted to some special area for years. And beer is sold by vendors withe small kegs attached to their backs.

  

Bruce: We were wondering what sort of concert this would be. Would the Spanish fans know the words to the songs? Would they be into it? As it turned out, they knew the words and how to participate in the various Springsteen singalong moments and when to wave their hands or turn on their cell phone lights. The concert began at a little after its announced starting time of 9:00 (everything starts later in Spain, I guess), with Bruce opening with “Badlands”. It was still light and it was impressive to see the entire stadium floor bouncing with people. We had pretty good seats really, but recently we’ve seen Bruce from the floor or from fairly low down in an arena, so it was different being slightly more of an observer than a participant. Being on the floor is a more overwhelming experience, particularly when the crowd is all singing and rocking away.

This was “The River” tour, so they played a lot of songs off that album, including things like “Sherry Darling”, which we hadn’t seen him do for a long time. Bruce also covered the Patti Smith song “Because the Night”, which we’d never seen him do, although it is a natural fit. He and the E Street Band play continuously for three and half hours, playing a lot of the big hits (although not “Rosalita”). The stage was set up so that Bruce (and sometimes other band members) could get out into the crowd. They did all of the usual Bruce things, like the “Hungry Heart” singalong and getting a woman out of the crowd to dance with Bruce (and have now added having  a guy picked out of the crowd to dance with Patti.

   

All in all, it was a classic Springsteen concert. High energy, entertaining, good-natured. The energy level remains astonishing. The E Street Band is still incredible, despite the loss of Clarence. Bruce tried to speak to the crown in  Spanish once in a while although you could tell he was reading it off papers taped to the floor. The crowd didn’t care. They at it up.  For anyone really into Bruce and the E Street Band, her is a link for the setlist for the concert. (I thought initially that it also included links to You Tube videos from the concert, but they are from other concerts. Of course, there are videos on You Tube if you search. Here’s a link to the acoustic version of “Thunder Road” that ended the concert.)

Happy Birthday Judie.

 

On Friday morning, we left Barcelona, taking a high-speed train to Madrid. It is a two and a half hour ride, mostly through the countryside. I’d like to be able to report more on the scenery, but trains seem to put me to sleep, so I missed a big chunk of it. Judie told me that there were castles and vistas.

Madrid: I don’t think that Madrid is one of the cities that is viewed as a must-see destination and, having been there, Judie and I could not figure out why that is.  It has beautiful architecture, great museums, good restaurants, an efficient subway system and it is much warmer than places like London. The part where most of the tourist stuff is located is walkable and not too big. It is inexpensive to go there from London, which is probably why there seemed to be countless “hen parties” and bachelor parties featuring oddly-dressed, inebriated Brits.

We stayed at very nice hotel on The Grand Via, which appeared to have just been renovated and reopened. The Grand Via is a major street in Madrid and is lined with a series of lovely buildings, mostly made of white stone with balconies and turrets and bay windows, interrupted occasionally by wide avenues and squares containing outdoor cafes. The street is home to many hotels and theatres. At one end is the beautiful City Hall, a former communications building of all things, and the Prado and the other main museums. At the other end is the Palace and Cathedral. While Judie was working on Friday afternoon, I wandered around for an hour or two and finally parked myself at an outdoor cafe and just enjoyed the early summer weather and watched people walk by. When I finally returned and Judie finished her last call, we retreated the roof of the hotel, where there was a bar with nice views and comfy places to sit.

   

That night, we went to a restaurant called La Baracca. I had looked into going to Botin, reputed to be the oldest restaurant in the world, but couldn’t get reservations. So I made reservations at this other one and it turned out to be across the street from the back door of our hotel. They specialize in paella and it really was delicious. The seafood in it was just OK, but the rice was just wonderful. It had great flavor and was both fully cooked a just a little crunchy, which we guessed may have come from cooking it in individual paella pans. The best we’d ever had.

The next day, we took one of those on-off tourist buses, taking a full loop around Madrid to decide where to get off. We got to see everything and get slightly sun burned at the same time.The Palace and the surrounding parks are up on a hill (which is why Madrid is where it is), with some pretty views. We decided to skip going into the Place since the lines were too long and went to the Cathedral next door instead. (I have become pretty sick of hearing about royal families and their histories. All of the European capitals seem to have this stuff. At a certain point, it just gets to be boring stories about a rich families. We did happen to walk by the Palace when the guards in funny uniforms out front were marching about and shouting.) We went up to the dome of the Cathedral (elevator part of the way made it easier) for some great views of the city. We continued on for a fairly long walk back to our hotel, via Plaza Mayor, a gorgeous square in the middle of Madrid with a long history. It is ringed by restaurants with alfresco dining and drinking.

        

Catastrophe Averted: By mid-afternoon on Saturday trying to find Plaza Mayor, Judie and I gave up and were sitting at an outdoor cafe (little did we know that we were two blocks from the Plaza we were tying to find), surrounded by hen party groups, tourists and families. We were eating Iberian ham, gazpacho, patatas bravas and fresh anchovies and washing it down with sangria and beer, when this kid comes up with a menu, puts it on the table and begins talking to us and pointing at it. There is a moment of confusion and then all of a sudden my old NYC radar kicked in. What is he doing here? He’s not my waiter! Why is that black peddler looking at him like that from over there? I instinctively slam my hand onto the table, moving the menu and instantly both of our hands are on my iPhone, which he had put the menu on top of. He gave up and ran away as I was screaming at him. A really close call…..

The Prado: On Sunday morning, we decided to go to the Prado. It was tempting to go to the Reina Sofia Museum, which is where Picasso’s “Guernica” is, but the Prado was a shorter walk and it is hard to go to Madrid and not go there. It was a pretty spectacular museum, although I have to admit hat I eventually got sick of all of the paintings of Jesus, Mary and various saints and martyrs in various states of torment and torture. But getting to see Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” was a treat, as was a room of paintings by Goya from his “Black period”. There were lots a lovely paintings and the museum was very well laid out. Here is one of those Goyas I particularly liked:

As a bonus, there was a special exhibit of the paintings an artist named George de La Tour, an Alsatian painter who seemed to be influenced by Caravaggio. There are only 40 of his works known to exist and the exhibit had 31 of them. The were just spectacular. Who is this guy? Two of them are below.

      

Copa Del Rey: After the Prado, I convinced Judie to go back to Plaza Mayor for a final visit and alfresco drink. It turned out to be a little further than I though and, even worse, all uphill, so I was not dealing with a happy camper by the end of the walk. But it really turned out great. The Plaza was hopping because it happened to be the day of the Copa del Rey, basically the Super Bowl for the Spanish football (soccer) league. The game was to be played in Madrid (at Athletico’s stadium) and featured mighty Barcelona (with their front line of Messi, Suarez and Nemar that is so great that it is almost unfair, plus great players like Ineinesta, Pique, etc.) vs. Sevilla, who are also no slouches (but without the star power). Fans for both teams, in full regalia, converged on the Plaza Mayor and were drinking and singing and marching and waving their colors. It was all high spirited and great fun. (Barca won 2-0 in overtime later that night.)

   

Judie and I went to Spain last weekend. The trip was to be centered around going to see Bruce Springsteen in Madrid on Saturday night (Judie’s birthday), which I’ll describe in greater length later. But about two weeks before we left, Judie found out that she had been scheduled to speak at a conference in Barcelona the day before our trip to Madrid, so the whole thing turned into a grand Spanish tour.

A Short Walk Around Barcelona While Judie Was Working: I had wandered around Barcelona quite a bit in the past, since Judie had been sent to two conferences there while she was at American Express and, as a result, I’d already seen most of the major sites. Since I had only part of an afternoon to do some exploring (on a stunningly beautiful day), I decided to take the Metro down into the city center and concentrate on my two favorites things about Barcelona: Gaudi and the food.

Boqueria: My first stop was the Boqueria Market, which is just off the Ramblas, a beautiful, tree-lined boulevard that cuts from the waterfront up into the city. I had forgotten what an incredible place it is. As much as I love Borough Market in London, the size and selection of the Boqueria really puts London to shame. The colors of the vegetables and fruit and ham and fish and meat and everything else was just kaleidoscopic.

    

The market, of course, has lots of little places to eat, so I stopped for lunch at one of them and had Iberian ham, which they seem to routinely serve on crusty bread with a little tomato sauce, fresh, fried whitebait and fried artichokes. All with a couple of glasses of white wine. Really heavenly.

    

Casa Battlo: Now fortified, I proceeded to stroll up the Ramblas, checking out all of the beautiful buildings and the people sitting at outdoor cafes enjoying the wonderful weather. Barcelona is a city that was laid out with a number of large and wide boulevards, which then have smaller streets off of them. It allows for lovely vistas and the planting of trees along the streets, something that is missing (and perhaps not possible) in the small and narrow old streets of London. It is also a city that seems to be aware of design and seems to be concerned that, at least in the older parts of the city, the overall presentation is harmonious. Very unlike the hodgepodge that is New York or London. My destination on the walk was Casa Battlo,  one of the great Gaudi landmarks. It is not as famous as Casa Mila, with its iconic helmet-like chimneys, or Sagrada Familia, the church that is his masterwork, or Park Guell. But I’d had tours and visits of those landmarks on prior trips. Just the walk to Casa Battlo was great, because it is along an avenue where the homeowners seem to have been competing to build the most spectacular building. Casa Battlo is a six-story townhouse, so it is on a smaller scale than Casa Mila, which is an apartment building. The facade is a profusion of colorful tiles and organic shapes and is really unlike any building you have ever seen. I suppose one could call Gaudi’s style Art Nouveau, but it is so original and unique that it is really not fair to even try to categorize it. I went into the building for the tour and the organic shapes and colors continued inside and onto a back terrace and finally onto the roof, which feature incredibly sensuous tiled chimneys. The various Gaudi architectural gems are so memorable that it is impossible for me to really name a favorite. But this place is right up there. A few photos, which hardly do it all justice:

       

Dinner: Eventually, Judie got away from the conference and endless phone calls with some very needy and difficult clients and we stopped in the hotel bar, where we met a few interesting industry people (including a guy I met at a dinner in Copenhagen) and then went to dinner. Since it is Spain, nobody eats until 9:00 (although the restaurants do open at 8:00, probably for tourists). I assume that they must work later in the day. The owner of our favorite Shoreditch restaurant, Super Tuscan, had recommended Paco Meralgo, which turned out to be a tapas place with seemingly a very hip, young clientele. The food was delicious and the service was great. At one point, the entire staff stopped working, put on silly hats and wigs and went to sing Happy Birthday to someone. On the way back, one of them posed for this picture with Judie (soon to be a birthday girl).

Lawrence After Arabia”: Last Thursday we went to the Hampstead Theatre (which has turned into our “go-to” theatre—a bit like The New York Theatre Workshop or the Public) with Barbara and Mike (Judie’s friend from high school in Korea and her husband who are visiting) to see “Lawrence After Arabia”. This was another one of those historical dramas, which they seem to do very well here. Of course, often history can be so interesting that it really beats anything that you might make up. T.E. Lawrence was certainly such a figure. This play focuses mostly on the time after World War I, when Lawrence wanted to get away form the limelight and enlisted in the RAF under a false name. At the same time, he was friends with George Bernard Shaw and his wife and was spending some time with them and trying to edit a sort of memoir he had written about his experiences. Most of the play takes place in Shaw’s sitting room. While Shaw is trying to finish “St. Joan” (by dictating to his long suffering secretary, Blanche Patch), Shaw’s wife, Charlotte is looking after Tom (Lawrence) and helping him with his book. There are occasional flashbacks to the war and scenes with Prince Feisal and Field Marshall Edmund Allenby. And Lowell Thomas, the American journalist who became famous by covering the story of Lawrence of Arabia, appears occasionally to show the sort of pressure that Lawrence was under. One of the big points of the play is that Lawrence was tormented by his role in World War I and felt that he had double-crossed Prince Feisal by assuring him that there would be a unified Arabia after the war with a capital in Damascus. Feisal and the Arabs fought successfully against the Ottoman (Turks) (it is referred to as the Arab Revolt) and helped the British win that part of the war. But at the Peace conference, the winners simply went back to their old, misguided colonial habits and arbitrarily divided Arabia into “countries” that the French and English got to exploit. Lawrence argued that this would never work and that Europe would be reaping a whirlwind. In a private meeting with King George V, he declined a knighthood for his services in the Arab Revolt in protest of the treatment of the Arabs. So there is a contemporary political element to the play, as it portrays Prince Feisal as a potentially effective leader, who might have unified an Arabia that would have been functional, independent and friendly. Instead, we have ended up with dysfunctional countries like Iraq and Syria, etc. and our current mess, which one might arguably trace back to this mistake As is always the case at the Hampstead Theatre, this was a wonderful production with particularly great sets and a top-notch cast. Jack Laskey (who you would know if you watch “Endeavor” on PBS) was very good as Lawrence and Jeff Rawle was a very convincing and charming Shaw. Probably the most famous actor in the cast was Geraldine James, who has been in countless plays movies and television dramas and played Charlotte. William Chubb had a few great moments as Filed Marshall Allenby and Rosalind March’s understated portrayal of Shaw’s secretary was just great.

Oxford Pub Crawl: On Saturday we took the train up to Oxford (seventy minute from Paddington Station) to meet Jane and Paul Jee and their friends for the day. The plan was that Mike and I were to join Paul and his friend Jeremy for a pub crawl, while Judie and Barbara were to join Jane and her daughters and Jeremy’s wife and her daughters for sightseeing and shopping. (Actually, in the end it turned out that one of Paul’s daughters, Charlotte, and a friend of hers, Lizzie, joined the pub crawl, so it wasn’t as sexist as it looked like it was going to be.) We met everyone at the Turf Tavern for lunch and a couple of pints. The Turf Tavern is a very old pub, reputedly the last place where cockfighting was legal in London and the spot where Bill Clinton didn’t inhale while he was at Oxford and, I’m pretty sure, a regular location on “Inspector Morse”. I’m not certain of the names all the pubs we went to on the crawl. I know that we went to The Bear Inn, one of the oldest pubs in Oxford and one which, for some reason, displays pieces of ties, presumably worn (and then donated) by patrons. We also went to the Eagle and Child, a pub famously frequented by the Inklings, a literary and drinking group whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S Lewis. I’m pretty sure that we ended up at the Rose and Crown, a pretty little pub recommended by Lizzie, Charlotte’s friend who was just finishing her degree at Oxford. (It was her “local”.) And we went to two others, whose names I’ve forgotten, including one where we ate some scotch eggs and pork pies and another where we had an extended Brexit debate led by the spectacularly conservative Jeremy on one side and by Charlotte and me on the other (the debate was somewhat heated, probably because it was at pub number 4 or 5, but friendly). Finally, somewhere between eight and ten pints of beer  and three or four miles of walking later, we met up again with Judie and Barbara (who at one point had left the other women shopping and had gone to the Ashmolean Museum) and the others at a restaurant (whose name I had no hope of recalling at that point) and had a wonderful multi-course meal that Paul had arranged (with each course accompanied by wine). We then fell into a cab with Barbara and Mike and went back to our hotel, although we did stop at a nearby pub for a final “cleansing ale”. Quite a day. Certainly the most beer I had drunk in a single day in over 40 years.

Punting in the Thames: Sunday was a lovely and sunny day in Oxford and we spent a lot of it just wandering around the impossibly beautiful town. We spent some time checking out the Botanical Garden, which was in full bloom, and walked past the various colleges to Balliol College, where we met Anna Geier, the daughter of one of our friends, who spent the better part of last year living with us in Montclair. She took us around Balliol, which may be the oldest college in Oxford University (there is apparently some dispute between the colleges), including the Hogwarts-like eating hall. After a lunch at the White Horse pub, we said goodbye to Anna and continued to wander about. I had the idea of going punting on the Thames, since it was such a lovely day. It turned out that lots of people had the same idea and the river was very crowed, which made getting around hard, since the punts are difficult to control. You have long poles that you stick in the water and push off the bottom and then try to control the direction by swinging the pole through the water off the back. It is pretty easy to end up going sideways into a bank or slowly ramming another boat. Shortly after Mike had turned us around to head back (no small feat), I took my turn again. I was pushing us upstream and suddenly the pole got stuck in the mud and I was trying pull it out as the boat drifted along. I should have just let go of the pole, since it turns out that they float, but I had pictures of the pole sinking and us being stuck in the river with no means of propulsion. While all of this is flashing through my mind, the boat just moved out from under me and all of a sudden I realized that I was about to fall in the water and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Sure enough, I fell off the back. It might have been worse. I had given Judie my phone to hold and taken off my shoes since my feet were killing me the first time I did the poling. But I was soaking wet and lost my glasses. A number of other punts came over to help out (holding onto the pole for me was very useful) and I managed to get back into the boat eventually. The river is pretty shallow and I found that as we got near to the shore I could reach the bottom and then get to a point where it was very shallow and easier to get in. But I was soaking wet and fairly muddy and we still had 20-30 minutes of poling to get back to return the punt. But we made it and everyone at the punt rental place was amused. But I was still soaked so, as a result, I now own a new pair of Oxford University sweat pants and tee shirt, which I wore back to London. Oh well, at least I created a memorable experience for our guests (but at the cost of my glasses).