Ealing

Late last week I took a long walk out to Ealing, a region of western London about five miles from our apartment. I wasn't sure what I'd find out there, but I wanted to take a look, so I set out on the Uxbridge Road through Shepherd's Bush and pretty much walked in a straight line all the way to Ealing Broadway.

It was a nice day -- beautiful sunny weather and relatively cool. I bought a cheap egg salad sandwich at Tesco and ate it in Ealing Common, where I took the photo above. As you can see, fall is coming! The horse chestnut trees are always the first to lose their leaves, it seems.


The neighborhoods around Ealing become more suburban, with freestanding homes or small apartment houses separated by gardens. In Ealing I popped into a charity shop and bought a couple of used books for cheap reading. Then I got on the tube and came home. It was a fun day! The map above traces my path.

In other odds and ends:

-- We had a busy weekend of socializing. I've already written about my walk with Liz and Sally. On Friday, we went to the home of the chairman of the music department at the school where Dave works. (This is the same guy, Gordon, we had over for dinner a week or two ago. We like him and his wife, Donna.) Then, on Saturday, we had a progressive dinner with a couple of Dave's coworkers, Pete and Keith, going first to their apartments for appetizer and soup and then to ours for the main course. Dave made boeuf bourguignon, and I made banoffee pie, which I keep hearing about on "Come Dine With Me." It's basically a banana-and-toffee pie that's assembled cold. I thought it was a British thing, but when I mentioned it to Sally and Liz, they weren't so sure.

-- I've started applying for a few jobs here and there. No luck yet, but I am aware that I can't remain unemployed forever!

-- There's a lot of construction going on in our apartment complex at the moment. Someone is renovating a downstairs apartment, and the local government is excavating part of our courtyard for some mysterious improvements that seem to relate to wastewater. The result is lots of drilling and jackhammering during the day. More incentive for me to walk!

-- Two days until the dogs arrive! I went out and found them a big bag of good-quality dry food (at the shocking price of £62, or about $95!) plus a few special cans of wet food as a treat. Hopefully we'll find a less expensive supply route for dog food in the future. It's surprisingly hard to find large bags of food in the city. The dogs will be picked up today in New Jersey, kenneled overnight after their final vet appointment, and then flown out late tomorrow for arrival here on Friday. Stay tuned!

Protea

Last week I went to see "One Day" with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess at the Odeon Whiteleys on Queensway, our local movie theater. Hathaway has taken a lot of ribbing in the UK for her attempted English accent, which unlike her character is not particularly northern or even consistent, but I thought she did a good job nonetheless. I enjoyed the movie, even though it is ultimately a tear-jerker and definitely a chick flick.

(I've been trying to keep up with movies. I also saw "The Skin I Live In," Pedro Almodovar's newest with Antonio Banderas, which was interesting but perhaps not as compelling as some of his earlier films. And as I already mentioned, Dave and I went to see "The Inbetweeners" last month. Next on my list: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Contagion," which hasn't yet opened in the UK.)


Anyway, as I came out of the theater, I stopped at a florist and picked up these great flowers. They're called proteas, and apparently they're something of a national symbol of South Africa, where most of them originate. I've seen them in the states -- in fact I once found one on the sidewalk in New York -- but I don't think I've ever bought any.



Apparently proteas are held in such high regard in South Africa that the national cricket team is named for them. I think that may be the first time I've ever heard of an athletic team named for a flower!

Shad Thames

Remember what I wrote recently about the coming of autumn? Well, we've had a slight change of plan. The weather gods decided to give us another week of summer, and the last few days have been sunny and unseasonably warm, with temperatures in the 80s. It seems like everyone in London is out and about, sunbathing in the parks and strolling around in t-shirts.

I was among the hordes of wanderers yesterday, when I met up with Sally and Liz for brunch in Bermondsey, on the south bank of the Thames. We then walked through the neighborhoods around Tower Bridge including the curiously named Shad Thames. It's an area of old spice docks and warehouses that have been turned into gourmet restaurants and such.

We wondered about the origin of the name. I thought it might have something to do with shad, the river fish, but according to the always-reliable (ha!) Wikipedia it may be a corruption of "St. John-at-Thames," a reference to a church once located in the area.

We found an interesting fountain, which my Googling tells me is called Waterfall by the sculptor Antony Donaldson, from 1991. It features cavorting water nymphs, with everyday items like books, a watch and a camera -- all cast in bronze -- seemingly scattered at the fountain's edge. I especially liked the hands of the nymphs and the way their lime-crusty fingers dipped into the pool.



The pigeons liked them too.


After exploring Shad Thames, we had coffee at Borough Market -- a huge outdoor food market that was mostly closed on Sunday -- and wandered slowly westward all the way to Waterloo Station. Along the way we stopped in at the Tate Modern (mostly for a quick bathroom break), had a late afternoon beer at Royal Festival Hall, and watched skateboarders in a graffiti-plastered skate park on the riverbank.

It was great to finally see Sally and Liz, who have been my blog pals for years. We hadn't yet had a chance to meet up since I moved to London. And being outdoors was ideal -- everyone tells me to take advantage of the summer while it lasts, because winters in London are long and dark!

Rudolph & Laurita, London, 1968

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a scrapbook that I inherited by happenstance from my Aunt Laurita. She and my Uncle Rudolph, who as my maternal grandmother's brother was really my great uncle, traveled through Europe in the spring of 1968. They took a three-week American Express "Priceless Connoisseur" tour through England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. Aunt Laurita kept photos, receipts and other souvenirs in the scrapbook -- like the photo above of their tour group, with the Houses of Parliament in the background.

Aunt Laurita and Uncle Rudolph are on the left side of the picture:


The other day I got out the scrapbook to read about their stay in London. I thought it might be fun to revisit some places they'd photographed. Unfortunately, most of their photos in the scrapbook show tourist destinations -- Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London. Comparing them "now and then" just wouldn't be very interesting.

If anything had changed in the past 43 years, I thought it might be their hotel. So I went to check it out yesterday.

They stayed at the St. James Hotel, which is now the Crowne Plaza St. James on Buckingham Gate. My aunt preserved a brochure from the hotel, noting that they'd had to wait in the lobby when they arrived because their rooms weren't yet ready. (Oops!)



She also praised the beauty of Hyde Park, where she liked listening to the gadflies at the Speaker's Corner -- "my favorite place!" -- and noted that elsewhere in London "some Germany bomb damage can still be seen." Here's my uncle in front of the hotel:


In every photo from this trip, he's wearing a suit.

Here's my aunt outside the Tower of London:


Anyway, here's what their hotel looks like today:



It's quite an edifice. (I think the fountain shown on the brochure is in the courtyard, which is accessed through that open arch in the lower photo.)

What's even funnier -- when I visited London in 2000 with a friend, we had a few drinks in a great bar called Zander that I have always remembered fondly. Turns out Zander is still in this very hotel. It was a coincidence I didn't realize at the time.

In her scrapbook, Aunt Laurita saved her ticket stub from "Robinson Crusoe" starring Engelbert Humperdinck. She declared it a "good stage production."


And she and my uncle kept Easter programs from services at both Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, though I don't see any evidence that they actually attended the services. They were only in London for two days and their schedule was pretty well booked, so my guess is they just picked up the leaflets.


Aunt Laurita and Uncle Rudolph lived in Miami, where in the '60s they were probably seeing an influx of Cubans but not a lot of people from elsewhere in the world. In London, my aunt noted "many different nationalities in our hotel. Those from India wore their native dress, turban and all."

She also wrote, "We saw a massive protest march against the government taking over bus transportation, down Park Lane from Hyde Park toward Buckingham Palace." It probably had something to do with this.

I wish they'd gone somewhere really swingin', like Carnaby Street, but I suppose that wasn't quite their scene!

Another Fox

More than a month ago I wrote about some fox stencils that cropped up in Northwest London.

Well, just last week someone removed a plywood wall that concealed a vacant storefront on Portobello Road, and what should be behind it -- another fox! Obviously not the same variety as the stencils, but we like him just the same.

Unfortunately that vacant shop is now under renovation, so who knows how much longer this fox will be hanging around!

Craneflies

One of the things that Dave and I have found interesting about England is the marked absence of insects. At least during the two months that we've been here -- in summer, a time when you'd think bugs would be at their worst -- we've seen very few. A couple of houseflies here and there, some bees on our lavender, and no crawling critters at all.

(Not that this is a bad thing.)

Windows in London don't even have screens, which shows just how insignificant insects are. Coming from Florida, where screens are mandatory and the air is always chock-full of flying things, and New York and New Jersey, where roaches, mosquitoes and gnats are commonplace, I find it a peculiar relief to live without window screens.

In the last several days, though, we have seen a few of these guys (above). They're spidery-legged flying insects an inch or two long. They look like really huge mosquitoes, and after doing some internet research I've learned they're called craneflies. They don't bite, and they're hardly exclusive to England -- they're common all over the world, and in fact I'm sure I've seen similar species in Florida.

If you look closely just beneath its wings, you can see two small rudders. These are called halteres and they help orient the insect during flight. Pretty cool, huh? Evolution is amazing.

Despite the halteres, though, craneflies fly in a sort of wobbly way, and they're very easy to catch. So last night, after taking this picture, I caught this guy and a companion and put them outside. Dave laughed at me and kept yelling "Kill them!" But that seemed like a rather extreme thing to do to a bug that doesn't even bite.

I later read that putting him outside -- he's almost certainly a male, based on the shape of his abdomen -- won't extend his life by much. By the time craneflies reach adulthood, they only live long enough to mate and die. He's pretty much at the end of his life span, but maybe I gave him a few more amorous opportunities.

Tate Modern

I felt like I needed a dose of culture yesterday, so I put on some nice clothes and went to the Tate Modern, the art museum in a converted power station on the south bank of the Thames. It's in a dramatic location, with the Millennium Bridge right outside the back door and an excellent view of St. Paul's Cathedral across the river.


I saw a lot of interesting art -- works by Picasso, Miro, Barnet Newman, Mark Rothko, Giorgio de Chirico and many others. I also saw some newer, more unusual pieces, like Jannis Kounellis' untitled piece featuring shot-through birds over a drawing of an industrial landscape on the wall. The birds "have been seen as symbolizing the death throes of imaginative freedom," according to the exhibit notes.


Do Ho Suh created an astonishing polyester-and-steel replica of the stairs in his New York apartment, right down to the power outlets and the turned newel posts on the upstairs railing.



And Ai Weiwei's work "Sunflower Seeds" just looks like a big heap of seeds, until you realize that each one was precisely handcrafted from porcelain. The artist, recently imprisoned in China, remembers sharing sunflower seeds as a compassionate gesture during the dark years of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.


I had lunch at the Tate -- I tried a Pimm's, a popular light cocktail in Britain that I found way too sweet for my taste -- and then I walked across the bridge. I found some shiny spherical sculptures in a plaza that made a perfect reflective surface for a self-portrait with St. Paul's in the background.


Finally I wandered over to Covent Garden, where I got some coffee from Starbucks and listened to an opera singer named Seija Knight as she performed for the crowds. She was excellent, at least to my untrained ear, and I bought her CD. I really enjoyed her performance.

Then I made my way back home, arriving about 5 p.m., just before the skies opened in a pouring rainstorm. Good timing!