'Opening Night' with Gators

Yesterday was unremarkable until after work, when I went down to Soho to see a show. I had a couple of hours to kill before curtain time, so I revisited this pub on Tottenham Court Road, which I went to 24 years ago on my first trip to London. I wrote in my journal in April 2000: "Ate lunch at a pub called the Jack Horner, where I had a fish & cheese 'pie' (in a bowl) called a 'parson's hat.' Not sure why it's known as a pie, since it was nothing like one!"

I guess I was unfamiliar with the word pie in the British sense...?

Anyway, it was fun to go back. I didn't eat this time. In fact, I didn't even look to see whether they still serve a "parson's hat." I just had a pint and sat reading. It's a good old-fashioned pub with lots of wood and no pretensions of glamor.

Then I walked around for a bit, taking pictures:

Eventually I stopped at Pret for an inexpensive soup and sandwich, and sat in the window reading the first volume of David Sedaris' diaries, "Theft By Finding." I've read it before -- in fact the library copy I'm reading used to be my own -- but none of it stuck with me so it's like new. I laughed out loud at his 1981 description of Jim Bakker: "He looks like a baby monkey. Not just a baby. Not just a monkey."

After Pret I still had an hour to kill, so I read at an outdoor table on Old Compton Street and had a syrupy glass of cheap rosé before making my way to the theater.

I was there to see "Opening Night," Ivo van Hove's new musical based on the John Cassavetes movie from 1977. It hasn't been a commercial success and it's about to close, but I wanted to catch it before it did. It's about an alcoholic actress who's struggling to connect with her character in the days before the opening of a show, and having something of a breakdown exacerbated by the death of a fan outside the theater. Rufus Wainwright wrote the score, and Sheridan Smith does an excellent job as the actress, played by Gena Rowlands in the original movie. I thought it was an interesting, innovative show, but the woman next to me disappeared at intermission so apparently opinions are mixed.

A woman in the row in front of me kept complaining about the man sitting in front of her. She said he was too large and she couldn't see around him, and said something about how "it shouldn't be allowed in the theater, but there you are." She eventually changed seats.

Here's the man:

I don't know if she was upset about his hat or his Florida track suit. He didn't engage with her at all, as far as I could see. I'm not sure he was even aware.

And then, on the way home, this woman was walking in front of me toward the tube:

What are the odds?!

Baby Einstein

This plant is growing down the street from our flat. According to my trusty iPhone, which I just discovered has a built-in plant-identifying feature, it is a Chilean potato vine (Solanum crispum). My "Picture This" plant app identifies it as Solanum laxum, but in any case, it's an ornamental potato of some sort.

Yes! I just learned this about iPhones. If you take a picture of a plant and then look at the photo in your photo album, there's a little leaf icon below it. Hit the icon and the phone tells you what kind of plant it is. Siri, that mastermind!

I spent yesterday morning down in the Lower School working on inventory. I've finished the non-fiction section, which I've found to be missing 39 books. I suspect many are actually there and they either didn't scan correctly or have slid to the back of the shelf, so now I'll make a second pass and look for them.

There were kids all around me while I did this work, tumbling and romping like puppies. One boy ran up to me with a drawing and said, "Can you see the L?" I looked at the page he held up, featuring a sort of octagonal shape with random divisions like a stained glass window, and sure enough there was a letter L in there. Maybe his name starts with L. "Oh yeah!" I said. "Cool!"

This kid had no idea who I was but he didn't care.

They were also full of talk about who "likes" who, and who "has a crush" on who, which I thought was pretty sophisticated for kids no older than fourth grade. One kept talking about how "everything is energy," and about how you, me, his lunch and his toys were all "MC squared." He'd clearly just learned about Einstein. A budding physicist! "Why are you so obsessed with 'MC squared?'" asked one of his friends, perhaps not a budding physicist.

It's so funny to hear little kids talk to each other. The stuff they come up with!

Olga loves this time of year because in the afternoons, the sun shines straight into the living room and warms her on the couch!

An Apple, a Flood

Here's another curious thing I encountered on my excursion into the city on Sunday. I'm not sure if you can see what's going on in this photo, but water was pouring out of the ceiling onto the train platform at the Baker Street tube station. The transport workers had set up some sandbags to catch the spill and direct it down the platform, but it was still quite a mess. I've never seen anything like this before that I can recall. Apparently Thames Water has begun a project to upgrade the Victorian water mains outside the tube station, and I wonder if this leak was somehow related to that work.

So what else has been going on around here?

Well, I tried to see the aurora borealis over the weekend, but I didn't get a hint of anything in the sky over London. Maybe I was out at the wrong time, but I suspect there's actually just too much light pollution. I even tried the point-your-iPhone-at-the-sky trick and it did nothing. I just got gray.

Olga was feeling poorly yesterday and we're not sure why. She wouldn't eat a treat or her dinner, her stomach was gurgling and she was eating a lot of grass. She gets like this sometimes, and we've found that if we can just get a smidgen of food into her, it settles her stomach and her appetite returns in short order. So we got take-out burgers for dinner, and I gave Olga part of my meat patty. She ate it, and sure enough she ate most of her can of food soon afterwards. We'll see how she fares today.*

Apropos of nothing, here's an old photo my dad took of me and my brother at our grandparents' house in Hyattsville, Md. This was probably 1972 or so, which means I would have been five and my brother would have been about two. I'm sitting on the bucket holding up an apple from my grandparents' apple tree. I was reminded of this photo when I opened a frame and found it beneath the photo that was on display. I switched it out so this one is now in the frame. My brother looks puzzled, doesn't he?

*Late addendum: Olga ate normally this morning and walked her regular route, and had a treat afterwards. So she seems OK today!

Purple Hibiscus

And here was my Sunday afternoon adventure: I went to see "Purple Hibiscus," the huge fabric artwork by Ibrahim Mahama at the Barbican.

"Purple Hibiscus" consists of about 2,000 square meters of handwoven cloth made by craftspeople in northern Ghana. The pieces, designed to precisely fit the building's dimensions, are so large that the artist rented out a football stadium so they could be woven and sewn on the field when matches weren't being played. The cloth -- about 20 tons of it -- was then brought to London and wrapped around the Barbican building, Christo-like, overlooking the Lakeside Terrace.

Embroidered into the cloth are about 100 garments called batakaris, which the artist collected from families across northern Ghana. According to the exhibition guide: "These precious textiles, often saved by families over generations, tucked away in wardrobes or stored below beds, carry the imprints of the lives, lineage and power of the figures they once clothed. Worn, degraded and bearing traces of years of use, these smocks are testaments to the endurance of traditional belief systems, and the continued relevance of intergenerational knowledge."

I think it's a fascinating creation and it certainly brightens up the Barbican's normally earthy concrete facade. I was prompted to walk all the way around to the other side of the lake, which I don't think I've ever done before, to see it in its entirety. (Walking to the other side of the lake is more involved than it sounds -- you've basically got to trace a circuitous path around the entire estate.)

I got a cup of coffee and sat out on the sunny terrace, people-watching, before walking to Farringdon station and making my way home again via the Thameslink. A perfect outing for a sunny afternoon!

Lots of Olga

Remember how I erected that barrier to keep Olga out of the teasels? Yeah. It doesn't work very well.

Yesterday was another "cracking day," to use Mr. Kravitz's memorable phrase. The temperatures hit 80º F (or 27º C), our warmest day yet, with bright sunshine and a blue sky. Spectacular!

I spent the morning in the garden, of course, doing more weeding and small tasks. Remember the pathetic canna lily that never prospered? Well, it's dead. It didn't survive the winter. Our big cannas haven't shown themselves yet, either -- I hope they're not dead, but if they are, so be it.

After lunch, Olga and I set out on a very slow walk to the cemetery.

The mystery bulbs that were planted on West End Green have revealed themselves to be some type of alliums, as well as (I think) irises.

Olga, navigating here through a thicket of garlic mustard, seemed to enjoy the walk. She chased her tennis ball...

...and luxuriated in the cool, wet mud...

...and rolled in the high grass.

I noticed another pretty large tree has fallen over the cemetery path. Unlike the cherry, this one did take out a headstone or two. Man erects his petty monuments, and nature turns them to dust.

I haven't seen or heard the turaco yet this year. But I did solve the mystery of the dangling girls. There are, in fact, two of them -- positioned on the same side of the same tree, but far enough away from each other that you don't really see them together, if that makes sense. So my suspicion that someone comes around and switches them out is, in fact, a fantasy. Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually true.

I took Olga back home -- we encountered this smiley little sand-filled balloon on the sidewalk. I think it's one of those squeezy stress balls? Anyway, she got a bath and took a nap while I set out on another adventure, which I'll tell you about tomorrow.

Meteorological Observations from Mr. K

I just discovered something that all you Blogger nerds will appreciate. I've always been troubled by the presence of extraneous html code in my posts -- mainly paragraph tags (a letter P inside brackets) that make the spaces between text and photos too big. I would always write a post and then go back into the html code and remove the paragraph tags. There were always four, two at the very top of the post, above the first photo, and two above the second photo. I have no idea why.

BUT I just discovered that when I start a post, if I hit backspace before I do anything else, it removes that formatting. Voila! No more need to go in and manually take out the tags. What I type is what I get.

This will mean nothing to you if you're not a blogger -- but if you are and you're picky about formatting like I am, it might be useful information.

I got lots done in the garden yesterday. It was an amazing day, weather-wise. Or, as Mr. Kravitz said to me when I ran into him on the street, "Cracking day, isn't it?" (Mr. K is a man of few words so I was impressed that I got anything more than a hello.)

I trimmed and pulled weeds, mainly dock, that cursed scourge. I'm really trying to work with weeds and let some of them be, but if I leave even one dock plant to set seed, we'll have six million of them the following year. And they are almost impossible to pull up, being brittle with a long taproot, and if even a smidgen of the root remains the plant will regrow. From an evolutionary standpoint it's impressive. Dock is a survivor.

I trimmed where one plant was bumping into or smothering another. Like where our big hideous camellia bush was overgrowing and stunting the top of the cardoon. Now the cardoon has space to breathe free and reach for the sky.

How is it possible that we have a hideous camellia, you may ask? Aren't camellias one of the prettiest of flowers?

Well, in many cases, yes. But our camellias are white, and the blossoms turn brown within a day or two of opening. And then they hang on forever, so the overall effect is a bush with brown, dead, saggy flowers. LOADS of them. It has also become way too large for the space. We're seriously thinking of chopping it down, and you know I don't do that kind of thing lightly.

See what I mean? It's also very misshapen, because it was planted too close to the gigantic mock orange behind it, which means the back side is entirely without leaves. (We didn't plant it. It was here when we moved in.)

Anyway, I filled two yard waste bags and the garden still looks wildly overgrown. We like it that way but it's funny how all that work produced little visible change.

Meanwhile, Queen Olga basked in the sun by the back door. Dave pulled out all that fertilizer (at left) because he was going to feed the plants, but then he took a nap and it didn't happen. Maybe today.

I also managed to work through two issues of The New Yorker plus our RHS gardening magazine. Whew! The exertion!

(Top photos: A bee inside our yellow peony, which has TEN buds this year, the first of which has just opened.)

Number Our Days

Can you stand a few more orchid photos? We have two more plants blooming. The yellow-green one above is one of the five orchids I found in a neighbor's yard waste bag last fall -- you may remember I brought them all home and repotted them. One died in short order but the others are still with me, and three of the four have flower stalks, though this is the only one with an actual blossom so far. I think they're all the same color.

And then there's this one, also a rescue. It's bloomed before but I'm always happy to have another round of flowers!

Yesterday I did more inventory in the Lower School. I'm slowly whittling down that tally of 50 missing picture books as I find some of them here and there. I think we're down to 40 now.

My health is still a bit of a mystery. Remember that calprotectin test I took a couple of weeks ago, the one that was high, indicating inflammation in my gut? Well, I took it again, as recommended by my doctor -- and it was still high, though slightly lower than last time -- around 250. (I have no idea whether these variations are significant.) So there's still something going on. I've received confirmation from the NHS that they've taken me off the "28-day pathway" -- a fast track that lets them assess possible cancer cases quickly. So whatever's happening they've concluded it's not that, based on the endoscopy. But I still don't have the CT scan and biopsy results, and though I feel better I'm still feeling weird. I won't rest completely until all the results are in. I'll talk about it all with the doctor when I consult with her again in another month.

Dave and I have nothing planned for this weekend. We're going to get out in the garden and tidy things up a bit -- it's looking a little overgrown and crazy out there right now. I also need to power through my stack of New Yorkers, which is weighing heavily on me.

I read a piece yesterday about a guy who took a Polaroid photo -- only one -- every day for about 20 years, until his untimely death from cancer in the late '90s. His friends have used that body of work as inspiration for a performance piece, and the article mentions Psalm 90, apparently one of the oldest of the psalms and one that reminds us to appreciate life and "number our days" to gain wisdom. Taking a daily Polaroid is a way of numbering days, and it occurred to me that blogging is too. I'm numbering my days here, though the jury's still out on whether I'm accruing wisdom.

Here's Olga, our old girl, sleeping soundly on the couch last night. Both she and her pink blanket are looking pretty tattered. But this morning she's watching me expectantly as I write, waiting for her walk, so I guess I should get that underway. Olga numbers her days in trees sniffed and cats chased -- or at least glared at.