Lunch at the Banqueting House

Bill writes: Last week we had lunch at the Royal Banqueting House. Designed by the man with the best name in british history--Inigo Jones--this building was finished in 1622 for performing court masques for James I as well as state functions such as official banquets. Impressively, the masques themselves often featured sets and costumes by Jones and text by Ben Johnson.



The building is one of the finest in England and one of Jones' greatest designs (along with parts of Greenwich and Covent Garden). The interior is based on a double-cube and the ceiling is adorned with a series of paintings by Rubens, commissioned by Jame's son Charles I to show the greatness of Jame's reign. Unfortunately, soon after the paintings were installed in 1636, King James realized that the torches used to provide the lighting for masques would blacken the expensive paintings, and no further performances were held there.



On an even darker note, in 1649 Charles I was convicted of treason and led out of one of the top floor windows of this building and onto a specially constructed balcony, where he was publicly executed by beheading.

By contrast, on the day we visited there was no masque (and fortunately no executions either), but there was a nice buffet followed by the Penny Merriments, who performed 16th and 17th Century songs and broadsides in period costumes (including this horse outfit) and using period instruments.



Afterwards, we walked through the courtyard of the Old Admiralty Building and the Horse Guards Parade.






And then had a spot of tea in St. James Park. The weather, as you can see, has been pretty grey lately. I think that just as Eskimoes have 50 words for snow, Londoner's must have an equal number for the shades of grey that make up their February landscape.

The Bear Gardens

Bill writes: Somehow I think the Bear Gardens, where they had bear-baiting on the lawless south side of the Thames in Shakespeare's day, used to be a lot scarier than this. And I for one am glad of it.

Hidden London: Lunch and Flamingoes

Bill writes: Aline took me to lunch yesterday at Babylon, a very nice restaurant at the top of this quite large and imposing building.



Lunch was great, but what Aline really wanted to show me was the rooftop garden of this building. Work is going on to renovate it, but we found a back entrance and let ourselves out to the garden. Or actually three gardens. Since 1928, the top of this building has had a series of large gardens.

The Tudor one is currently closed for renovation. However, we were able to sneak around to the back for a look at the spanish garden. It's a sort of mini-Alhambra, with a large courtyard, fountains, a covered walking gallery, and palm-trees.





But the marvels don't end there. Going around the corner, you come on the woodland garden, with streams, ponds, glens, and full-size trees all planted in the five feet of soil built on top of the roof. Not only are there ducks and mallards living in the ponds, but a pair of male flamingoes are there as well. They were brought here to the garden 20 years ago, and have lived on this rooftop contentedly ever since. It turns out that flamingoes are comfortable in weather down to around 15 degrees fahrenheit. So they were doing a lot better than we were.



Certainly not the sort of thing you expect in the center of London, but there you go.

Tower Bridge

Bill writes: After lunch yesterday we toured Tower Bridge, pretty much everyone's favorite bridge in London. Passing by Dead Man's Hole (where corpses from the Tower and surrounding areas were retrieved for storage below stairs), we went on into the bridge.



The bridge was built back in the 1880s, and is an amazing architectural achievement. Up until the 1970's it still used the original coal-fired engines to move each side of the 2,000 tons of roadway from horizontal to vertical in 60 seconds.





You can go to the top level of the bridge, the old pedestrian walkway, where one can get a nice view of the city. That's the HMS Belfast in the foreground and St. Paul's in the background on the right.



And you can see that the bridge is right next to the Tower.



A special exhibition on the Blitz was going on, and they had an "air-raid warden" talking about the problems of guarding the bridge during the German air raids. The main reason the bridge survived is that the Luftwaffe used it for a marker during the raids, as it was visible even during the blackouts. In turn, the wardens perched high on the bridge during the raids, and used wireless sets to inform the fire brigades where the fires from the bombs were located. What's astounding is the level of bombing that occured. Beginning on "Black Saturday," September 7 1940, 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters attacked London. It's hard to imagine, but according to the website I visited, this represented a 20-mile-wide swath of aircraft filling some 800 square miles of sky. At one point, the fires were so bright that people on Shaftesbury Avenue over 7 miles away could read their newspapers by the firelight on the docks. With barges of sugar and rum from dockside warehouses ablaze, even the Thames itself was on fire. And this was only the beginning, because the bombings continued for another 57 nights in a row. Absolutely astounding that anything survived. And yet, the bridge and St. Pauls did survive.

By contrast, by the time we left, it was dark, but the bridge was calm and lovely in the night.

Green Nuclear Meltdown

Bill writes: Well it seems that London's eccentrics are a theme this week. And these members of the Green party are no exception. We were walking with our class when we noticed a hubbub going on, as men and women in nuclear-logo'ed cleansuits pulled up alongside a pair of officers. The cleansuit folks donned masks and pulled out a series of beeping equipment as they swept the officers.



But then they noticed us, and headed over to our little group.



Uh-oh, I thought. However, I noticed that all their equipment looked a bit low-tech when seen up close. David, our most outspoken classmate, went over and quizzed them about it, fearless of his potential radioactivity. Turns out they were some kind of protest group.

But even after reading their literature/broadside, I'm pretty much as in the dark as ever. Even with the bright glow of the nuclear phosphorescents.

My Admiration for this Man Knows No Bounds

Bill writes: I don't know his name, and all his other deeds, if any, are lost to history. But he has my complete respect for utter obstinancy in the face of encroaching commercial interests. See that large building across the street? Look about two-thirds down on the right and spot the small white shop that splits the building into two parts.



The story is that the owner of that little shop refused to sell out when his neighbors on either side did to make way for a block-long store that was being planned. He refused all offers, saying that his shop was his and he was staying put and so was it. So the new building was constructed around him and his, and remains as you see it to this day. London's greatest monument to the little guy who said "No."

A Couple of Ding Dongs

Bill writes: Our class on the history of London took us to the East End yesterday. We spent a great day learning about Spitalfields and the Whitechapel area. One of the highlights for us was finding a connection with American history. Here is the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the foundry for Big Ben. Our eastender classmate was kind enough to point out that this was also where the Liberty Bell was first cast in 1752. Because I refrained from mentioning that the bell's workmanship left something to be desired, he agreed to take a photo of us in front of the shop. Notice the date above the door. This shop has been operating continously since the early days of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Not the current Queen Elizabeth--the first one.

It’s Not Just Grommet Watching Birds!

Aline writes: We figured Grommet spends so much time at the window, there must be something in it! So a few weeks ago we participated in the Big Garden BirdWatch. This event is put on by the RSPB (which I assume stands for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), and 2006 is the 26th year it has been held. The instructions were simple: on either January 28th or 29th you spend one hour observing and recording the most number of birds of each type you see at one time (to prevent double-counting). It was pretty cold, so we watched from our window with binoculars. My favorite newspaper, The Independent, ran a 4-page color section of the most common birds and how to recognize them, so that made our bird identification a lot easier. This is what we saw:

2 carrion crows
1 feral pigeon
1 wood pigeon
2 gulls
1 blackbird
2 wrens
10 magpies

The results will be announced next month; last year, over 400,000 people participated. The results helps them monitor what species are increasing and decreasing, especially because some European birds winter in England. It really made me more aware of what kinds of birds are in our garden – I can see why bird watching is so popular!

Plate Nappies

Bill writes: I need some help from British restaurant-goers here. When you take delivery of a meal in a low- to middle-range restaurant, it's odds-on that it will be delivered on a napkin on a plate. See illustrative photograph below.



You'll find them under sandwiches, under cakes, under bowls of soup. What's its purpose? British plate-napkins are a mystery to me, like bidets. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them. I'm afraid to use them, and even more afraid to leave them alone. The thing is, look at that napkin. The sandwich was great, I'll grant that. It was a tuna melt. But that means the filling melted right out of the sandwich and onto the napkin. In the case of a cake, the frosting is all over the napkin. Bowl of soup? Soup stuff. You get the idea. So should I use the napkin? Is it there to wipe my face with (or more accurately to transfer tuna melt/cake frosting/soup from the plate to my face with)? Is it to keep the plate separate from the food, like some kind of low-tech thermal insulation? Or is it to make certain that tiny, wet, sticky, torn bits of blue paper from the napkin leech onto my tuna melt sandwich, thereby ensuring I'm getting a bit of color fibre into my diet?

As my friend Barbara would ask, "What's the deal with that?"

Grommet Says, “Me? Ow!”

Aline writes: you may have wondered why we have been so quiet lately. Unfortunately, Grommet was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism 4 weeks ago during a routine exam. The vets (yes, he has his own specialist—a cardiologist) also found some heart problems, hopefully due to the hyperthyroidism (if so, the damage will be reversed once the hyperthyroidism is controlled). So he has been going to the vet a lot (poor thing), and we have been worrying a lot (poor things), and devising sneaky ways of giving him his daily meds. We are all doing better – Grommet has had no side effects from the meds, and we are gradually getting back to normal. He still has some vet appts in his future, but don’t tell him that :-) More posts to follow… we have a lot to catch up on!