.........started off with another fine meal at Bentley's in Mayfair. We always sit at the counter, drink their special stout and eat scallop and pea fritters. We love living in the big city, but we are such small town eaters. We invariably eat out at the same restaurants and order the same dishes -- because they are so good. We do add new places, as we did with Bentley's three years ago when Bob's job moved to London's node of hedgefunds in St. James's and Mayfair. The only problem with Bentley's now is that it is always filled with Americans. I guess it must appear on some list of where to eat posh fish and chips in London.
Bentley's is an old time fish restaurant recently brought back from the dead by one of the UK's celebrity chefs, Richard Corrigan, who I don't think does TV. Although I did see him once as a guest on Tamasin Day-Lewis's TV series, and I thought he was a really neat guy. I never watch TV cooking shows, but I did enjoy Tamasin's show in her funky home kitchen, mumbling to herself in that deep posh voice about what she was doing. TV cooks always seem to be perky, but Tamasin could never be accused of being perky. We used to get the Telegraph on Saturdays so I could read her weekly food column which was a wonderful source for information on ingredients and for recipes. Then the newspaper was sold and all the fun columnists disappeared. Susan says Tamasin's Kitchen Bible is the only UK cookbook she needs. (Marian Cunningham's Fanny Farmer Cookbook is the US equivalent for Susan.) After Tamasin ran off with the cheeseman (who then ran off with Nina Planck of our London Farmers' Markets, mentioned here already on 2 September ) the funky kitchen was sold in the divorce, and now she cooks in the shiny kitchen of her dreams, according to the Times.
After dinner we took the Tube over to Kings Cross for an evening of music at London's newest concert hall, Kings Place. The scruffy area around Kings Cross has been undergoing massive redevelopment for as many years as we have been here in London. The neighbourhood still has that half gentrified look I remember from lower Manhattan in the 1980s. Trendy offices and eateries flanked by buildings waiting for a rehabber to come along. The Guardian newspaper has built a new glass office building for themselves with gallery space at street level to wander through and see work from their archive on display. Tucked into one end of the building is a gorgeous arts centre with two concert halls, gallery display space, various eating and drinking venues, and what I can only describe as a huge public living room with tables and chairs to work at, and sofas to relax in. The Regents Canal passes behind the building, so on nice evenings -- as Friday was -- you can sit outside and watch the canal boats pass by. Last year to open their first season, they had a week-long festival of arts events from morning to late night. Each event lasted 45 minutes and cost £4.50. This year the festival was limited to the three days of the weekend. We heard two delightful concerts from musicians who are members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of London's major orchestras, and one that performs with original Baroque instruments. In the first concert, the oboes and bassoons from the orchestra played Lully, Handel. and Purcell's Fairy Queen, which they said they had played all summer at Glyndebourne. The second concert was two violins and a theorbo playing Purcell, Corelli and other Italians who experimented with the violin early on, and pieces from John Playford's music score collection published in the mid-17th century. Bob writes the programme notes for the chamber choir he sings with, and last year he wrote an interesting piece on Playford. During the Civil War period when the Puritans were in control, theatre and music were banned from public performance so entertainment moved into the private spaces of homes. Playford's music collections were popular with people who wanted to learn to play instruments, and those who wanted to organise musical evenings for private entertainment.
The new concert hall was lovely with wood panelling and outstanding acoustics. Sadly, the ticket prices for the regular schedule of concerts at Kings Place are quite expensive. All of their concerts are only 45 minutes, yet the tickets cost as much as the average ticket price for a full length concert anywhere else. Perhaps they are filling a niche for audiences with limited attention spans who don't mind paying full price for half a concert. For us, it really is more expensive than can be justified, so we will not likely be attending very many events here as the year goes on.
Saturday morning we set off early for Cambridge to see the Darwin show at the Fitzwillliam Museum. This is of course the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (born the very same day as Abraham Lincoln), and there has already been a big show at the Natural History Museum on Darwin's life and work. The Fitzwilliam had an interesting hook for their exhibit: Darwin's influence on artists in the 19th century, a period when discoveries in natural science were relentlessy changing the way the world was understood, and also a time when scientists, writers, and artists ran in the same circles as friends and colleagues. Entering the first room, you are face to face with Darwin himself in John Collier's, magnificent portrait of the man. Collier was T.H. Huxley's son-in-law twice over having married Huxley's eldest and youngest daughters. (Collier is also the grandfather of the 91-year old friend who I mentioned in my previous post on the start of the Second World War, which makes her T.H. Huxley's great-granddaughter through Collier's second wife, Huxley's youngest daughter.) The opening rooms of the show were devoted to the burst of interest in earth science after the publication of The Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell in 1830. Included were gorgeous geological maps including some drawn by Darwin, landscapes where the topographical features and rock structures are painted in detail, and fantastic canvases of "lands before time" filled with imagined prehistoric creatures fashioned from the evidence of recent fossil discoveries. Three popular genres of Victorian painting were then attributed to Darwinian principles. Scenes of animals struggling in the wild -- battling stags, raptors eating their prey -- illustrate "survival of the fittest" in the natural world, and the social realism paintings of the later Victorians -- starving peasants and wan labourers -- illustrate the extended principle of "social Darwinism" in the human world. For me the most interesting connection was in the genre of sad-eyed puppy paintings, as I have always thought of them when passing quickly by, that was related to Darwin's theories of animal expression which anthropomorphised animals by attributing emotions akin to human emotions. So now I will forever have a context to view these paintings. I love art exhibits that make me understand the world in a new way. The artists exhibited here all used Darwin's scientific work to see the world in a new way, and the remainder of the show was mostly devoted to human evolution and behaviour -- women flaunting their beauty as male birds flaunt their fabulous feathers, human racial types catalogued, and explorations of "pre-evolved" humanity -- both cave man paintings and imaginary beasts. Our favourite was a set of Redon lithographs entitled Les Origines (after The Origin of Species, of course) which includes a flower with an eye, a cyclops, a cynical satyr, and Pegasus on his back finding his wings to be useless for flight. When you think about it, why not a few fauns and gryphons in that great chain.
Cambridge's academic museums really are quite spectacular for their amassed collections. Despite regular visits during Susan's two years in Cambridge, we had only been to the Fitzwilliam and the Polar Museum before. Sadly the History of Science Museum is closed on weekends, but the Geology Museum was open with another Darwin Commemorative Display that included Darwin's personal belongings from the History of Science Museum. Bob loved seeing Darwin's microscope, my frisson of excitement came from the rocks on display, that had little collection tags printed "Beagle Collection." How cool is that, the very rocks Darwin picked up and brought back to Cambridge.
The day ended with Susan coming over for dinner. She is working non-stop on her first (and hopefully not last) exhibit for the Hampstead Museum which opens next Sunday as part of the 30th Anniversary Celebration for Burgh House. Fortunately Sunday was a boring day in which we cleaned the house in preparation for my hosting the weekly quilt group on Monday. As I am finishing this "weekend post" on Tuesday, I will have to learn to be quicker and conciser with future weekend posts......
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