The Fog in London

Sun-up was at 7:56 this morning according to the BBC weather site, and we are having our first foggy morning of the season. The skyscraper tower of the Royal Free Hospital two blocks away — considered a blight by Hampsteaders — is not visible from the dining room window at the moment. These foggy days are a prelude to Christmas every year. A new weather front is dropping the temperature every day, and for the next few mornings we can expect freezing fog to linger. The sidewalks — I can never remember they are called pavements here — will be wet and slick; the damp air will penetrate the woolen defenses of scarves, hats, and gloves, making the temperature seem much colder than it really is.

As the atmospheric fog drops, the fog of my eternal head cold seems to be lifting. The week after my return from the States, I never left the house except to buy some  head cold medication. I just slept and worked on breathing. Fortunately, there were no dates to remember on my calendar. This week has been a gradual entrance back into the swing of living in London.

I hosted a quilt group pot-luck lunch on Monday and attended one on Thursday. The Monday group always holds the pot-luck lunch here because we have more Christmas decorations than anyone else.  Most of the group members are ex-pats living in rented and often furnished flats who will only be here for the months or years of their husband's overseas assignment, so naturally they haven't brought the family decorations from home. I usually welcome the party to unpack our beloved Christmas decorations, but I am afraid last weekend I made a rather half-hearted effort, so I have to finish the job this weekend. Alas, we have another year in which the storage box of Christmas themed fabrics has not been touched. The old "Christmas in July" craft magazine promotions need to be revived. Speaking of magazines, Borders bookstores in the UK are closing down, so my easy access to US magazines is now closed off. Borders US expanded to the UK shortly after we moved to London, but was sold off a few years ago to a UK private equity group and then to a management buyout, but Waterstones has the high streets sewn up having bought up all the other high street chains. Borders opened up some huge US-size bookstores around the country. Those empty spaces are going to make big holes in shopping districts.

I loved seeing Megan's Sanctimommy photos of decorating Hingham. Some are ones she grew up with and requested when she and Barnz chose to have Christmas on their own. It has been nine years since we spent Christmas with Megan. I would never ever want young children to spend Christmas away from home. I still have memories of a Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in Washington, D.C. with two little girls deeply worried the Easter Bunny would not be able to find them for basket delivery room service. (He did.) As of yesterday however, I have formed a new holiday plan. In a few years, I want Megan and the children to come for a visit the week after Christmas so, as dual citizens, they can experience an important cultural component of their English nationality: the theatre. The English live and breathe theatre, unlike Americans who have very little access to theatre productions unless they live in New York with money to spare. Outside of New York, there is the one professional repertory theatre in big cities, the non-professional drama club in small cities, and the ubiquitous high school musical. I wonder if high schools even put on plays any more. My high school had the annual musical plus a Junior Class Play and a Senior Class Play where we were introduced to classics like Blithe Spirit and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Hingham High School had a vaunted drama program, but after the annual autumn musical, all I remember being invited to see was the 15 minute entry into the all-important Massachusetts High School Drama Competition, which recognises technics and techniques, but offers no appreciation of drama as art.

Yesterday, when an English friend with a three year-old granddaughter listed the number of performances they had already attended with her and how many more were coming up, I realised the national love of drama begins with the pantomime season at Christmas. Time Out magazine lists 27 productions under the Children's Theatre heading in this week's issue. They include The Cat in the Hat at the National Theatre directed by Katie Mitchell (a very hot young director), The Enchanted Pig, an opera by Jonathan Dove at the Royal Opera House, and The Forest at the Young Vic. Then there are the annual productions based on beloved story books, Raymond Brigg's The Snowman told in dance (suitable for age 2+ to start them really young), Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, and a new production of her book Stick Man. The year-round children's theatres, the Polka, the Angel, the Unicorn, have seasonal productions too. So of course I want my grandchildren to come here to spend a week attending the theatre every day. When they outgrow the children's productions they will graduate to the adult panto productions. Fairy tales told with an edge of sexual innuendo and cross-dressing with B-list celebrities, popular stars of past decades, soap opera stars, and reality TV competition winners and losers in the special roles. We went to a few high-class pantos — Angela Carter's posthumous Cinderella — years ago, but looking through the listings, perhaps we need to book a real panto this year.

Every year in the weeks before Christmas we book so many Christmas concerts, there is no room for anything else. Looking at my calendar I see six concerts coming up over the next two weeks. Speaking of music, I am surrounded by stacks of CDs — our collection of Christmas music (minus the extensive, but outdated collections of LPs and tapes) that Bob has been using to write his review of favourite Christmas music available on Bazzfazz (11 parts) and on Scholars and Rogues, which has 14 parts. A Big Day in Hingham was the day the Atlantic Wire website picked up Part 4 from Scholars and Rogues. I can't find the actual link because my computer is not picking up links very quickly right now, but the Atlantic Wire bills itself as "tracking the most influential opinion makers," and on the night in question, everyone else on The Ticker was indeed someone notable from their 50 most important pundits list. I feel the title of Bob's post, which included the words "Medieval Babes" had something to do with its selection by an A-list political site with cultural pretensions. Megan and Barnz, who can do these things, captured a "screen shot" so we have a record of this event on Bob's laptop.

In addition to the two pot-luck lunches, I went to two book groups this week. My regular "Sevens" group read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a book I did not like in the 1980s when I first read it, and which I found I still don't like when I reread it earlier this week, although I keep reading that I should like it as it is some sort of classic. The group was split on opinion, but those who liked it kept citing the magnificent prose, which is usually the reason given to call it a classic. One thing I don't like is the writing style which I found made up of oddly patched and overblown phrasing. Our moderator found an interview in which Robinson said she began writing and saving metaphors when she was doing a graduate degree on Shakespeare, and later she realised she had the voice of Ruth in her random collection. In other words, she did patch together the prose.

The second book group was an extra meeting of the "Literary Ladies" to meet  Ruth Waterman, the author of When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo. Ruth is an English violinist who studied at Julliard and lived in New York for years before returning to England. In 2002 she was invited to guest conduct the Mostar Sinfonietta in Bosnia. She returned to Bosnia to lead concerts in 2004, 2005, and 2006, when funding for the orchestra ran out. As a BBC contract presenter, the BBC gave her recording tape and suggested a radio show if she found any interesting material. She collected personal experiences of the devastating war years from her young orchestra members that were used for a Radio 4 programme, and ultimately for this book. I bought the book from her, so haven't read it yet, but she played excerpts from the voices of the musicians and discussed the sadly deteriorating situation in Bosnia at the moment. The meeting was heightened by a visiting friend of a member who told of her escape to Rio de Janiero from Bosnia with her 9 year-old daughter after, as she said, "my mother's body was found in the river and my grandmother was killed." She is also a violinist, explaining she was in Bosnia when the war began because she had returned from living in Paris when asked to represent Bosnia in an international competition, and told us of her desperation when her only chance to stay in Rio was by securing a seat in the city's symphony orchestra. The room certainly went silent as she told her story, giving us an inkling of what Ruth went through when survivors poured out their experiences.

Finally, we went to a gallery opening of a print exhibition organised by the husband of a quilting friend. David is an artist and designer, and his design has been chosen by the Royal Mail for the Olympic Sports series of stamps issued earlier this year. David's stamp is for Badminton. To celebrate he invited other stamp designers to exhibit their work as prints made by Epson photocopiers. What a great show. The link to the ROA Gallery lets you see the wonderful work on display. We chose at least a dozen. Next week we will have to hone our choice down to Christmas gift level.

At last I feel like I am back into the routine of life.  Tomorrow we get our tree, and I begin to organise what needs doing between now and the New Year. We haven't even caught up on the Advent Calendars. Christmas is only two weeks away!!

A cultural cornucopia of autumn

A generally busy week around here. Saturday evening we heard the Tallis Scholars at Cadogan Hall doing motets on death by Lassus, Gombert and Josquin, followed by Victoria's Requiem. Not a cheerful programme. We used to be fans of the Tallis Scholars, but we gave them up a few years ago when we started thinking everything they sing sounds a bit like everything else they sing. A bit boring really. And I guess we still are thinking that after Saturday night. We have tickets to their Christmas concert in December too.

Sunday was cold and gloomy so instead of doing a planned walk, we went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and the Masters exhibit that opened a few weeks ago. Turner is not one of my favourites, and I know very little about him, except for the tons of information that permeates English culture because he is after all "England's greatest artist" who painted England's favourite painting.  A Cockney prodigy, he enjoyed besting his contemporaries and the old masters who came before. He famously added a speck of red to his seascape in the 1832 Royal Academy Show when he saw that it was hanging next to Constable's red splattered Waterloo Bridge.  This exhibit hangs the two works side-by-side for the first time since 1832. The entire show is made up of Turner paintings side-by-side with the work of artists he wished to emulate or more to the point to outshine in skill. He competed with all of the greats: Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Canaletto and dozens of other very good artists. The Tate holds a huge collection of Turners because of the Bequest to the nation that settled his estate's death duties — and the idea for the show comes from Turner in his will leaving a few of his works to the nation with the condition that Dido Building Carthage be displayed next to Claude's ...Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in the National Gallery. The interesting thing about the show is that curator David Solkin chose to exhibit as many misses as hits for Turner's scorecard. There were some where Turner's version of another artist's subject was a clear winner, especially when atmosphere was a defining element. There were some perfectly dreadful pastiches of master works. Sadly, for me and for Bob who is a bit more of a Turner fan than I, there were some perfectly lovely paintings by Turner that paled when sitting next to a master, so we have another show where opinion of the artist declines as the show progresses. In our family that is known as the Bonnard effect, after a huge show at the Tate in 1998. We took time out from our moving-to-a-new-country chores to see the show, and Susan, Bob, and I agreed that the only Bonnard we really liked was the famous Dining Room Overlooking the Garden at the Met in New York.

On the plus side, some of the old masters borrowed for the show were well worth the price of admission (which we didn't pay because we are members), especially Rembrandt's The Mill from Washington D.C.'s National Gallery. That was one of Bob's favourites when he was in the army in Maryland and spent his spare time in Washington museums. He hardly recognised it because it has been cleaned in the intervening 35 years, which I read on-line was rather controversial since it completely changed interpretations of the work.

While at the Tate Britain, we stopped in to see the Turner Prize nominees work which has just gone on display. Why it is the Turner Prize I have no idea except he is Britain's best/favourite artist. He would have no problem whatsoever competing with these artists and winning hands down. This is the Prize that has featured unmade beds and light bulbs flashing on and off in past years. I couldn't possibly comment on any of these nominees so I will let a link do that.

And I found a new artist to admire in a room display on women artists who had a hard time because they were women. Stanislawa de Karlowska was married to the Camden Town painter Robert Bevan. The Tate owns three of her works and these two were on display.

Last night we did something we rarely do anymore. We went to see a dance performance. This is the centenary of Diaghilev's Paris company Les Ballet Russes, and Sadler's Wells' contribution to the celebration is this programme where they asked four choreographers to create pieces In the Spirit of Diaghilev.  We went primarily because one of four, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui,  choreographed a fabulous programme we saw last year titled Myth. His contribution was Faun, based on the music Afternoon of the Faun with additions from Nitin Sawhney,  and featured two remarkable dancers. Afterlight, danced to wonderful Satie piano music, was an homage to Nijinsky, danced by a solo male with a light show playing over his body movements. Quite fantastic. Those were the two successful parts of the evening.

The first piece featured many dancers, several large TV screens with bright red machines turning and black and white stripes rippling, plus a bright strobe light that unfortunately was directed right at Bob's retina, so he had to hold his hand over his eyes for most of the piece. The TV screens were very distracting, as any neuroscientist knows, the brain is wired to watch moving impulses of light, and as any parent buying an infant mobile knows, red, black and white are the colours that can be discriminated first and best.  I have no idea what the dancers did, I watched the TVs. When we were riding home on the Tube, and I finally had a chance to read my programme notes, I discovered this piece was made by "an ongoing collaborative enquiry into the distributed nature of choreographic thinking with the Interactive Cognition Lab, UCSanDiego" — the very place Bob did his cognitive science post-doc 30 years ago!!!!!! So it was neuroscience after all.

We had gotten an e-mail from Sadler's Wells last week noting this production included "adult content" material, and that would have been directed at the final piece which included rape, sodomy, a Pope, a garotting, blood, and an electrocution. This was very much "in the spirit of Diaghilev" measured by the people walking out! But no fist fights as far as I could see. A powerful blast of incense permeating the theatre did nothing to improve my reaction. The music was a lovely waltz — my programme says Ravel's Mother Goose — so ho hum, violence and nursery rhymes, must be a commentary on our times or something.

I also finished another book this week, Gardens of Water, a first novel by Alan Drew, written when a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book has one of those Readers' Guides for book groups in which we learn that Drew and his wife took teaching jobs in Turkey, arrived in Istanbul four days before the huge earthquake hit in 1999, and lived there for three years. The latter means they were there pre- and post-9/11, never mentioned in the interview, but clearly what helped shape the text. A Kurdish family of four has been uprooted from their Southern Turkey homeland because of the PKK rebellion. The Turkish forces are of course funded and supplied with weapons by the US — it's just what we do — and the father hates Americans — it's just what they do. They have settled in a city near Istanbul, but when the earthquake hits, they lose their home, shop, and extended family. The Turkish government is unable to respond to the crisis so they rely on American aid workers to feed and house the population. These aid workers are Christians who offer succour, but at the price of intense proselytising. The novel sets up clashes in world view: evangelical Christianity in a Muslim community; traditional parents trying to maintain their values — values that are mostly abhorrent to those with Western values such as the readers of this book — but whose children are swayed by the toys and treats of the modern world; the deep distrust of anything associated with the US by the millions of people whose lives have been tragically altered by one US policy or another.  I won't be giving anything away if I say this is not a happy book.

Cold weather has arrived in London this week along with quite a bit of rain. We haven't yet turned on the heat, but we will this weekend. After spending a day shivering wearing three sweaters and my bathrobe, I finally pulled out my winter clothes and sweaters. My closet and drawers are stuffed full so that means no shopping trips for me. I find myself drawn to the window displays this season because so much of it looks familiar — 1965 familiar. The last time these cute tunics and miniskirts were around, I was the target market! There are articles in the paper about Twiggy because she is turning 60. How could she have been younger than I was? And suddenly through Facebook I am in contact with high school classmates who haven't crossed my mind in 40+ years. I seem to be simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time.

Jenni in Bruges

Our traveling totem Barley sits on a wall in Bruges.

A few weeks ago, Bob and I realised that since Bibs was born 2 years/2 months ago, our holidays have been only to the States except for a week in Germany in 2008 and a weekend in Vienna way back in January. There are many reasons to love living in London, but one of the best is hopping a plane or train and being in Europe in a few hours or less. When we moved here, we coincided with the advent of cheap airlines that would take you any where in Europe for a few pounds (and when they wanted to fill planes, a few pence). The first few years we were here, at the turn of the century, there were at least four discount airlines — Go and Buzz are long gone, Ryanair and Easyjet hang on — competing for passengers by offering lower and lower fares. This was of course in retrospect A Very Bad Thing for many places — Prague and Vilnius were overrun with very drunk Brits attending stag party and hen party weekends – and for some people too — on school holidays very drunk teenage girls were raped and very drunk teenage boys died falling out of hotel windows on Greek islands. And we hardly need to go into the Very Bad Thing this was for airplane emissions and global warming. The cheap airlines are no longer very cheap. The post-9/11 airport security levied stiff taxes on each ticket, the rising price of jet fuel increased fares further, and now we have the endless extra charges for bags, for check-in at the airport, for paying with credit cards, and now for seat reservations too.

For a time though, the cheap airfares were A Very Good Thing for us. Nearly every month I could book a ticket and be in some wonderful city: Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Helsinki, The Hague, Oslo, Copenhagen, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Dresden, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Siena, Lucca, Brussels, Paris, Nice, Cannes, Monaco, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Munich, Cologne, and Bruges. There are lots of places I still want to see in Europe — Seville, Milan, Bergen, spring to mind — but I have now been to Bruges three times. I have not seen In Bruges yet, but I will watch it tonight because it came in the mail while we were in Bruges.

My trips to Bruges started as literary pilgrimages. I can't remember where I first heard about Dorothy Dunnett, but I bought the first volume at Waterstones in one of those buy two books/get a third one free offer that is now standard in UK bookshops. Of course you can always find two you have been dying to read, but never a third with equal passion. Dorothy Dunnett, who sadly died in 2001 right as I was buying that first volume, is a cult writer with a huge, if hidden, following. She wrote two enormous multi-volume historical fiction series with casts of thousands of characters, both fictional and real, with complicated plots that follow historical events with great accuracy. In 2002, I began the eight volume Niccolo series, and I might have flagged half way through, but by that time, I had told Megan about Dorothy, and she urged me on, as a fan and a fast reader, she finished all eight volumes of Niccolo and then devoured the six volumes of the Lymond chronicle . The heroic Niccolo begins his globe trotting career in the important textile centre of Bruges in Flanders in the Duchy of Burgundy during the 1460s to 1480s. In those pre-Columbian decades, he single-handedly invents international capitalism as he roams through Europe to adventures in Cyprus, Iceland, Africa, and Scotland. By the end of 2002, Megan had convinced me that we must see Bruges for ourselves. So we headed off in cold and raining early November when many places were closed for the public holidays All Saints Day and Armistice Day which serve as a good week to take off after the tourist season is over. But we did have a good time in a lovely cozy hotel, The Egmond which I highly recommend, but it was completely booked for the month when I tried them last week, so plan ahead. We spent a great deal of time eating candy and cross-stitching after finding a very good embroidery shop. 2002 was the end of the year for Bruges as a European Cultural Capital, so there were several special shows still on view about lace and with illuminated manuscripts. And of course we wandered the streets seeking out sites from the Niccolo books where important events happen.

This is the Jerusalem Chapel where Niccolo was married with the approval of the chapel's owner Anselm Adornes who is now entombed in the chapel under this effigy of him and his wife.

The following year, Ryanair decided to fly a route to Ostend/Bruges, so Bob, Susan, and I booked for one pence tickets -- oh the golden days of destroying the environment -- which was perfectly ridiculous, and the route was scrapped after a few months. For one thing we were in the air for about 15 minutes, not long enough to fly much higher than a kite. Second, these cheap airlines which fly to less accessible destinations use not real airports, but old commercial aviation landing strips that are in the middle of nowhere, and then require long bus rides to the actual desired place of destination. On this trip the bus ride was more than an hour to Bruges! At the very last minute, Bob had to cancel because of a work-related matter, so Susan and I carried on. Susan is not an enthusiast of tourist sites that in some way resemble Disney World and attract the same travelers — she is not a fan of Venice nor of Bruges — but we also had a good time visiting the very interesting city of Ghent and exploring the old beach resort at Ostend.

I always knew that I would need a third trip to Bruges with Bob, so when we realised the paucity of our recent travels, Bruges seemed the obvious easy and near destination. Plus, Bob has now read all of Dorothy Dunnett, being the other fast reader in the family, he has plowed through both the Niccolo and Lymond series. (As the slow reader with a Pile to Read, I have not yet read the Lymond books, but I am thinking that is a possible 2010 project.) Travel to Bruges could not be easier, we took the cheap £49 train at 6:00 in the morning on Friday. The new fast Eurostar from St Pancras, which we hadn't ever used, gets you to Brussels in 2 hours. The 9:00 (add an hour for the Continental time difference) train to Ghent/Bruges/Ostend was 5 minutes late, so we caught it, and an hour later, we were in Bruges at 10:00 in the morning. Third time in Bruges is not really recommended over all. On the plus side we had a weekend of sparkling beautiful early autumn weather, several churches I had never seen were open, and Bob has a nose for good restaurants, so we had some terrific meals.

Some of the lovely canals that run though Bruges. The center of the city is usually crowded with tourists in small groups and in large groups, but when you walk away from the center, the crowds disappear. And one of the windmills placed on the embankment where the city wall once ran.
















































A Romanesque carving over a portal in the Basilica of the Holy Blood.




On the negative side, the art museum was closed until next weekend for a rehang of the collection, so we didn't get to see those jewels of Flemish art; the quality of shops has declined to offering just tourist tat both in the embroidery shop Megan and I patronised, and in the German Christmas chain Kathe Wohlfahrt where the nice angel orchestra figures I buy for Megan have been replaced with made-in-China knock-offs. And the hotels.com offering we booked had a nice entry and a good location, but the room was up two steep flights where I was eaten by mosquitos and have now broken out in some sort of allergic rash of red bumps on my face and arms.

However, the pastoral Beguinage, a community for excess women and now a Benedictine convent, is still charming and the early Flemish kitchen in the dwelling unit open as a museum is still covetable. The Memling paintings in the eponymous museum are still stunning, especially the Ursula casket.

And as a special treat we were able to buy tickets for a Telemann concert with Gustav Leonhardt playing the harpsichord. The concert hall is new, built for the Cultural Capital year, and has a strange unattractive façade of rust coloured slats, but the interior is lovely, and looking out from within the slats makes them more appealing. Gustav Leonhardt is old, 81 years, and has been playing the harpsichord in concert for 60 years according to his biography. Bob was over the moon at the chance to hear a legend play once more.

We also spent an afternoon at the seaside in Ostend where the modern stained glass in the cathedral is a knock-out, especially on a sunny day when the blue and red glass makes patterns on the white interior walls.



















Monday, on our way back to Brussels for the Eurostar return, we stopped off in Ghent to see the magnificent van Eyck polyptych The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in St Bavo's cathedral with "the most beautiful Mary ever painted," as Bob said.


Ghent has such a lovely old town with striking buildings and a scenic river and canal through the centre.

A brass plaque on a modern shop showed us the location of the building where John Adams lived in 1814, when he was negotiating the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. That brought to mind from some deep recess in the brain, the grade school poem, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix by Robert Browning, and I wondered if the poem had to do with the Treaty, and why on earth they cared in Aix (this Aix being the German Aachen/French Aix-la-Chapelle) or even thought it was good news. A little googling and it seems there was no news, no event, Browning just wanted to write a poem to the rhythm of galloping horse hoofs.

So back home in London by 10 p.m., after an excellent four days away. I think a fourth trip to Bruges would be two or three too many, but I am looking forward to spending tonight In Bruges, cinema version.