| « | April 2025 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
By tube to Jean's. We've arranged to go out for lunch, the first time in years that she's been able to come out with us. We had meals out occasionally with Jean and Siva in the distant past, but not since Siva's illness. We choose the Golden Palace, a Chinese dim sum place with glowing newspaper and magazine reviews - and it lives up to the praise. A lovely two hours of samplers, some of them amazingly good.
Tomorrow back to Canada.
Afternoon screening of documentary on the Katyn Massacre at the Imperial War Museum. It's about the killing of 22,000 Polish officers, soldiers and (mainly) intellectuals civilians early in the war. When it came to light the Russians blamed the Germans but there is no doubt at all that the Soviets were to blame and the Allies refused to hold them to account. Quite shocking. The film is introduced by an historian and there's a fair sized audience, about half of Polish extraction.
There are questions after as well, but we leave part way through as we're off to Doug and Jenny's for supper. Marian, the Czech au pair of 2 years ago is visiting with his 11 year old nephew and we're pleased to see him again. He was very kind to us when we were leaving on the Thames walk. Jenny's mum is there as well, and an aunt, and Emma and Giles. They have the nicest dining room I know - seats a dozen comfortably and serves as a library as well. Good food and company too, of course.
Over first thing in the morning to queue for tickets for Never So Good at the National Theatre. It's about Harold Macmillan with Jeremy Irons in the lead role. We arrive just before 9 for tickets that go on sale at 9:30 (the theatre keeps back some of the 10 pound tickets for release on the day of the performance).
The queue itself is street theatre. We're numbers 29 and 30 and most of the others have come much better prepared, equipped with hats, gloves, scarves, newspapers, books, coffee from various nearby cafes, and even metal chairs borrowed from the theatre's outdoor cafe - and in a couple of cases personal folding chairs. None of these people look like first timers. The queue is headed by a family - grandmother, father and teenage son, who is using the time for schoolwork of some sort. Then t here are 2 elderly men seated on newspapers on the ground, one in cap and trenchcoat, the other in bucket hat and jacket. They have a paper carrier bag with them with breakfast sandwiches and cups of coffee. The young are underrepresented and there are no visible minorities. A woman with white hair and red scarf takes turns with her husband in the cafe chair. There are two women in chairs near us, one in her eighties I should think, with short white hair, brimmed felt hat, long coat with matching creased trousers, smart shoes and lovely smile lines around her eyes. Next to us, reading the New Yorker, is a man with a big bright orange scarf saying Holland and a matching Sainsbury's carrier bag. At 9:25 a man with a white beard and black brimmed hat, wearing a long coat over jeans, returns his chair to the cafe and resumes his place in line. Others follow and we move in orderly fashion into the buiding in the order in which we arrived. A very English exercise. One can imagine many countries - and the Taiwanese spring to mind - in which there would hae been manoeuvering if not outright shoving instead of this most civilised half hour.
And at the end we have 2 tickets for the front row of Never So Good at 2:15. Which gives us time to stop at the Barbican and a quick stop home for lunch before going back to the theatre. the play is very good and we're so close - in the front row - that we can see hairs on the legs of an actor in his dressing gown. We're next to the two elderly women who were near us in the queue. One of the kindly gets us a cast list when she collects her own.
The play gives some insights into Macmillan's early life - WWI heroism and relationship with Ronald Know, his tutor, and shows him also in relationship to Churchill and Eden and Eisenhower. It's a sympathetic portrayal but there are many laughs - it goes right through to the Profumo scandal - and Jeremy Irons is brilliant.
Back to the War Museum for a Polish Documentary on the war years. We are a small audience, only 7 people, one of whom is an elderly gentleman with whom we talk briefly afterward. He tells us about Posk, the Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith and we check it out. Have a cup of tea in the cafeteria and see a very interesting art exhibit - paintings on glass by a woman who qualified as a lawyer but whose passion is painting, Dorota Kwiatkowska-Ryszewska. Intriguing work.
We stop at a nearby Polish shop and buy a loaf of Polish bread and some herring as well as perogies that go on sale after we arrive and are sold out by the time we leave 10 minutes later.
Charge our TKL to sterling at the little currency place near Westminster Cathedral and come home for perogies (sauerkraut and mushroom filled) and double Coronation Street.
Canada House to check the email and take a look at the Globe and Mail. Then Camden Town by bus to the market. There's a 99p store with quite amazing bargains, most of which we're not, of course, in the market for. The market we've gone for, Inverness Street, is cheerful as ever. The man who sells us tiny sweet grape tomatoes, lettuce, pepper and cucumber says he went to Canada to fish last year - near Peterborough.
There's a Polish film festival running in London, in part at the Imperial War Museum, so we go out to find out about Sunday's presentation and find that a film has just begun - yes, in there, just started. So we head in with no idea - could have been Stalinist architecture in Warsaw and us out in 2 minutes. Turns out to be a feature length drama called Sons and Comrades (1982) and absolutely riveting despite the subtitles. It covers the life of a woman with 4 sons from her widowhood in the 30's through into the Communist era and it's tragic and moving and, of course, political.
Then we meet up with Jenny for a drink at Walker's of Whitehall, a pub at the Trafalgar end of Whitehall near where we've been walking past the Banqueting Hall, the only remaining bit of Whitehall Palace where Charles I was executed, and wondering if the window still exists through which he went to the scaffold. Nice to see Jenny for what is probably the last time until November.
In the news we get a true British eccentric, who has spent years tunneling under his own and neighbours' houses until the massive excavation caused cracks in the road. The man, nicknamed the mole, now owes the council £300,000 for restabilising the houses.
Moving day, so we repack what we took to Istanbul and what we left behind and take the tube to Swiss Cottage. The new flat is a handy location, equidistant from Finchley Road and Swiss Cottage stations but it's an oddball arrangement. Bed downstairs with a small settee in an area cramped enough that the settee is facing only the stairs to the loft. The loft has a kitchen, with TV on the table and a bathroom with shower. We bring the TV downstairs where, fortunately, there's a co-ax plug in. The cooker upstairs is a bit of a problem, though. The ceiling is low and the smoke alarm is hypersensitive. It proves more or less impossible to cook a meal without triggering it. But it's only for a week so we'll try to work something out.
Sunny when we wake, despite a mixed forecast, so Jean and J and I go for a walk up Harrow Hill to where Harrow KSchool, alma mater of Byron and Churchill, is located. There's a lovely little old church there - and it is old. It was dedicated in 1094 and the oldest remaining parts of it are 11th century. Its history is intertwined with that of the school and there are numerous plaques commemorating former masters and their families and students killed in war. Most movingly, perhaps, Byron's 5 year old daughter Allegra, who died abroad is buried here in an unmarked grave, a stone at the corner of the church door in her memory.
Comfort food pie and pasty lunch and a relaxed afternoon of chat and snooze. Nice to spend long enough with Jean that the conversation can come and go lazily.
Up at 7 - which is 5 London time (and 11o'clock last night Canadian Central time). We take the metro and light railway combo out to the airport where we discover a) that our Akbil still has 5.50 TKL left on it and b) that this is not a station where the Akbil can be returned for the 6 TKL deposit. Catch 22. So we give it to a surprised looking turkish man whose young son thanks us. Live and learn.
Like Tel Aviv, everyone entering the airport departures goes through security and all luggage is x-rayed, including what is checked. If the scanner squeaks as you walk through you keep removing things until it doesn't - in J's case his belt. We're early but no particular joy picking seats. Queue for immigration exit and a particularly happy security officer at our wicket - singing a little song to himself. Ludicrously overpriced Duty Free but we're not tempted to add weight anyway. There's an English language Turkish paper with a front page article on a shooting we saw on Turkish TV news earlier in the week. Apparently both killer and victim came from a village of which it is said that no-one ever dies of natural causes.
Interesting aspect of airport toilets - you are asked, in the interests of saving water, to press the flush button twice.
The flight is full and the airport pretty full on landing as well. We usually arrive at Heathrow in the early morning or early evening. Twenty-five minutes in the queue at immigration, although only seconds to answer the questions. Clearly we don't fit the profile of the illegal immigrant. I remember arriving at Heathrow the first time 19 years ago, met by Jeam amd Siva and being unable to believe that at UK customs - as in all the European, mid-East and Asian countries we've ever visited - those who have nothing above the permited limit to declare simply exit via the green lane without forms or questions. There are random checks - say one in a thousand - but that's it. Very speedy.
Jean is back from a day's visit to her sister-in-law in Cambridge when we arrive. It's Hindy New Year and Shanti has invited us all over for nibbles. Her uncle is there and friends, as well as Priya and Anthony. Shant as always the gracious hostess. She - and of course the uncle - are originally from Singapore, where Jean and Siva lived for 3 and a half years and knew their family well, so much reminiscing. Lovely nibbles as well, including small crecent shaped pastries with a spicy potato and vegetable filling - much like samosas but baked rather than deep fried. Delicious.
Our last day already. Quite a few people checked in to the hotel yesterday and this morning the breakfast room is bustling, the inexperienced staff struggling to keep up. We notice a fair bit of waste. Surely anyone is likely to be able to predict whether he is going to want one or six pieces of bread? Our manager friend is philosophical. It's cultural. Chinese and Japanese may eat too much but they eat what they take. The Spanish like to waste. But he, as a Moslem, was brought up as we were to regard waste as sin in a world where there are people starving.
We debate taking the ferry over to the Asian side of the Bosphorus but in the end just do what we love best - wander the streets and markets and enjoy the great human street theatre. In some ways it could be any large city (there are 12 million people in Istanbul) but it's also visibly the meeting of east and west. The little shops and pavement stalls could be London - Brixton, say, or Harlesden, but then there are the goods spread out in the middle of a road on tarps or tables or just the road surface, where cars are trying to work their way uphill and have, indeed, come to a totatl and fairly patient stop in the face of the obstacles. There are doner shops on the corners and the man striding down the street with a basket of breadrolls on his head (why do westerners never carry things on their heads - it must be efficient as somany others do it). There are shops with stationery and with garden implements or children clothes or fruit and nuts or plastic toys or leather goods. And thre are pavement stalls with everythings - batteries, needles, playing cards, underwear, pens, and a surprising number of tv remotes. In a box outside a shop used glass jars are for sale - a half a lira each, which seems quite a lot.
There are very few beggars, but there are people with pretty borderline jobs - the man who sits on the pavement next to ordinary bathroom scales and makes a small charge for their use, for example, and, on a higher level, the countless shoeshine men (seldom boys here). there are signs of poverty - the number of young people with uncorrected limps, for example (though state hospitals are free). But mobile phones are everywhere and most people are quite well dressed, the men much as they would be in the west and the women in a mixture of western and Moslem styles - sometimes with the two combined on the same person, as with the young woman wearing a traditional headscarf and along-sleeved shirt saying LOVE across the chest, the O having been replaced by a Playboy bunny.
Children look much as they would anywhere and there are a lot of thm, on foot with parents or grandparents, eating bagels or roasted corn on the cob from the carts, or occasionally ice cream. There's the newborn baby whose adoring mother can hardly take her eyes off its face as she walks and the little boy looking with delight at a two gallon jar of leeches in the middle of the square - a few of which get spooned out into a small water bottle for a purchaser. The sheer size of the market area and the number of people is overshelming. Men with carts and even vans come along the steep streets where there isn't even room for a donkey - and everyone keeps their good humour and patience.
Food prices are lower than in the west, but not a great deal. Clothing is quite a lot cheaper, as is footwear. It's not hard to find shirts for 3 or 4 dollars Canadian or shoes for $12, though the quality would be very low. Very good quality is also available, and there are plenty eager to provide it, but we don't linger for the presentations.
J does buy a small leather bag to put his camera in. It's an interesting transaction. The seller has a table outside his shop and speaks no English. We speak no turkish. However he quickly grasps that J wants something big enough for the camera but only just, so that it will fit in his pocket. The interesting thing is that both J and the Turk explain themselves in words, the turk quite volubly, but use their hands to talk as well. So the Turk not only points out the handy belt loop on the bag but pinches his own skin to indicate that it is leather. A very dignified and satisfactory transaction for both sides.
Dinner is round the corner at the little restaurant where we ate the first night. This time the staff not only explain what the dishes are - they point out on the multilingual menu that we can have sampler plates with a little of everything for 9 TKL each (about $6.75 of £3.40). So we do - and very nice it is, with chicken, lamb and beef all mixed with different vegetables as well as a stuffed vegetable we can't quite identify and a delicious aubergine dish, some liver, potato, and a large meatball. Not spicy, but very flavourful. And we're full.
Newer | Latest | Older
