London 31.1.10: Quiet Places, Magic Places

Just boarding the plane in London, and as I write the date, I realize I’ll now have to accustom myself to writing 2111—if God gives me breath up to the new year.  This is another flight (this happened when we flew back from our trip to Edinburgh and the Black Forest) where we find, to our surprise, we’ve been upgraded to first-class.  That previous trip back was the first time I’ve ever flown first-class.

London 30.12.2010: Winston ChurchEEL and Tourist Tat

Back to the Tate: I really liked the neighborhood around the museum.  It’s the most appealing I’ve seen in London, with its red-brick apartment buildings and quiet tree-lined streets.  Is this Chelsea?  Whatever the area’s called, I imagine it’s horrendously expensive to live in.

London 30.12.2010: Dangling Galeros and Comedies of Error

Yesterday a blur of this and that.  But before I forget, I should mention the nice meal we had Monday evening.  We had seen a small Italian restaurant near the Earls Court tube station in our comings and goings there—Bistro Benito.  It looked inviting, and when I went online to read about it, I read reviews full of praise.

London 28.12.2010: Pharaoh's Daughters and Refulgent Light

At the Tate Britain: the omnipresence, even refulgence, of light in J.M.W. Turner’s late paintings, and yet its obliquity.  Why both, simultaneously?  Light becomes more noticeable—more a fact of what we see and observe, and not just the precondition of seeing and observing—when its source is masked?

What his critics saw as paintings of nothing were depictions of light itself, attempts to depict its play across impossibly epic screens; light itself is the subject, and not merely what it illuminates.

London 27.12.2010: Bus-top Views and Droll Children

And what I forgot to say about yesterday: there was a tube strike, so we could get only as far as Hyde Park Corner on the tube, and then had to switch to the bus.  Outside the Earls Court tube station was a transit employee who told us how to get into the city using the buses.

And so we had the unexpected treat of being able to ride the bus, sitting in the top, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, inching along Piccadilly Street, which was very congested with Boxing Day shoppers, both in cars and by foot.

London 26.12.2010: Christmas Crowns and Dr. Johnson's Pigeon

I’ve reached that stage of a trip when journal-keeping begins to seem a chore, a chronicle of this and that.  And so I put off writing, and the unwritten chronicle grows ever longer.

But since we’re back in our room after a long, cold Boxing Day walk and I’ve had a hot shower, I have time to catch up, so let the tedious chronicle begin.

London 24.12.210: Verity Vindicated and Disbelief Suspended

 

Not a great deal to report of yesterday.  After being out the night before to see “Oliver,” I was logy-headed and very tired the next morning.  And, as Steve pointed out, it’s usually around the third day that fatigue seems to hit, when one flies overseas from the west.  He, too, was tired yesterday.