London 24.12.2010: Welcoming Churches and Homeless Wayfarers

Our first stop when we exit the Piccadilly Circus tube station: St. James church, a Christopher Wren church.  We hope its little flea market is open, but it's not, on Christmas eve.

We go into the church.  I'm impressed by a welcome sign in the narthex: "A warm welcome from the church community of St. James, Piccadilly.  St. James is part of the Anglican Communion within the world-wide Christian Church.  We understand ourselves to be called: to gather as a body which welcomes and celebrates human diversity--including spirituality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation . . . ."

London 24.12.2010: Victorian Christmases and Loving Couples

On the tube just now, heading along the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus, we sit across from an older (truth: probably near our age) gay couple.  And as I listen to one of the two describe an exhibit about the history of Christmas celebrations to the other ("The trees began with Queen Victoria, you know"), I think:

London 22.12.10: Cockney Sparrows and Charming Shtick

What to say about the man who retrieved us at Gatwick when we landed?  The travel agent made arrangements with a service that meets travelers and ferries them (metaphorically speaking, needless to say) to their destination.  I’ve been putting off writing about A.G., because he was such a caricature of himself, and I suspect a self-conscious, deliberate one, a self-send up.

London 22.12.10: Christmas Markets and Nutmeg Candies

Sitting now in a Pain Quotidien in Covent Garden, waiting for our evening musical, “Oliver,” to begin.  It’s just up the street.  We bought tickets at the half-price booth early today.

We ate in one of these Pain Quotidien places in New York last time we were there, near the Strand bookstore, and liked it.  Getting a table this evening was an adventure.

London 22.12.10: Mince Pies and Panforte Farces

I have no proof that the young man at the coffee shop yesterday was Canadian.  Save for those shibboleths that supposedly set the speech of much of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and B.C. apart from the speech of the upper half of the U.S.—oot and aboot—the two speech patterns sound much the same to me.  Except that he said bēēn.  And that, of course, could be a self-conscious adoption of the standard English pronunciation by an American living in England.

London 21.12.2010: Second Sleep and Queue Police

Now in London.  We walked a bit in Kensington High Street yesterday after we arrived, and then I crashed.  Slept from 5 P.M. to 8 A.M. with a little wake-up period around midnight, when I drank a cup of decaf coffee and had a comforting tiny dram of brandy, thinking of Pepys and others (Shakespeare?), who write about the second sleep, when people got up in the middle of the night on long nights, ate, drank, smoked, made love, visited with neighbors, and then returned for a second sleep. 

London 19.12.2010: Atlantic Wastes and Lambs of God

Plane, en route to Atlanta, where we’ll board a flight later today for London.

One of the lessons of growing old is that one no longer has the luxury of a wide range of personae to try on in various situations.  This is not due to lack of imagination or opportunity.