I had had a lot of trouble sleeping in the period just before leaving on the trip, but did okay at the workshop in Germany, and I got more than eight hours that night. But this still meant I was awake at six. Since my room did not have a bathroom of its own, I took advantage of the early hour to secure access to the public facilities. I showered, dressed, and walked around the neighbourhood for a while, taking pictures experimentally.
I was back for breakfast at 7:30, served in a basement room. First I was offered a choice of three breakfast cereals by a server with a thick Eastern European accent -- bran flakes, corn flakes, and frosted flakes. I opted for the corn flakes, and was handed a small portion in a bowl, which I augmented with some All-Bran I had brought from home. A small glass of orange juice was placed on my table. Then I was offered "egg, bacon, baked beans". I declined the baked beans. "Coffee, tea?" Coffee, I said, and received a small metal pot. It had the smell of boiled instant, and turned grey when I poured in milk. I took a sip, then left it. One fried egg and a pile of bacon (thankfully back bacon and so not very greasy, but quite salty) arrived, along with a rack of toast (I have never understood the English habit of putting toast in a rack to cool). All in all, it was edible, and included in the price of the room, but it was not my idea of breakfast.
My first destination was the National Gallery, but it did not open until 10, so I thought I would walk down to the river first. I left the hotel around eight, and went down Gower to Bloomsbury Street, and across Oxford Street. Close to where I had had dinner the night before, I found a newsagent just starting to open up, and purchased a copy of Time Out, the weekly guide to London. I had never seen one (though I've used their guides and website many times) and was surprised at how thick it was, like a double issue of the New Yorker in the good old days.
I walked down Neal Street (a nice strip of colourful shops and boutiques, but all quiet at that hour) and towards Covent Garden Market. I had to visit this to take shots for the kids, who had recently seen and enjoyed both My Fair Lady and the earlier movie Pygmalion. It, too, was deserted, with a few cafe owners just starting to sweep up the overnight debris and take covers off tables. Crossing the Strand, I walked onto the west sidewalk of Waterloo Bridge for my first view of the Thames. There were nice vistas on both sides, with a lot of new buildings (not that I would have recognized the differences from twenty years ago; my memories of that visit are quite dim now). Most striking was the Millennium Eye, a large Ferris wheel on the south bank more or less across from Westminister. The road traffic was thin enough that I could easily cross the bridge in the middle to shoot some photos downstream, following which I crossed back, continued to the end of the bridge, and went down a flight of stairs to the South Bank Centre (at which I had seen a play on my last visit). My knees twinged a bit at the descent; I wasn't quite sure why (perhaps from the rainy hike we took at the workshop, after a few days of sitting around listening to talks).
I walked along the riverside sidewalk, past Royal Festival Hall and the large patch of green lawn near the Millennium Eye. There were passengers already queued up for tickets and others boarding for the first ride of the day; at UKP 10 or so plus who knew how long a wait, it didn't really tempt me. Past the Aquarium it started to get touristy, with souvenir stalls opening up, and many tourists coming from the opposite direction. I went up a flight of stairs and across Westminister Bridge on the west side, which offered a good view of the early morning sunshine on the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. I hadn't intended to go this far, but there was still plenty of time, and I did have that mandate of taking snaps for the kids. I had done all the touristy things in '82 -- watching the Changing of the Guards, tramping around Westminister Abbey, riding on a double-decker bus, and so on -- relieving me of even the slightest temptation.
I walked around the back of Westminister Abbey to take a shot of the buttresses, then up and around Parliament Square to the entrance of Westminister Abbey, which is on the side of the nave just below the transept. The facade was not particularly photogenic, so I walked up Parliament and Whitehall streets, past great government buildings (though not as imposing as those in Paris, thankfully) and past Downing Street, not significantly more barricaded off than it had been in '82 (with the IRA quite active at that time). A little further up was the HQ of the Queen's Life Guards, and a stall with one lone oddly-dressed soldier at attention out front. The streets weren't deserted, but people were fairly sparse. I came into Trafalgar Square from the south, went around to the west past Canada House and to the new Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, to the west.
Here I waited for a few minutes, checking focus on some of the shots I had taken by zooming in using the tiny LCD, until the gallery opened at ten. Most of the twenty-odd people waiting went straight towards the ticket office for the Aelbert Cuyp exposition; I wasn't that interested (despite having been converted to the joys of Dutch painting by our brief visit to Amsterdam in 2000), so I went straight up the stairs to see main collection, again in order by room number.
51: This small room was dominated by Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks. I sank onto the bench in front of it, and had the luxury of contemplating it for several minutes in total silence and isolation, as I often did with his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre (where the Mona Lisa around the corner draws off the crowds). In a small alcove behind the painting, in very subdued light, was a full-sized cartoon of that Louvre picture. Also in 51 was an unfinished Michaelangelo (the only painting on canvas he ever finished, the Tondo Dondi, is in the Uffizi in Florence).
52: works by Duccio, including fragments of the Maesta altarpiece, most of which is in Siena and which we saw in our visits of 1995 and 1996. 54: Masaccio, smaller works not quite as striking as his frescoes in Florence, and one nice Fra Angelico, with that terrific shade of blue. I didn't know beans about art in '82, but I was struck by that shade when I first saw it, on an insane single day in Florence when I attempted to visit seven museums. 55: Uccello's Battle of San Romano, the last of the three pieces into which the painting had been divided that I had left to see, since the other two were in the Uffizi and the Louvre. This one had the main character in it, was not as faded as the Louvre piece, and had less of a sense of showing off mastery of perspective; it was not a forest of lances (though some lay broken at the bottom, along with one foreshortened corpse). On the side was another Uccello piece, quite a nice one, Saint George and the Dragon.
56: Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait, one of the paintings that had convinced me to come to London again. It was smaller than I had expected (about a metre high); I suppose I knew its dimensions intellectually, but was surprised at its appearance. It was impossible to examine the painted mirror in which the artist is said to be reflected without risking pressing my nose against the canvas.
57: Botticellis (not that impressive), and a section of Pinturicchio fresco, not nearly as fresh and bright as those in the library of the Duomo in Siena. 58: better Botticellis, especially Venus and Mars, with Venus resembling the langourous maidens of the Botticelli room in the Uffizi. 59: at this point we were into the high Renaissance with Crivelli and Cosimo Tura. 60: bright canvases by Perugino, and works by Raphael, the best of which to my mind was not a larger work, but a miniature of a knight dreaming of a choice between Virtue and Pleasure represented by two women to his left and right.
61: paintings by Andrea Mantegna, quite unusual in my experience, done in a monochrome style to resemble shallow relief sculptures, such as are common on friezes. There were a couple of Giovanni Bellini Madonnas, not as ethereal as the ones in the Accademia in Venice, but 62 had Bellini's Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, stunning both in its details (such as the embroidery on costume and hat) and in the humanity of the aged leader's face. This room also featured Mantegna's Agony in the Garden, with its striking banding of sedimentary rocks dominating the vertical landscape, and the strikingly foreshortened sleeping figures of Christ's companions in the foreground.
63, 64, 65: German works of the 15th century. Also not favourites of mine; the only thing convincing me otherwise was the face in a small portrait by Durer (the body was only sketched in).
I was done with the Sainsbury wing at this point; I crossed over to the main wing, and took a detour to see the Vermeers, in case I somehow didn't get back to them. The National Gallery has two related works: Young Woman Standing at Virginal and Young Woman Seated at Virginal (a virginal appears to be some kind of keyboard instrument). There is a currently running controversy over whether Vermeer used a camera obscura or not; it seems clear that he studied optical phenomena, because his selective use of focus is undeniable.
9: Tintoretto and Titian, old friends from our many trips to Venice. There was a large Titian portrait of a family with a dog in one corner (it was a similar dog that attracted the 30-month-old Z during our first trip to Venice; I snatched her up just as she was about to touch it) next to one of his later "Impressionist" works, this one a Madonna and Child. On the other side was yet another facet of Titian, a dramatic and bright Bacchus and Ariadne, and a Veronese Adoration of the Magi with huge classical ruins above human and animal figures.
8: more Sienese artists: Beccafumi, Rosso Fiorentino. Here was another unfinished Michelangelo canvas, and Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II (did I see one like this in Rome?), plus a large Raphael altarpiece, and a terrific Saint Catherine leaning on the wheel on which she was tortured, twisting to the right and looking upward so that the painting seems to form a vortex moving up towards heaven.
7 was closed; 6 featured Lorenzo Lotto, N's favourite neglected artist, with a Virgin and Child. 4 had Lucas Cranach's distinctive women, elongated and with rounded bellies, some Holbein portraits (best being of Erasmus), and a very striking Holbein canvas called The Ambassadors. In addition to the effective characterizations and rich allegorical details, as bonus a holomorphic skull was painted as a diagonal slash along the lower part of painting, which was hung in such a manner so that one could stand to the side, almost in the plane of the painting, and see the skull in proper perspective.
I was starting to fade, so I walked out to the main porch of gallery, watched traffic move across Trafalgar Square for a few minutes, then went down the steps. I went up the Strand, back across Waterloo Bridge, and down the steps I had descended early that morning. My knees hurt even more this time, and I wondered if I was going to be hobbling by the end of the weekend. When I reached the riverside sidewalk, I headed east this time, under the bridge (where booksellers had set up) and along the Queen's Walk.
The tall buildings south of the river were all new to me. I passed the Oxo Tower (with its cleverly designed windows circumventing the ban on advertising), and walked under Blackfriars Bridge (which I always remember was where the banker Roberto Calvi was found hanging during the mysterious Banco Ambrosiano scandal). The Bankside Power Station came into view; this I would have been able to see in 1982, but I didn't walk this section of the South Bank then (it had nothing to commend it); the Power Station, of course, is now the Tate Modern gallery, bidding to be London's most visited attraction. I could also see the new Millennium Footbridge across Thames, which had reopened only a week or two before, after having been closed three days after its opening in 2000.
I continued under Southwark Bridge, and turned right down Bank End and Park Street, along a narrow sidewalk in the shadow of warehouses and the elevated rail line, to Borough Market. I had read about this almost by chance, in a Web search during an idle moment at the workshop in Germany, which brought me to a posting on chowhounds.com recommending it. It was fairly crowded, it being lunchtime and one of the two days during the week that the market was open. I quickly joined the queue for a grilled chorizo and rocket sandwich at Brindisa, a Spanish delicatessen. The queue stretched along the front of the shop area and down a nearby alley.
It took ten minutes to get to the front of the line; I handed over my UKP 2.50 and watched my sandwich being freshly assembled. I ate it standing in front of next stall, one selling herbs in pots (the stallholder looking distinctly unhappy at the attention her neighbour was getting). Before touring the market, I went across street for a double espresso at the Monmouth Coffee Company (their roastery/cafe close to my hotel had not been open when I passed it early in the morning).
I went back into the market to wander around. Stalls sold organic produce, seafood, bread, cheese; there were various butcher stalls, some concentrating on a single type of animal, and various specialty stalls (jam, honey, lamb, coffee, cider) as well as prepared foods (from bare-bones steamed-veggie organic to Moroccan). It was quite an upscale crowd, but casually dressed. (They would have been called yuppies in America, or branches in Paris; there are probably more detailed stratifications of class in London about which I am ignorant.) Some were pushing youngsters in three-wheeled jogging strollers.
I went back out to the street, and the Market Porter pub right opposite the Market. It was crowded, and yes, smoky. I caught the eye of a bartender, leaned over, and asked for their "best real ale". "Depends what you like," he said, his female colleague cocking an ear. "I prefer mine particularly hoppy," I said, which must have been a gross North Americanism, because he winced, consulted briefly with his colleague while they shook their heads, and then suggested the Sheep's Head Special Ale. I had a half-pint, again feeling a bit foolish, not just at my apparent gaffe but with my usual social isolation. I noticed a sign proclaiming that the Market Porter was CAMRA's South East London Pub of the Year for 2001.
Having finished my half-pint and walked back towards the river, I decided on the spur of the moment to walk east to get a snapshot of Tower Bridge for kids. This was a bit silly, as there are any number of coffee-table books that would do a better job, but I wanted them to understand the famous image in the context of the other shots I was taking for them. The pathway got confused as I headed east, and I found myself climbing up on to London Bridge. There wasn't an obvious place to climb down, and I went a bit inland and down Tooley Street, past tourists queued for some attraction called "Dungeon of London". I kept looking for a way to get back to the river, and found it by walking up through Hay's Galleria. This was a former pair of piers with a narrow waterway between them which had been covered with a floor and roofed over with a high glass galleria to form a rather touristy development. I walked briskly through it and back to the walk along the bank of Thames. A large naval vessel called HMS Belfast was moored to the south of the river (I gather one can visit it); I walked just past it, at which point I could snap not only Tower Bridge, but the Tower of London opposite (which I didn't visit in 82, though I walked almost to it on the north bank, on a hot, sweaty day).
At this point, behind construction hoardings, I could glimpse a new building looking something like a louvered half-sphere, which an inflight magazine had informed me was the new London City Hall. This was as far east as I cared to go; I turned around and went west again, managing to stick with the Queen's Walk as far as London Bridge. I went a little inland again and around through the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral, full of what appeared to be Londoners reclining in the sun first real day of spring. There was a most pleasant and moderate stream of foot traffic along the Walk, a mix of tourists and locals out for a stroll, with many kids skipping along.
It was time for more art. I went into the Tate Modern from front; moving towards the escalators, I could see the huge Turbine Room taking up the back third of building. It was not as impressive as it had seemed from pictures in newspapers and magazines. I could see lines queueing for tickets to the Warhol exhibition. I went up the escalator in a solid stream of humanity, up to second floor where the main collection started.
The Tate Modern is, rather controversially, organized by themes (Still Life, Modern Life, and so on) instead of by artist, movement, or time period. As an example, the Modern Life room contained, among others, works by Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Jacques Lipshitz, Alberto Giacometti, and Fernand Leger. It is an admirable idea, but didn't quite work for some reason. Part of the reason may have been the building as spectacle, drawing huge crowds just wandering through building. Few seemed to be stopping to look seriously at the works on display, and this attitude was infectious after a while, as the atmosphere did not encourage contemplation. Even the Mark Rothko room seemed to have much of its colour sucked out of it somehow. I wondered how it might strike me after hours. There were some rooms by "name British artists": Sarah Lucas's provocative comments on the status of women (a sofa with breast-like bulges, a life-sized headless rag doll sprawled on a chair) were underlined by forcing the audience to creep slowly along the exterior of the room, but Damien Hirst's Pharmacy seemed rather laboured, especially the honeycombs perched here and there. I would have preferred some of his animals in formaldehyde.
The best work, and the only one I wish the kids (who love modern art) had been there to see, was Rebecca Horn's "Concert for Anarchy". This was an upside-down grand piano (a Bechstein, a model we had contemplated buying a decade ago) suspended from the ceiling. If you watched it, after a while the lid and keyboard cover would open slowly, then suddenly (and with a discordant crash), all the keys would explode out of the piano and hang there. After a while, just about when people started to drift away, they would reel themselves back in with a series of fractured chords, and the lids would close again.
I went up to the seventh floor to try to get a view from the restaurant. I had read a so-so review of the place, and was prepared to eat a meal there anyway, but at any rate the queue for a table was quite long, and I didn't want to waste time standing in it. The line formed straight out of the elevator, within striking distance of the window, and there was a section without tables at which people were standing; I tried to walk there but was prevented from going in by maitre d'. I stood there for a minute trying to decide if it was worth joining the queue, when the people at the window left, and the maitre d' motioned to me. I was allowed to stand in the small stretch, leaning against a counter and gazing through the window at the view over the Thames, St. Paul's, and the City.
I took my small pocket tripod out and attempted to take a panorama of the view. It was tricky lining up the shots, and I could feel the eyes of the people waiting their turn on my back. When I was done I packed up quickly and headed down the stairs. The sixth floor was a members-only lounge (and looked to be one of those "was cool for thirty seconds but is now uncool because everyone's doing it" places); the fifth floor was another set of theme rooms. The best thing on this floor was a room with an installation showing, on a large screen, a video of the artist standing on a hill with a view of London behind him, holding a kiddie balloon, singing a Victorian hymn while taking periodic breaths of helium from a tank beside him to make his voice squeaky.
The fourth floor was the Warhol exhibit, which I wasn't interested enough in to spend UKP 10 on, so I was done. I went down the escalators to the first floor, and out along a ramp leading up into the Turbine Room, whose floor slanted up to the ground-level entrance. From that vantage, it was still not that impressive; they could have used the exhibition space to thin out the crowds somewhat.
It was time to cross the Millennium Bridge. It took quite a while to get on; at one point I was shuffling forward in an improvised queue. It was crowded on the bridge as well, through about halfway across, where the shallow arch flattened out, there was a little more space. Still, I had to watch for a spot at the rail being vacated. St. Paul's loomed ahead, but as I reached the end of the bridge, I turned and went down a set of stairs to Riverside Walk along the north shore of the Thames. The sun was low and to the left; I took out my sunglasses for the first time in the trip. I crossed under Blackfriars Bridge and climbed up onto the sidewalk of the wide street called Victoria Embankment. At a gap in the traffic I crossed over, just before Waterloo Bridge, and went up to the Strand, arriving at the entrance to the Courtauld Institute.
I had only about an hour before closing, but I knew the collection was small. It cost UKP 4.00 to get in. On the ground floor was a small room of early Italian works, mostly minor artists and unknown "Masters". There was one polyptych by Bernardo Daddi (butt of many lame jokes when we encounter his works in Italian museums). I went up to the first floor, with some sumptuous rooms. In room 3 was a Bellini Assassination of Saint Peter -- the same theme as one of his works in the National Gallery, but a better composition here (in the NG the work is dominated by the trees that the woodchoppers are allegorically attacking). There was also a nice, large Lorenzo Lotto Portrait of Man With Skull, some smaller Tintoretto works, plus lesser works by Palma Il Vecchio and Veronese.
Room 4: a nice Lucas Cranach Adam and Eve, and a fascinating work by Pieter Breughel the Elder on the subject of Christ and the Woman Taken In Adultery. The style was called "grisaille", looking like the monochrome frieze work by Mantegna in the National Gallery, but more three-dimensional and not attempting to imitate sculpture.
Room 5: Rubens, who I have never cared for. 6 was empty, 7 had a few works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who works for me only in a Venetian context. I went up to the top floor, where there was an abrupt thematic shift with a roomful of choice Impressionist works: Degas, Manet, Renoir (an early work, Le Loge, not as caloric as I often find his paintings). There was a Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe, but it was not the famous work I first saw in the Orangerie; this was cruder, a later copy created specifically for a collector.
Room 9: The paintings finished off with a bang. Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Cezanne's The Card Players, van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. On the way out I noticed a small room with the Witt Collection of drawings, which were of very high quality: Michelangelo, Durer, Seurat, Leonardo (a very sketchy cartoon, almost an outtake from one of his notebooks), Pinturicchio.
I went out into the huge courtyard of the building and watched kids and the occasional parent dash through a kinetic fountain, basically a set of vertical water jets arranged in rectangular formations in a very shallow basin, so one could walk into it as if into a puddle. At this point I remembered that my digital camera could take short movies, and took one for my kids.
I headed north, past Covent Garden again, this time much more crowded with people. In front an "attraction" was set up to let a couple of kids at a time jump high using bungee cords attached to a frame (this was "only" UKP 6.00). Next to it was a capsule looking like the front of a BART train being shaken around by machine with "Sony Playstation" painted on side.
Back along Neal Street, which had been deserted in the morning, but was packed with people now. I ducked into Neal's Yard to take a quick look, and remembered that there was a branch of Rough Trade Records in a basement below a skate shop. It was tiny, but incredible. Besides the latest releases, there was a great selection of older discs that they thought people should have. I bought Electronic 01, a two-disc compilation just released that week on their house label, but they didn't have another disc I asked about: the first, brilliant Pink Flag album from 1977.
But there were other music shops to hit nearby. I walked briskly up to St. Giles High Street, over to Charing Cross Road and then onto Oxford Street, also quite crowded. Just before Tottenham Court Road, I ducked into what looked like an alley but went by the name of Hanley Street. An outdated Time Out guide had mentioned several used CD shops here, but I could find only two; in one I bought a Suicidal Tendencies compilation put out by Virgin (and so probably not available in North America). There's probably only one song, Institutionalized, that I'll ever play off it, but it's a great one.
There was a Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road, which wasn't quite as an assault on the senses as the other ones I'd been in, and I found the Pink Flag reissue, plus one of a That Petrol Emotion album. Moving up Tottenham Court road, I ducked into a Sainsbury's supermarket. I like to visit regular food stores in various parts of the world. This one was not that interesting, but I did find a box of low-fat muesli which would salvage breakfast for me.
It had been quite a day, and I decided to treat myself and go to Rasa Samudra for dinner. I ordered fish moily, baigan bharta (an eggplant preparation), and coconut rice. The fish moily turned out to be a single steak of kingfish deep-fried and served in a coconut milk sauce with turmeric and onions; the vegetable dish had half-inch chunks of eggplant almost lost in a lot of peanut-and-yogurt sauce, and on the side I had a small mound of rice with coconut flakes and mustard seeds. It was a bit unbalanced, too much sauce and not enough starch, but it tasted all right. With a small Cobra (an Indian beer brewed under license in UK) the bill came to about UKP 27.00. The handful of other patrons seemed to be going for the all-inclusive "seafood feast", but with drink and tip this would have cost more like UKP 40, and from what I could see, it was one of those meals where lots of dishes of condiments disguised a paucity of expensive ingredients. A disappointment, really.
Back to the hotel; it was about eight. I watched TV for a bit (Crime Scene Investigation, which Time Out told me was enormously popular in the US; I had never heard of it). More usefully, the magazine confirmed my decision that there wasn't a compelling reason to risk exhaustion by going out in the evening, but that there was an interesting show opening that might be worth rewriting the next day's plans for. I typed in some travel notes on my Newton with attached keyboard, and went to bed around ten.