London.
First, let me wish Alan a very Happy Birthday, as he turns 90 today. Happy birthday, Alan.
Here I am in London again, for my final day. Hilary and Claudio have gone off the France for s few days, so I’m solo. .They headed out this morning, and I headed to the Barrington Hotel, the pub hotel that Tom stayed at. Very sad to say goodbye to Hil!!
After I got settled at the Barrington, and after it stopped pouring, which it did for about 30 minutes or so, before becoming quite lovely out, I headed to the city, to visit the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, a place I haven’t been in years, but was always a favorite. Not so much a favorite was the cost of admission, a staggering ยฃ22 ($29). Whew!
Not much to say – I enjoyed the museum. It’s part of growing up in London, at least for many in my generation, in which there’s a fascination with London Transport, and really the history of London Transport also both reflects and has shaped the history of London over the past 150 years. It’s difficult to separate London Transport from London itself.
I enjoyed walking around- the museum is not quite as interesting or filled with facts about London Transport as I remember, although I still enjoyed it, and the gift shop, like the museum entrance fee, is way over priced, but I especially enjoyed the 45 minute guided talk on art nouveau and art deco in London Transport posters and design, and really the history and development of London Transport in the 20s and 30s. That was really interesting.
I do love LT posters and designs, which have featured many artists over the years, including Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, both of whom were commissioned by London Transport, and I myself painted a London Transport poster in the 60s, which was in the graphic style of LT at that time, although I never submitted it. I still have it, and will add it here when get home (which will be in two days).
I saw a couple of young kids at the steering wheel in the cab of a London Transport bus, which took me back to Kaye doing the very same thing here in 1991, at age 4.
I left the museum around 5:30, now too late in the day to go to the National Gallery, which I had considered doing but closes at 6. and I really had little interest in visiting the very busy Covent Garden markets or stores, or even spending any more time there. I did stop for a while to watch a street performer, an acrobat, in the also busy front plaza, and then walked through the serene and (relatively) quiet gardens of St. Paul’s Church at Covent Gardens.
Then, I took a long-ish walk along the crowded streets, up past Shaftesbury Avenue, where I stopped in at the London Forbidden Planet science fiction shop. It does have some great stuff, and I wanted one of their t-shirts, but they were out of stock, but I remember when it was in a tiny location many years ago, tucked away off of New Oxford Street, just stuffed with great stuff, packed onto shelves in a store that didn’t have enough room to hold all that stuff. It was great. But now, despite all their fantastic stuff, it’s just a glitzy commercial mega store (they describe themselves as a mega store), and holds much less interest for me.
From there, I headed up to Oxford Street at Tottenham Court Road, and walked along the incredibly, and I mean incredibly, busy Oxford Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, with over 500,000 visitors daily. When I was a 19, I worked on Oxford Steet, in Ravels, a very trendy and relatively high end shoe store near Marble Arch.
At any rate, I walked to Orchard Street, next to Selfridges, and from there caught the number 13 bus all the way to North Finchley, which took well over an hour in the dense traffic, and I arrived there at around 7:30, and bought myself my final meal of fish and chips, which had been my plan all along. It was dark out now and kind of cool, so I took a bus back the Barrington, eating my delicious meal on the bus, and once back at the hotel sat in the pub bar and wrote my blog, as I cant get any internet connection in my small room here (where there’s barely enough room to swing a dead cat, as the saying goes). The pub and the rooms are nice enough, but no internet upstairs at all and a room way too small.
And then to bed. Last night in London.