A couple of weeks ago I rediscovered London. It started off on a Friday and featured a good deal of my good friend Zoe. We went to the Charles Dickens museum in Bloomsbury, which is situated in one of his numerous London houses, and contains a lot of interesting Dickensy stuff: portraits, his favourite armchair, first editions of his works, all that sort of thing. This was actually our second attempt at the Dickens museum. First time around, we turned up to find the place closed. It was good to finally get it under our belts.
We followed literature with some art. Having headed down past Holborn to get to the National Gallery, we joined quite the crowd of elderly tourists and took a tour. Very cultured, aren’t we?
But wait: there’s more. Saturday brought a free tour of Westminster Abbey (kindly organised by the King’s College Chaplaincy). I’d already visited the Abbey a couple of years back, but it was nice to get back in there and revisit some of my favourite memorial slabs of stone. The tour took us through places inaccessible to the ordinary visitor. We got to stand on the raised altar bit where the Royal Wedding happened, and see where the queen was coronated. She was crowned with her back to the people: brilliant.
Along came Sunday, and with it, the Old Spitalfields Market with Alice and Maddie. Maddie and I struck out for Liverpool Street Station, heading across London Bridge and past the Monument, catching a glimpse of a Harry Potter guided tour and giving semi-informed directions to a lost tourist. The Market itself was top notch, delivering a very nice bundle of Wodehouse books and some pistachio-flavoured Turkish delight.
I left the others to go and meet up with Zoe again, this time at an advent carol service at St Martins in the Fields, the rather impressive-looking church opposite Trafalgar Square. We went expecting to sing carols; instead, we got a fairly powerful sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. There was lots of talk of hell and judgement, nicely balanced by some wonderful choral singing.
Monday arrived, but my London touristing barely paused for breath. Zoe and I went to 39 Steps, a play based on an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Our restricted view seats turned out to be incredibly worth it when we found ourselves in an otherwise empty row, and we managed to land ourselves an unrestricted view after all. The play itself was great fun – a slap-stick pastiche of the film noir genre, with the fourth wall broken clear through by a very talented cast.
On Tuesday, Maddie, Polly, Kyveli and I headed back to Westminster Abbey to attend a performance of Handel’s Messiah. While we were seated behind the choir, the acoustics were fairly monumental, delivering a full-bodied performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. We even got to sit in the wooden choir stands! It was a fantastic night.
Finally, on Wednesday, after struggling through some more uni work – yes, that all continued as per usual – I went along with Alice and Maddie to a bar to see a band called Foreign Slippers. It was great music, great cider, great times. The perfect end to a rather hectic week of Londoning.
Is that Jamie Hewlitt's work? That bird? Or Lora?
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