Hanging With Our Homies (Sorry, Ben!)

We've been very social since our return from foreign lands. The week that we got back, Sue was scheduled to give a talk in Phil's class on the role of women in World War I. Her vast museum experience and knowledge of history ensured that her presentation would be seamless and fascinating. She even included interviews she'd done years ago with some women who'd lived through the war and worked in factories at the time. The students were attentive and seemed quite absorbed by the subject.


Dessert. NOT pork belly.

After the class, we took Klauser and Sue to an absurdly sybaritic restaurant called Babylon, owned by Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin American, Virgin Records etc. fame. It's on the sixth and seventh floor of a nearby building, with wonderful views of Kensington, incredible food, a garden with turf trucked in, and flamingos. Best of all, there were two courses featuring pork belly.

Yes, flamingos

On Friday our friends Debra and Arnie arrived from America via Scotland, bringing us a large bottle of the most fabulous, smoky-tasting single malt Scotch I'd ever tried (sorry, Peter!). We fed them beef stew and settled them in the bunkbed room, where they made the best of a slightly uncomfortable situation (sorry, Debra!)

Saturday it rained, but we ignored the weather and walked -- first to the Twinings Tea Shop, where we did a tasting and bought lots of tea, and then to Westminster Abbey, where we were seated in the ancient, ornate choir stalls for Evensong. It was a nearly transporting experience, with the Vicars' Choir singing right next to us, the walls of the Abbey soaring above, and the late-afternoon glints of light shining through the stained glass.



The Professor and the Acolyte
(sorry, Arnie!)

On our way back to Hatton Garden, we stopped at a new (for us)pub, the Olde Cheshire Cheese, and had snacks and beer (including fried cheese). After a brief rest we walked to our Vietnamese place and scarfed down still more food. Debra and Arnie walked again on Sunday, visiting a variety of tourist sites, and then we met them and Klauser and Sue in a pub I'd scouted out that served Belgian beer on draft. Beneath the pub, in the time of mad King George, the queen stored a larder of food that she hoped would help the king in his insanity; thus the name of the pub: The Queen's Larder.

Together we saw the film Suffragette, which got good marks all around, though it overlooked the fact that in the era when it's set, men who were not property owners would not have been able to vote. And thence back to the flat for a relatively impromptu meal of pork stew and apple-raisin crisp.

Monday we set out with Debra and Arnie to the Borough Market, an enormous grouping of food carts and produce stands on the south side of the Thames, near the Globe Theatre. Most of the produce section was closed, but we skipped breakfast on purpose so we could eat hugely from the food stands. Giant sandwiches of sausage topped with bacon, pork, and fried onions, Bosnian phyllo pies, and Thai coconut pancakes made us all very happy, and we brought back four assorted savory pies plus mushy peas, fudge, and brownies to have for dinner. 

We stopped at the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the way back (if there is an open door, Phil will go in) and were surprised to find that Captain John Smith of Pilgrim fame had worshipped there. There was a panel of stained glass devoted to him. The church also boasted the early seventeenth-century bell that rang to rouse the prisoners at Ludgate and let them know that it was time for their execution.

Debra and Arnie went off to sightsee, and a few hours later we met at our old favorite, the Lady Ottoline pub, where we had gin drinks (53 varieties of gin! Who knew?) and beers and then stumbled back home to eat pies and watch a film about Shakespeare and his lovers of assorted genders.

Now the flat is echoingly silent, but for the occasional howl from upstairs ("Di! Why is the computer doing this again???") and the sounds of hammering and drilling from the construction workers outside. We are slightly lonely and bereft -- but then again, we have fourteen coming for tea on Thursday.

Our pubs for the week:

Dickens, Tennyson, and Twain drank here

creepy clowns and Leffe beer at the Queen's Larder