Metaphorically?
Maybe.
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Off to Borough Market, which at around eleven was not quite a complete crush of people. We had to pass through a crushing bottleneck at one end, where we were squeezed between a wall and a bar with outdoor seating (I glimpsed a tray full of brimming pitchers of Pimm’s Cup but was not able to stop and neglect my family long enough to run up to the bar and ask for one).
But when we popped out the other side it was no longer crushing, only crowded; there were many people milling around, looking and deciding perhaps, but once you made up your mind to buy something you only had to wait behind one or two other people.
The man at the liquorice stand got plenty of business from us.
I also bought, for our dinner tonight: spiced-pear chutney, two cheeses of sorts recommended to me by the chutney-seller (a creamy blue and a soft runny cheese, but both carefully selected to be mild so that the children might like them; I needn’t have bothered), and two proper-looking Bavarian soft pretzels. The 17-yo asked for some clementine-like citrus fruits that he had sampled and declared amazing, and Mark chose three saucissons from a seller.
Then we had lunch! At first we thought we might find a table in one of the restaurants around the edges, then we thought we might leave to find a restaurant, and finally Mark decided he would stake out a spot near a bench and keep the 3yo while the rest of us fanned out to find food. “Just buy me lunch,” he instructed, “well, lunch for you and for me and for the two little boys,” so I took the 7yo and headed towards where we had seen an array of sellers of hot food.
A thing about the 7yo is that he does not like sandwiches of any kind, so we took a while in finding a not-sandwich. He agreed to a meat pie that promised to be filled with beef chili, beans, and cheddar. Relieved to have found something for the 7yo, I bought Mark a meat pie filled with beef and smoky bacon, plus mash on the side, no gravy; and a couple of sausage rolls for the 3yo, hoping that he would like them.
I delivered the child and the food to Mark, who had found a place to sit, and went off to find something for myself.
Börek!
Mine was filled with seasoned spinach and soft tangy cheese, and served with a pile of spicy chickpeas in a nest of hummus, with green chili relish.
SO GOOD.
I let the 17yo (who was contentedly deep in a meat pie) have a bite, and he thought mine was better than his.
And the 3yo adored the sausage roll! The pastry shattered into little bits all over his pants, but he was very happy. I may have to try making these at home. At least I know what to feed him (other than square bread and orange cheese sandwiches) for the next week.
Sadly, the 7yo did not approve of the chili pie, so he had to settle for eating a bunch of candy for lunch. Poor kid.
As for Mark, well, in my rush to get him something with bacon in it I had forgotten that pie is not really his thing. He ate it and it was fine, and he was perfectly nice about it, and of course he had told me I should just get him any kind of food, but I felt bad anyway, just from my own spousal misfire. I had failed to blow his mind as I had hoped with amazing meatiness and bacon and gravy sealed in a flaky crust, because pie is not the sort of thing that blows his mind.
I always forget this. B
ecause what kind of person doesn’t think pie is super awesome.
Sigh. I’ll do better next time. Why don’t they sell meat crumble?
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The 2 pm show at the Old Operating Theatre was billed as unsuitable for kids under 7. I volunteered to skip it and take a turn with the 3yo. On my back, he could ride along with me to the Tate Modern. Maybe we could meet up afterwards and go to the Globe if the kids weren’t tired, or we could just call it a day.
Mark was on the “just call it a day” team. I thought we could leave it open, perhaps. #foreshadowing #MarkWasRight
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I love just walking through cities and seeing the sights and people, and so for me, the South Bank of the Thames, between London Bridge and the Millennium Bridge, was pure delight. I was so glad to be there on that I went into the first souvenir shop and bought the 3yo a toy red bus for £3.99.
This random purchase turned out to be a good value, as he chatted to himself about it for nearly the whole walk that followed, and only dropped it a couple of times. He was also happy to get a penny in change.
“…their virtues we write in water.”
With an impatient 3yo on my back, I couldn’t stay long. Enough to get a sense of the building, its space and its contents. It is sprawly, with large rooms, in two towers connected at floors 1 and 4 by bridges.
I saw a Matisse:
Also a Kandinsky and a Picasso and a Calder.
There was a delightful installation of a plate-glass disc, suspended vertically on the ceiling in a small cube of a room and steadily rotating. A spotlight was trained on it from the side; the disc had been treated somehow to reflect blue light and to transmit yellow, so as the disc rotated it cast a blue reflection that revolved around the room, growing and eclipsing with the angle of reflection; and it cast a stationary yellow reflection that also grew and eclipsed. The moving blue spot collided with the stationary yellow spot every time it came around, of course, at the same moment that each shrank to a line’s width, and the 3yo cried, “Bang!”
I liked this, Gordon Bennett’s Possession Island (Abstraction), acrylics, 1991:
And this, a sort of Tower of Babel made of old radios, all tuned to different stations:
And this, William Roberts’ The Diners, oil, 1919:
And this installation (it’s a long story; the artist started, performatively, by engaging a village to make wheaten wreaths for her annually; she had to stop; she tried different means to preserve the art somehow; she settled on sealing the wreaths in metal “tins” in which they are presumably decaying.)
The 3yo had had enough, so we started on a walk back to the flat, via the Millennium Bridge.
I got a new view of St. Paul’s in a reflective ball on the other side. Unfortunately, it’s dented right where you would get a full straight angle at the dome.
Around past the side of St. Paul’s. Take that, Mary Poppins:
Many photos of ordinary London street scenes, like this:
Postman’s Park, a little green jewel of a space, contained this intriguing sheltered wall of glazed-tile texts:
It is a work of private art for the public, a memorial to everyday heroes.
I enjoyed the many-layered angles of this view through a building to who-knows-where (besides the City Thameslink, that is):
I crossed the Holborn Viaduct, its rails brightly painted, studded with these dragons that remind us we are within the jurisdiction of the ancient City of London. A worker on the opposite side of the bridge had a big fluffy duster on a pole, and was carefully dusting the metal lions at the other end.
A glimpse through a gate.
Fleet Street.
I passed the Temple Bar memorial, and turned to get a photo of its dragon in the center of the street.
I stopped at the grocery store before finally coming back to the flat. Mark and the other kids had arrived only minutes before me. He left again to take some of the kids to Mass (I planned to go Sunday morning early, along with the 17yo), and, after resting a while watching “Horrible Histories” DVDs, I set up a dinner.
Pretzels, cheeses and chutneys from Borough market, apricot Wensleydale, saucissons. And hummus and veg and cut mango and blueberries and crackers and Irish soda bread and leftover chicken soup. And a bottle of red wine, Montepulciano from a store somewhere around here.
We were tired, and I planned to get up early; so off to bed for me.
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