The last few days before our Midterm Break have been good – eventful, but not stressful or overbearing. Tuesday morning, after giving an oral presentation on a collection I hadn’t read – but still walked away with an A; bad life lessons all around – we went into London, more specifically the Greenwich Peninsula to the east of the main city area. The trains were all screwed up coming out of Harlow Mill, and it looked like our trip was going to be something like the setup to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles II: Literary London, but somehow everything aligned perfectly and we ended up in Greenwich right on schedule, not too far from the O2 Arena.
Greenwich, other than being the site of a recent Katy Perry concert, is also the place where time was born. That’s right, kids; before Sir Stanford Fleming, a Canadian, came up with the idea of time zones and set the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, there was no time.
"My legacy is tarnished by that gross historical inaccuracy."
We went to the National Maritime Museum before making the small trek up the hill to the observatory and the Prime Meridian; here was a huge spot, one of the better museums we’ve been to yet (for one, it didn’t include room upon rooms of ceramic dishes), with all kinds of ship models, relics, Horatio Nelson’s (the admiral killed in the Battle of Trafalgar, a major English victory in the Napoleonic Wars in 1805, immortalised in, you guessed it, Trafalgar Square) jacket, and even a model birch bark canoe by our own Shawnawdithit, the last of the Beothuck Indians in Newfoundland.
Oh, and they even briefly mention the fact that there was an Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Indian. Briefly.
After the museum, we took a spin through the gardens to the back of the museum, and climbed up to where east longitude and west longitudes meet, right on the Prime Meridian.
The show for the evening was at the small Greenwich Theatre, a retelling of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. Two dudes, contained in a tiny room that was the site of the one of the guys’ near-death torture. The show opened right where the short story ends, with the captive retelling the story of The Pit and the Pendulum to his rescuer, and adding a little bit of character back story along the way. Here’s the problem; Edgar Allan Poe did a great job with this vignette because he built suspense. You didn’t know if the guy was going to make it out, and it even got to the point where you couldn’t imagine how he was possibly going to. In this show, you knew he made it out, because they told you in the first minute. No suspense means that they had to pull some sort of twist ending – too bad it ended up being pretty lame. It had the potential to be a good storytelling technique, but it was played out on the wrong type of story.
Plus, the ending, where the captive realizes he’s more screwed than he was before, and lets out a bellowing “NOOOOOOO!” before shuffling to take his bow, might have been even worse than when Darth Vadar does it in Episode III.
Because dying of a broken heart and losing the
will to live . . . that's totally a thing
On Wednesday we didn’t leave for London until after 3 o’clock. By now, whatever was wrong with the lines was fixed, and we made it into Liverpool Street and got our connection to Holland Park around supper time. What a gorgeous little spot on the outskirts of the city. The whole area is very Victorian and upper-class, and the park itself just immersed you in the woods. The sun was shining, but there was a fall hint to the air – one of the best kinds of days for strolling through the woods. Also, there were gardens with peacocks just hanging around, and all sizes and shapes of dogs – what a spot.
It was dark by the time we wandered to Finborough Theatre, a tiny (try 50 seats) little wine café and playhouse. The fringe shows really are the best ones; we were front row, which basically meant we were in the Irish family’s living room, right in the midst of their tensest moments. The play revolved around a factory strike, but really at its core it was about the relationship between Protestants and Catholics, only a few years before the Easter Rising. A lot of prejudices and grim realities came out of the show – the play debuted in Dublin 100 years ago, but it still packed a punch in a tiny room in Kensington.
Today was an early day, and another ripe autumn morning. We were into London before lunchtime, this time bound for Kingston upon Thames. Just in case we hadn’t gotten our fix of the great outdoors over the last few days, we went on a good walk alongside the river to get to the Rose Theatre – and, believe it or not, the usually grey, grimy Thames wasn’t even a hard sight to look at.
We also swung by Hampton Court Palace, the so-called pleasure palace of Henry VIII, the dude who had six wives (not at the same time), created the Anglican Church, and went on to star in The Tudors. Not a bad place to hang out, even though we were in a hurry and not dishing out £10 to go inside.
The Rose Theatre is in a little chunk of London removed from the rest of the world, right alongside a cobblestone boulevard with a cool outdoor market. If only we had those in St. John’s.
We were there to see The Importance of Being Earnest, the Oscar Wilde play that features Jane Asher, once fiancé to Paul McCartney, now a cake decorator (seriously). We were sitting right in the pit – ie. on the floor, Indian-style. The show was great though – lots of fun, a witty script (this is Oscar Wilde, after all), and great comic acting by the whole cast.
By the time we made it back to Harlow, it was time to pack, time to book hostels, time to tick everything off an imaginary list and hopefully not have missed anything. All hands – there are five of us going – are getting excited now. We’re leaving on the 10:40 plane out of Stansted, which is a bit of a relief; no 3 am bus ride this time, instead we can hold off until around 8 o’clock. The plan is to spend a few days in Barcelona, heading south to Granada on Monday, and then Almería for the last few days, flying back to London next Thursday. Wine, beaches, the place where The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was filmed, a legitimate Spanish Train (hopefully not the one where the Devil and the Lord are playing poker), decently cheap hostels, and some solid days of doing nothing except relaxing – Spain, where have you been all my life?
I don’t know a word of Spanish except “Arriba!”, but I know that there’s no such thing as a language barrier when you’re lying down on a sandy beach against the Mediterranean with a drink in one hand. This is a far cry from making a snowman out of slush before Halloween.
What a lucky, undeserving bastard I am. See you all in a week.
Cheers,
rb
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