London, May 2023

• Wednesday, May 10: Fly to London
• Thursday, May 11: Arrive in London, British Museum
• Friday, May 12: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
• Saturday, May 13: Wimbledon, British Museum
• Sunday, May 14: Travel to Oxford

This was the vacation we originally planned for May, 2020. We wanted to visit our friend Ada in London one last time before she transferred back to DC. We bought our British Airways tickets and I was researching itineraries in Cornwall when the Covid pandemic squashed all plans. British Airways gave us vouchers for the value of our tickets but those vouchers were due to expire by the end of 2023. So we settled on May, 2023, as the best time to try again. We invited Ada partly in jest and were delighted when she took us up on the offer to join us for the Cornwall segment of the trip.

Wednesday, May 10

Barb worked a full day, half in DC at Manager’s Conference (her last one, last chance to meet many colleagues from around the country), second half at home online. It became a very tense last hour from 5pm to 6 as she got things ready and I was impatient to head to the airport. We finally left a little after 6 but a few minutes down the road Barb realized she forgot her AC plug adapter. She insisted we stop to check luggage then returned home to find it. So we were back on the road about a half hour later than I wanted. Things turned out OK; we parked and got to the British Airways counter by 7pm, a little less than 2 hours before the flight…a bit tighter than the 3 hours recommended by the airline. The good news was there was no line and we waltzed through check in and security.

I had upgraded us to Premium Economy and I was pleased to see the seats were quite nice: roomy with a goody bag, pillow, blanket and headphones. Service on the red-eye flight was brusque, at best. There was no drinks service other than a small glass of water or orange juice as we taxied. After an hour or so they gave us a decent hot meal of brisket with potatoes and succotash; I ate mine and most of Barb’s. I was hungry having not eaten in nearly 12 hours, something of a recent record for me. I asked for a gin and tonic to drink; one was finally delivered well after I finished dinner. I watched the Bill Nighy movie, Living, which was pleasant, a non-threatening airplane movie that I hadn’t seen yet. I tried to sleep after that and dozed intermittently, eventually sleeping through some episodes of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. We woke to a good view of London as we circled into Heathrow.

Thursday, May 11

We breezed through immigration at Heathrow and ours were the first bags off the conveyor (so maybe the last ones on the plane?). We were so quick that our driver was not there when we emerged from Terminal 5. I called London Heathrow Cars and they said she’d be there in 10 minutes. I started to get What’s App calls from an unknown number and thought it was spam. It turned out to be our driver, an older Russian or Eastern European lady. She eventually found us and took us to a nice Mercedes for the drive into town. Traffic was nasty and it took about 75 minutes to make the trip. Just the last 3 miles from Paddington to our hotel took 25 minutes through London’s congested and traffic-light riddled streets. The traffic itself wasn’t too bad, but they funnel all cars and trucks onto a few main streets and then have traffic lights on nearly every block. We eventually made it to The Montague Hotel around 11:30am, just slightly behind schedule.

We were greeted warmly by the bellman/concierge and the desk clerk, and were happy to be informed we were upgraded to a junior suite…but it wouldn’t be ready until 3pm. We freshened up a bit in the bathrooms, enjoyed some fresh lemonade in the lobby, left our bags and went around the corner to the British Museum. I had chosen The Montague Hotel for its proximity to the museum; I had first noticed the hotel in 2011 when we last visited the Museum and were walking in the neighborhood past the signature pots of red flowers along the street. I thought “What a nice looking hotel” and logged it away in my memory bank. Now here we were.

We got in the museum without really showing our timed tickets then took a few minutes to get Barb oriented and connected to the audio guide. She also tracked down a free paper map to the Museum which proved useful. We decided to try the History of the World tour, an ostensibly 60 minute run through 20 diverse objects scattered through the museum (I am frustrated that I cannot find a good online link to the tour, but I’m resisting the urge to do a separate post cataloging the 20 items while I can still retrieve them from the app…I may succumb at a later date if I have nothing better to do). It turned into a much longer scavenger hunt as we slowly worked our way up and down stairs, wandering through various rooms trying to find the specific target object. There was little rhyme or reason to the objects selected other than it forced us to see a great deal of the museum.

The British Museum is really a collection of about a dozen museums with nearly 100 rooms and thousands of objects, each with their own interesting stories of how they were found, why they were in the museum and who they represented. It’s entirely overwhelming and exhausting. Best to take it in smaller doses that’s what we would do over the rest of our stay. As it was, we traipsed through half of the 20 items on our tour in about 90 minutes before succumbing to the need for food and a place to sit. We had just finished our snack of a decent ham and cheese baguette when the fire alarm sounded throughout the Great Court. It was not a drill though we never saw any indication of an actual fire…nor was there any panic, just a general resignation that we’d have to find a way out. We and thousands of other people filed through the lobby, slowly merging through one small set of doors. If there was an actual fire we would have been trampled or burned up. After 15 minutes or so we were outside the building, sheltering under the eave to stay out of a drizzly rain. We waited another 15 minutes or so for the all clear then shuffled back into the museum to resume our tour.

In all, we spent almost 4 hours working our way through our 60 minute introductory tour. We concluded we would go back to spend more time in the Enlightenment exhibit, the Gilgamesh/Babylon room and the Chinese area, at a minimum. The cuneiform fragment with the Gilgamesh story sparked my interest and I wanted to learn more about Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. 

One of the memorable items on the tour was an African drum from Ghana, procured from Virginia (or Jamaica?) in the 1730s by Sir Hans Sloane whose collection formed the basis for the British Museum (the first I’d heard of Sloane but I was to learn more). I took a moment to consider this artifact of extreme importance to a group of enslaved people, perhaps their only direct memory of home. It was expertly reskinned in Virginia, then snatched up by the British explorer – “That’s nice, I’ll take it” – and now it sits here in the British Museum. What a long, strange trip. Nearly every display case in this mammoth museum has items with similarly complex and problematic lineages.

We were worn out by jet lag and the museum by about 4pm, so retreated to our hotel, checked into our nice little suite and cleaned up before dinner. On tap was our now-traditional first night London meal of steak frites at Le Relais de Venise Marylebone. We decided to walk to the restaurant; it took us 45 minutes rather than the advertised 28 but we got there in time to be about 30th in line for the 6pm opening. The meal is still the best. The dressing on the salad is bracing, the sauce on the steak is unctuous, and the fries are perfect. And just when you finish your first plate, along comes an excellent second helping.

We staggered back to the hotel and fell asleep to the dulcet tones of the Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Finals. What a goofy show. I stayed up until 11pm, somehow, then passed out. Earworm of the night was a song from Austria about Edgar Allan Poe (“Who the Hell is Edgar“).

Friday, May 12

Breakfast at the hotel turned out to be a treat. The Full English Breakfast buffet featured just about everything we desired. Pork products in all their glory, and plenty of them. We both took our time and overloaded on calories for the day. A dangerous but totally enjoyable start to our vacation.

We went back to the British Museum when it opened at 10am. Barb and I spent an hour or so in the Enlightenment Gallery, a catch-all treasure-box of artifacts from around the world embodying the intertwined explosion of learning, classification, empire building, inquisitiveness, and arrogance that coincided with Britain’s rise to power in the 17th-19th centuries. It’s a fascinating, problematic exhibit, overflowing with amazing stuff in cases and wall displays — far too much to fully take in or comprehend, but that’s part of the point. The world was suddenly open to these people as they grappled to make sense of it all…as we still do. It was enlightening and overwhelming, even in a small dose.

I learned a bit more about Sir Hans Sloane and his very wide-ranging collection of artifacts — natural and cultural — largely financed by marrying Elizabeth Langley Rose, widowed heiress of a Jamaican sugar plantation fortune. He was only in Jamaica for a few years before returning to London where he became a top physician and continued collecting (and buying collections) through his long life. His admirable qualities were offset by being a harsh, though distant, slave master over his Jamaican estates. Today’s Sloane Street and Sloane Square in London are named for him, and his 71,000 piece collection indeed jump started the British Museum upon his death in 1753. Rhiannon Giddens would be pleased to note that a pair of banjos are included in Sloane’s 1707 book on Jamaica, the earliest reference to African music in the Americas.

One case in the Enlightenment Gallery focused on the transatlantic slave trade, trying to reconcile the fact that much of the collection is financed by slave labor and colonialist empire building. The one case is a weak start at acknowledging Britain’s role in this trade (though I didn’t know it went back to Sir Francis Drake…he was all over the place!). The curators seem to know it and include a little note, the gist of which is: “We’re working on it.” I was somehow expecting a more thorough handling of the subject. I’ve visited the Museum’s website for the latest information but haven’t found much.

Appropriately enlightened, we headed onward to the main topic of our day: Harry Potter! Barb had expressed interest in seeing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in its shortened version on Broadway; I reminded her the full two-part play was still running in London and we got tickets. It so happened that the tickets for this Friday show coincided with an annual House Party celebration, basically a fan/brand event meant to generate social media hits. We were offered a free Big Bus tour of London starting at noon before the 2pm show.

It was raining for the open air bus ride so we stayed dry on the lower level of the doubledecker bus. The tour was not really a tour; it turned out to be an hour-long rolling trivia game that Barb and I did poorly on – Allie would have done much better. The sights of London went unremarked upon as we wrestled with obscure Potter trivia. We did get a nice view of Parliament as we crossed the bridge, and then traveled some of the Coronation parade route but I elected not to attempt any pictures from our lower level seat. Barb panicked for the final 5-10 minutes when she couldn’t find her work phone. We eventually tracked it down in her purse, hiding in one of her many pockets.

After the tour/trivia game we had a little less than an hour before the show started, so we squeezed in a 10-minute walk to a Trafalgar Square hotel where Barb was supposed to pick up a phone that some other government employee had left there for some reason I still haven’t figured out. The people at the hotel had no idea what she was talking about. After going in circles for a few anxious, wasted minutes we hustled back to the Palace Theatre and got ourselves seated, huffing and puffing, just as the show was about to start.

Without giving away spoilers, I can say that the show was an industrial strength example of brand extension. The very convoluted plot was supplemented by some elaborate stage production and fairly magical special effects.

Between shows, I was glad we made dinner reservations at The Cambridge pub just next door to the theatre. Barb had good fish and chips. I had a dense beef pie – I didn’t need to eat it all but I did. I also had a decent London amber ale and then a quite good cider, the first of many ciders I would have on the trip.

The second half of the show helped clear up some of the questions I had from the first half, then introduced more plot twists and reveals. What can I say…I was a less than casual fan sitting among a throng of zealots. There are no such things as Playbill magazines anymore, so I took a photo of our cast listing, in case any of them become famous.

Saturday, May 13

Today’s featured item was Wimbledon. Fortified by our Full English Breakfast buffet, we set out on the London Underground. We were able to get from Russell Square station to Wimbledon/Southfields station in under an hour, transferring at Earl’s Court. From Southfields we walked about 20 minutes to the Wimbledon Museum rather than messing with the bus. We walked by overgrown Wimbledon Park which evidently used to be a golf course but will soon become a National Tennis Centre with acres and acres of courts and facilities. Will be impressive. Watch that space. 

We took a 90-minute tour of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club grounds, including Court 1, Henman Hill, the grounds courts, press centre, and finally Centre Court. Very impressive operation, the cathedral of tennis. Very snooty process for membership. Took lots of photos.

After the tour, we took an audio-guide walk through the Museum for another 90 minutes. We learned more than even I wanted to know about the history of tennis and the club in particular. Going through the lists of champions, it’s crazy to realize how much of tennis history I’ve already lived through.

We decided not to squeeze in a trip to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, Battersea or Regent’s Park. The weather was a little cool, we got caught by the rain each of the previous two days, and we were tired from walking and stuffing a lot into the first two days. Instead, we took our time at Wimbledon and walked slowly back to the Southfields tube station.

An hour later we were back at the hotel and decided to go to the British Museum for a final couple of hours. Barb did Chinese Dynasties. I went to the Mesopotamia area (mostly Room 55) to learn more about Anatolia, Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurbanipal, and so on. Took more pictures so I could remember what to look up later. I tried to make connections between the exhibits and timelines but still had trouble sorting one thread from another. The museum further struck me as a somewhat random walk through stuff we found (took) from around the world, but at the same time, it holds the keys to everything worth knowing. Almost every item on display has a staggering story.

I first stopped at the Ashurbanipal Flood Tablet which sparked my interest in this room in the first place.

There was a large display about the Ashurbanipal Library, “the first library to contain all knowledge” (project website). I hadn’t known about this library or its destruction.

I was amazed to see what must be one of the first maps of the world.

I still barely know my Ashurbanipal from my Nebuchadnezzar, much less Assyria from Babylonia…but this is the place to learn.

I can’t resist a picture of a cat, but besides that, it is a beautiful work of ancient art.

More background to learn…including Hammurabi.

It’s all too much. Farewell, British Museum. We spent chunks of three days and barely scratched the surface of one percent of what’s there. I am humbled.

The hotel concierge sniffed at the neighborhood Italian spot I’d found on Yelp and instead suggested Da’Paulo, a small spot just a few blocks further away. He made a reservation for us and we walked the few blocks to this neighborhood spot we never would have found on our own. I had a nice grilled sardine salad appetizer and a seafood ravioli pasta. Barb had a very nice veal Milanese. A good recommendation from the concierge.

We were back in the room by 7:30pm, settled in for the Eurovision Song Contest finals, live from Liverpool. There was an amazing buildup on the BBC — you would think it was the cultural event of the Century. Once the show got going, it was a cavalcade of 3-minute blasts of high energy quasi-entertainment. For all the effort and energy, most of the songs were empty and instantly forgettable. The ultimate winner was from Sweden with a song I didn’t like very much. I fell asleep once the voting got started and woke up just in time to see the winner announced. My judgement: Eurovision was not remotely worth the hype and expense that went into the event. And Hannah Waddingham had the most fun of all.

Time to rest up for our next adventure: getting to Oxford.