A VISIT TO LONDON

The Cherry Orchard

 Last weekend we went to London to stay with our friends who live in Dulwich - a part of London quite impossible to reach without enjoying long spells trapped in the purgatory of the South Circular Road.  In the  habit of these things the road is neither really south, nor circular nor even a road, being bits and pieces of roads tacked together on that familiar British pattern of ‘make-do and mend.’  Apart from the M25, I asked, when was the last time that a major road was built in London? The 1950’s I should imagine.  Boris, get weaving.

    But I shouldn’t commence one of these increasingly rare blogs with a rant when I spent a good part of the weekend surrounded by great beauty. I ate breakfast in a cherry orchard. No, really, I did, in the heart of Surbiton and only a stone’s throw from the River Thames.  Admittedly all the cherry trees had been felled and the land used to build the Surbiton equivalent of dachas - just as Chekhov predicted in his play - except that is for a single ancient specimen that was still producing knicker pink blossoms with Japanese extravagance left in the middle of our friends' garden where we admired it from the comfy furnished warmth of a conservatory while eating a type of meal known only to Londoners (they say London is a foreign country) which started with almond croissants, fresh rhubarb and yoghurt and progressed via black pudding, baked tomatoes, fried egg and sausages made from wild boar to ordinary butter croissants and jam.  And all this while contemplating the cherry blossom like Madame Ranevskaya herself.  Sublime would not be an excessive adjective with which to describe this gastronomic experience.
    But I mustn’t confuse you or you’ll be thinking that Surbiton is in Dulwich.  It isn’t.  We came home via Surbiton which lies on the river Thames to the South West of London, whereas Dulwich lies in the South or South East.  From Dulwich we went to Greenwich, which is on the river, and which claims to lie at the centre of the earth and has the Meridian line to prove it. (In passing you might think that Boris might have named a Tube line ‘Meridian,’ especially if one ran out to Greenwich, but I understand from my friend Angus who joined us on the Greenwich trip and whom I have known since University days, that the reason there are no tubes in South London is because the ground is sand, whereas north of the river it is clay. When you tunnel into sand it collapses, apparently, thus foiling your idea of a tube train.  So that is why the overground railway predominates south of the river but makes up for the land stolen for the tracks by providing a rich harvest of railway arches underneath which a good part of the commerce of London started, apparently).

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum. Canary Wharf Beyond

    Where were we? Greenwich.  Yes.  Home of Elizabeth, the unlikely heroine of Boraya, my Russian novel which just yesterday I finished or at least have done with for the time being.  One of the last things I altered was to put Elizabeth in the Trafalgar pub when she returns on a visit to Greenwich, where she used to live before she became sucked into her Russian maelstrom.  She had a flat somewhere near the park and the station, but she also visited the pub and last weekend I did the same and drank beer watching the river in full flood lapping at the pub windows.  It almost felt dangerous. We could almost have been in St Petersburg.

The River Lapping at the Gates

    Greenwich is just so beautiful that one wonders why the world ever again should need architects.  Sir Christopher Wren and Indigo Jones (and perhaps we could throw in John Nash and Capability Brown) have done all the work needed; they have produced the designs and the proportions and the perspectives.  Now our computers could just produce endless variations of their work. Modern buildings it seems are just shallow impersonations of architecture and ugly to boot.  The Shard, which towers above you when you stand on London Bridge station, may be profitable and clever but it is uncivilised and soulless. Give me Greenwich and St Pauls any day.

The Shard

  So we walked past the Observatory on the hill and eschewed the chance to stand on the Meridian line and headed for the Maritime Museum, to view our glorious ocean going heritage. Nelson is there of course, or rather parts of him, to wit his frock coat, which looks made for a twelve year old boy brought up on a poor diet.  How the musketeer in Redoubtable ever managed to hit such a small target is quite amazing. It can’t have been an aimed shot - just a lucky, or if you were Nelson, unlucky, chance. 

Queen Anne's House

    Still there was no getting away from Nelson, even in the Queen Anne House, built ingeniously for the wife of James I (or VI) by Inigo Jones over a species of the Old Kent Road.  It’s a lovely white box of a house that contrives to look both plain and beautiful, and a home, too.   Tardis like, it is bigger inside than out but sadly has been stripped of its furniture and now houses all the Maritime Museum’s pictures including the stonking great canvas - the size of Victory’s mainsail I shouldn’t wonder - that is Turner’s depiction of the battle of Trafalgar.  It is so large that Turner must have bought his paint by the gallon and I remember it with awe.

JMW Turner: The Battle of Tralgar

    All rather surreal, but then just in case visitors got carried away,  the students from nearby Greenwich University decided to stage a production of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale.’  We kept running into the cast as we wandered about looking at the pictures.  I asked one of them who was holding a bloody rag where the bear was and she told me that it was in my imagination.  I offered to play the bear, but as we were then half way through the play she thought my performance might be a trifle under rehearsed. It wouldn’t have mattered; the performance was anyway quite inaudible given the vast echoing chambers of the unfurnished Queen Anne’s house while the audience’s attention kept being diverted by the superb proportions of Mr Jones’ halls and galleries and the geometric patterns of his marble floors.  ‘Bear with me,’ I said  and turned regretfully away.

The Cutty Sark Tea Clipper

    Finally we looked at the Cutty Sark, magnificent against a grey sky.  But why, I asked, did people ever bother to race the tea home from China?  Surely it would have been cheaper to build a bigger, uglier ship that might have taken a fortnight longer to make the voyage but would have delivered the tea more cheaply?  No sooner had I asked the question than I knew that I was speaking with the spirit of the Shard, and not with the civilising souls of Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.  

Pictures are mine apart from those of Turner, of The Shard, and of the Cherry Blossom which are courtesy of Wikipedia.