Recollected after my return home.
1) Overall, this was not a well-planned day (which happens) and I didn’t exactly start it in the best mood (which also happens), but by dinnertime everything was hunky-dory.
2) I had sort of a random assignment to look for a metal goblet (more on that later), so I went off to the London Silver Vaults someplace near Chancery Lane, just to see what was going on there. You know how they say “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it”? Gurrrlllll . . . I could not afford it. But it was very interesting to see everything you could make out of silver, including stuff I wouldn’t have imagined . . . usually in the shape of animals.
2a) It was kind of involved getting to the basement where the vaults were, not just an elevator, but a corridor with many twists, turns and angles. And then long corridors of the vaults, all brightly lit with fluorescent lights and jam-packed with silverware, epergnes, champagne buckets, rows of napkin rings, trophies, candelabra, and God knows what else.
3) So, that was interesting, but fruitless. My feet then took me on a bit of a walk to the National Portrait Gallery, a return visit to see anything I’d missed the first time. Which was quite a bit, including a special exhibition of portaits by the artists of Young Poland — basically the Polish equivalent of the Impressionists. But I had also missed a couple galleries of the Stuarts, and of course I felt like I was seeing old friends around every corner.
4) After a NAP, I headed back in the direction of Spitalfields for dinner with my friends Tim and Jésus (with whom Craig and I had dinner with earlier in the month). Embarrassingly, I had mistaken the number of their house and rung at the wrong building. When a confused young woman in a bathrobe opened the door to ask “What?” all I could do was mumble, “I’m so sorry, I have the wrong number” and slink away.
4a) But when I got to the correct house, all was well. We sat in their tiny back garden, heavily vined and gently filled with golden early evening light, and talked about Knole and other points of interest, and the rest of my stay over a glass of wine.
5) For dinner, we went to an Indian place called Cinnamon, where the food was fabulous and the live jazz duo was deafening. This was not an experience Tim and Jésus had experience there before. I kept remembering a lounge singer in Boston back in the 1990s, a wonderful woman, who was singing one night at Club FooFoo so VERY LOUDLY that a lesbian stood up and hollered “I’M GOING DEAF!” Adjustments were made to the microphone after that. (This was so long ago that the piano was by the entrance, well before the creation of the Napoleon Room.) But they went on break before about halfway through our entrées, so we were able to continue our excellent conversation without further vocal strain.