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Encouraging Perfect Propriety in an Imperfect World since 2001
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THIS IS ROBERT TALKING . . . Or, the Dark Side of Etiquetteer :-)

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Sunday, 6 July: Summer Abroad, Day 65: London Again, Day 11

July 6, 2025

1) Sometimes, when you’re awake earlier than you’d like to be, you just have to recognize that you won’t get back to sleep anyway and you might just as well get up. Sure, it was 7:00 AM, but I hadn’t turned out the lights until after 1:00 AM . . .

2) The forecast indicated a gray day, and since I always say that colors pop on a gray day, I pointed my shoes in the direction of Kew Gardens. I remembered that E.M. Forster story (I just had to look up the title, “Arthur Snatchfold”) with the milkman who enlivens a garden out of bloom by appearing in a yellow shirt, and put on mine — though I expected to see some wonderful flowers.

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3) Leaving the hotel I turned right instead of left (to go to a different Tube station), and was surprised by a sculptural interpretation of a painting I saw in New York back in March: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog. Isn’t that fantastic?!

4) On the Underground, I felt fortunate to get a seat in a different car from those two women watching videos without earbuds in the station. Until I realized I was sitting a couple seats away from someone who was listening to some sort of foreign language podcast without earbuds. Annoyed, I turned to my right and . . .

4a) . . . and was so disappointed that the offender was an extremely beautiful man who Ought to Have Known Better. Think of Clark Kent at age 45, wearing a gray T-shirt with the neck cut out (remember how we did that when Flashdance came out?) to emphasize his clavicles, and slutty little glasses, listening to some irritating Slavic-sounding podcast. I was so demoralized I had to turn back to The First Celebrities.

5) Kew Gardens is a rural station, and to get to the gardens from the station you have to take a walkway over the tracks to the other side, where there’s a tree-lined square surrounded by little storefronts. A farmer’s market was in full swing, helped along by a fairly large jazz band playing . . . playing . . . what is that Ricky Martin song that ends “and just forget about it”?

6) Kew Gardens, extensive and impressive, drew me first to the tropical greenhouse, which is exactly what I think a greenhouse out to be. The plantings outside masterfully combined colors. A border of dusty miller and geraniums made me think of the floral efforts of years past to realize the school colors of ye Instytytte; cardinal red is easy enough, but the floral world doesn’t include much silver gray, and dusty miller is not always easy for centerpieces.

6a) Warm and clammy inside, I felt overdressed, and remembered General Sternwood’s unhappiness in his orchid house in The Big Sleep*. “Do you like orchids? They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

Influencers at work. How on earth was I going to get past them?

6b) Occasionally on this trip I’ve come across influencers out to create content. Today’s was an Asian woman dressed up as Flopsy Mopsy Bobbsey with her crew. Nothing a good brisk “Excuse me” couldn’t get me out of.

6c) Several places I noticed plaques for the audio guide, but today I had come just to see and be, not to learn and do.

7) More exuberant plantings and color combinations as I continued in the direction of Kew Palace, observing all the family groups with young children. The sun was starting to flash out now and then, and the day was feeling a little warmer.

This is the rear elevation.

8) Palace? It’s a four-story house! In fact it was first known as the Dutch House, but this was George III’s principal home during the years of his mental illness. It’s maintained now in some part as a means to have a wider conversation about mental illness — which is healthier than the old way, which was just not to talk about it at all.

8a) I hadn’t known that G3 played the flute, and they have his transverse flute made of china on display. Will they some day invite Lizzo to play it?

From the King all the way down to baby Amelia.

8b) One of the most novel museum displays ever was to provide a family portrait of sorts of all the G3 family as dressmaker’s dummies.

8c) As at Hampton Court, they use china on the dinner table to help tell the story of life in the palace. I think it’s very effective.

8d) During his illness, G3 lived on the ground floor and in a wing that is no longer there, and Queen Charlotte and four (?) of their daughters lived on the upper floors. The most moving artifact there was the chair in which Queen Charlotte died, in the room where she died.

9) Interesting as the palace was, I was more drawn to the gardens behind it: a parterre, and a “nosegay garden” full of sweet-smelling flowering plants, complete with a few bees and butterflies. I could only have wished that they had a maze.

The palace seen from the nosegay garden.

10) By this time it was midday, and I was ready to be sustained. A reasonable walk brought me to the Brasserie Restaurant, across an ornamental lake from the tropical greenhouse. I was shown to a table inside, which later became dominated by a party of ten, and served an excellent cauliflower soup and schnitzel (after all the schnitzel I had in Vienna). Just wonderful.

11) Didn’t expect my lunch timing to help me avoid a rainstorm, but when I left it was apparent there had been a lot of rain . . . and sprinkles were still sprinkling. And we don’t complain about it, because the grass is scorched already.

12) Teenage geese caught my eye, goslings that just hadn’t completely grown up yet, strutting about and pecking at the lawns and pavement.

13) It would have been a shame to have gone all the way to Kew and not seen the Great Pagoda, so I headed in that direction, discovering new bits of information about the garden along the way. The pagoda tower itself is quite impressive, especially with the dragons added back to its many eaves in 2018. But my towers days ended at Sagrada Familia in 2022, and I was content to scan the bottom floor and look up the stairwell.

14) The temperate greenhouse led me from Raymond Chandler’s General Sternwood to Tennessee Williams’s Violet Venable. Aside from that Flopsy Mopsy lady and a very nice woman in a wheelchair, I saw a lantana, which brought me right back to Oak Park Elementary School. So if I wake up screaming tonight, you’ll know why.

15) The roses behind the tropical greenhouse I had missed earlier, and now I got to enjoy them fully, especially their scent.

15) Rounding the corner, I got the bonus of a setatue of a sweet white greyhound. A father and son were playing hide and seek next to it.

16) They have quite an extensive shop, but I didn’t feel like carrying anything extra, and retraced my steps all the way back to London.

17) And there, I fell into my little bed like a stone and sawed gourds for almost two hours. Then, it being Sunday, I thought I ought to go find out what this “Sunday Roast” thing was I’d seen advertised at so many pubs. Being very sleepy still, I just drifted into the first pub I passed on High Street. I made do with a double gin and tonic and ordered a steak for my Sunday Roast, which was quite good. I sat at my somewhat unsteady table ploughing through both my dinner and The First Celebrities — in the latter case the story of Lady Charlotte Bury, whose decline from the beautiful daughter of a duke to a lady who had made two unfortunate marriages for love, then became a novelist out of financial necessity, and then published her correspondence (and that of her friends!) about George IV and his family (!) — well, it’s quite a tale.

18) Tomorrow, the Imperial War Museum!

*The novel. In the movie the line ends “ . . . rotten sweetness of corruption.”








Fri-Sat, 4-5 July: Summer Abroad, Days 63-64: London Again, Days 9-10 →
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