Going to the Proms

Days have run along. We realized we hadn’t kept up our calendar, and could we even remember what we did? Hm.

Friday we bused over to Greenwich to observe Greenwich Mean Time, and also to look at the Cutty Sark, now out of water at a tourist spot nearby. Greenwich Royal Observatory is all spacious lawns, a big hill with huge old trees bending gracefully, and old curious buildings. You can stand on the dateline, but you have to pay, so we didn’t – we crossed it going downhill. It was a lovely walk, and we saw wood pigeons and parakeets, definitely worthy birds.

Long slope, Greenwich Museum below, Isle of Dogs beyond, and my new shoes.

 

Greenwich Observatory - the date line is up there someplace

 

Museum entry with ship replica

The other very lovely experience in Greenwich was having a coffee in a book shop near the Cutty Sark, and browsing London-focused books. Quiet Places in London was one, and a diary of days when nothing happened was another. Very inspiring, this. Each “nothing happening” day turned into a loose anecdote, often a complete story in a single paragraph. Brilliant. If only I could remember the author or title.

Kind quote with our coffee

Anyway, after our coffee we took a wrong turn and got lost. Greenwich away from the tourist heart -- an odd, half-industrial port town with no detectable (by us) order to the streets. We wandered among cement depots and heavy equipment lots, slummy apartment buildings, and under the Overground tracks. Finally, asking our way (“you stick to the main street, luv” thus a sturdy old woman with a little dog) we came out on Greenwich High Street at a pub we recognized, the North Pole. Whew!

North Pole

We went home, giving up the fancy of going to Canada Water to see what it was like (that’s a bus stop, evidently in a port area much like Greenwich, of which we had had enough – we also didn’t go to Elmer’s End), cooked supper and watched the BBC Proms on tv.

“Proms” arises from Promenade, in this case (I thought) a showcase mostly for symphony orchestras around the UK, mainly in the Royal Albert Hall in July and August, with radio broadcast. After about a week, some appear on the telly. We heard Beethoven’s 3^rd, and an Elgar song cycle. It turned out later, though, that "Proms" actually refers to the audience, standing up in cheap tickets on the main floor – they are in the promenade; they are Promming.

Saturday was a free-bikes day in London. We decided to promenade ourselves around Hyde Park, and after some trouble managed to figure out the awesome procedure of checking out a bike. Off we went, on a sunny, breezy ride, rather slow actually since the rest of London was also out in Hyde Park. Have you noticed how much harder it is to go slow than fast on a bike? Still, quite beautiful weather and everybody all smiles.

There’s a long skinny lake called the Serpentine running through the middle of the park east to west, and on the lake were swans, ducks, bright blue paddle boats, and rowing boats. A classic Saturday-in-the-park kind of day, children playing Frisbee, and many families of all kinds picnicking. 

We stopped for our picnic, too, and then rode across the park, past Sackler Galleries (will check out later), parked the bikes and looked for a coffee. What to our wondering eyes should appear, but the Albert Memorial, and across from it, the Royal Albert Hall. The obvious outcome was, we had our coffee at their cafe, and got Proms tickets for Sunday evening.

Royal Albert Hall, with Proms sign

Sunday evening Proms:  the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a program focused on WWI. You have never heard of Rudi Stephan, Frederick Kelly, and George Butterworth, because they were killed young in the war, generally by being shot in the head as the program kindly informed us. They had all prepared to be composers, and they were wasted along with so many others. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams was older than them, and lived a long time. He drove ambulance in WWI, and what he felt and saw turned up in his music throughout his life, especially in Symphony #3, composed soon after. He was influenced by folk music and by friendship with Gustav Holst, and at one point in this symphony, he quotes a trumpet player he heard on the Somme persistently playing his top notes flat…but we didn’t notice this during the performance.

We were pleased to be in the beautiful concert hall, after the delicious sandwich from the cafe, with wine during the interval, historical pictures of constructing the Hall, and the general sense of elegance and good maintenance, and we didn’t mind how jammed the buses were afterwards.

Everybody takes the bus here, including white-haired ladies in pearls who are helped up the steps by equally white-haired elderly men. 

Almost nobody drives, except the zooming young Arabs in Lamborghinis, who don’t care about the steep fines for center-city driving. Noisy cars, with sullen slouched mustachioed youths slyly sliding their glances around to see who is admiring their snakehead-looking chariots, out of place next to the classic black cabs. There are few of them, and a lot more cabs… but on Sunday night, it was all buses all the way down. And so, home to bed, satisfied.

Proms program and Julianne in the cafe of the Royal Albert Hall

Nancy, on Monday, August 18, 2014