Some great and long-standing friends of ours from London visited us about a month ago. During their stay they offered to put me, and Jane, up for a couple of nights in London so I could attend a ‘Boys Night Out’ with some other mutual friends. These nights out with half a dozen other longstanding London-based friends have been going on for several years. We meet each time in a restaurant where country’s cuisine matches our progression through the alphabet.
We have made it through to ‘W’ which this time meant we had to meet in a Welsh, Western Samoan or Western Saharan restaurant. Perhaps controversially given the current politics in north west Africa, we went for the latter and settled on a Moroccan restaurant in Covent Garden. There, we were deposited in the basement where we were largely left to our own devices and had a relaxed evening of catch up while avoiding issues of Brexit, politics and climate change which might have provoked argument. We may be mates but we have diverse views on life!
Visiting London for this evening out and capitalizing on the hospitality of our hosts, provided a great opportunity to experience the rich range of exhibitions and galleries of this great city. Having sold my weekday bolt-hole 18 months ago, we rarely visit London these days. We are no longer members of the big cultural institutions and hadn’t planned well enough in advance to see the most popular and celebrated exhibitions. But exhibitions in the next tier down from the greatest were amusement enough.
Jane had accompanied me to London and, before she went off to meet up with London friends of her own, we went to the Natural History Museum to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. I have visited this many times and always love the photographs and the way they are presented in backlit screens. The range of material and the detail in the images is astounding to me.
I hung around the Natural History Museum for a while to help me recall bringing our sons to the museum on many Saturday mornings when they were small. I saw several of the rooms including the new dinosaur section (including a robotic, moving tyrannosaurus dressed as Father Christmas!), and a small but diverting exhibition of photos of research and military stations in the Arctic by Gregor Sailer.
I then crossed London in wonderfully sunny weather, to the brand new Antony Gormley exhibition at White Cube Gallery.
The first thing that astonished there was the transformation since my last visit. Then, all the rooms were filled with massive piles of rubble and shelving packed with dimly lit industrial artifacts put together by Anselm Kiefer in celebration of Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. Gormley did fill the biggest of the rooms with more stone constructions – fired clay blocks positioned to represent 244 ‘body forms’ – but the whole exhibition was sparse and minimalist; a total contrast to Kiefer’s last exhibition here.
I was joined by one of our London hosts and together we did another circuit of the exhibition. I enjoyed it. I like the fact that I have now seen a range Gormley’s work in a variety of places and see at least some of the linkages and evolutions in his thinking.
We headed off to find a local Bermondsey pub for a pint (of Magazine Cover by DEYA Brewing Company – one of my favourite beers and local to our home not London) and a light lunch. Then we ‘Citymappered’ our way to Greenwich to see the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National Maritime Museum.
Like the Wildlife Photography exhibition, this is an exhibition I have visited often over the last several years. It tends to be more repetitive in terms of content than the wildlife photography but I find it amazing nonetheless.
I don’t really understand the techniques and equipment involved in producing the images. Indeed, I admire the photos that are relatively simple single take shots rather than the ones clearly involving huge telescopes, time lapse photography and overlays of multiple pictures. In any case, the results are, almost uniformly, incredibly beautiful.
We failed to get to the Royal Naval College in time to see the Painted Hall there before it closed for the day (my fault!). But we did get some good views of the Cutty Sark and the Thames as the sun went down in a clear sky.
Next morning, Jane left for home and I made my way across London to Kings Cross to take a train to Nottingham. Again, the weather was clear and bright. I loved my walk across the centre of the city while renewing my acquaintance with London’s diversity, vibrancy and bustle. Its such a rich city – in more ways than one!
Then to Nottingham for a rather whistle-stop stay with my sister, a game of Mahjong, and a nice meal out with my Dad whose birthday followed the next day. He is 92. That is 90 years older than First Grandchild whose birthday we celebrated just a couple of weeks before. Incredible!
My Retirement Journey 