Let the Memory Live Again

Breakfast is included at the hotel.  Not a buffet, you order off a menu.  I ordered the vegetarian.  Jeesh what a lot of food.

Mid-morning I set out to walk to the Isle of Dogs, along the Thames Path.  Don’t know how many more trips I’ll ever make to London, but I made a commitment to try each time and do a new section of the TP.

Today’s walk, which started at London Bridge, was pretty dull as walks go (unless you were following along on an app, as I was, which was sharing a lot of history).  While a lot of the TP is scenic and green, the section through east London is mainly a series of wharf conversions to flats.  The path edges the river, juts back to Wapping High St for many sections, to the river, to the street, in a horseshoe like fashion.

 

Without knowing anything it’s really just a lot of brick.  But you pass Wapping Stairs, for instance, that date back centuries, and aside from leading to a pier may have been the stairs prisoners were taken down before execution.  There’s Limehouse lock from the 1770s which was the first “short cut” off the Thames.  And when I saw a rat so large at first I thought it was a small rabbit, I thought about the centuries of habitation here, densely packed, grimy, without running water or sewers, sooty, and there’s a whole different edge to the banal repetition of it.

Eventually you reach Canary Wharf; there is something so “planned urban community” about the development it seems sterile in a 3D video game way, readymade like a cake mix but short all the steps to make it a really great cake.  It’s not exciting or thriving like Singapore or Hong Kong, it’s just an extraordinary amount of construction in a dense area.

The reason I chose this walk was because a) the hotel is in the east end of the city and b) I was on my way to Asda, a supermarket that is more commonly outside the city.  Good Housekeeping, in their roundup review of Christmas Puddings 2024 gave Asda the highest marks for a supermarket pud.

Asda was also running a little promo where certain brands had released special edition “pink” versions of their products.  The point being a percentage of profit would be donated to breast cancer.  This seemed dubious at best.

There were also, how can I put it?  Halloween specialties.

Given how huge breakfast was, and despite walking for a few hours, I wasn’t especially hungry, but I did want to circle back to The Grapes.

Pub fun fact: Oldest pub on the river in London (pub on the site since 1583).  Pub fun fact: It featured in Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend (it was called The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters).  Pub fun fact: Ian McKellan bought it.  OK, enough pub fun facts.

 

There was a small deck off the back and while not picturesque it was certainly pleasant.  Plus they had bitter, three choices, all just over 3%.  While I was taking in the river activity a man came in with not one but two Irish terriers.  A male, 12 years old, a female 10.  He told me going out with them was like walking celebrities.

After The Grapes I just meandered through EC1.  In the years I lived in London, and most of the visits since, I rarely go further east than St. Paul’s.  It’s not an area I know that well.  So, without intent, just walked various residential streets and enjoyed something different.

 

It started to get late though, and tonight’s play started early, 7 p.m., so eventually I hopped on a tube at Shoreditch and headed back to the hotel.

St. Dunstan’s in the East Church Garden.  From a historical website: The Church of St Dunstan was originally built around 1100 and is a Grade I listed building. A new south aisle was added in 1391 and was repaired in 1631. It was severely damaged in 1666 by the Great Fire of London. The Church was again severely damaged in the Blitz of 1941. Wren’s tower and steeple survived the bombing. During the re-organisation of the Anglican Church after World war II it was decided not to rebuild St Dunstan’s. In 1967 the City of London decided to turn the remains into a public garden, which opened in 1970.

 

The play tonight, the Lehman Trilogy, was a hit at the National, transferred to the West End, then was scheduled for NYC.  Stephen and I had tickets, I was very excited to finally see it.  Then a little something called Covid happened and NY was cancelled.  So it’s back in the West End, the same Sam Mendes production, and I finally had a chance to see it.  Three acts.  Almost three and half hours.  But gripping, exceptionally done, and as a production (in terms of skill, novelty and entertainment,) it crushed Dr. Strangelove.

 

However, here’s the thing.  It’s at the Gillian Lynne theatre.  That’s somewhere I hadn’t been since 1981.  How do I know?  How could I be so exact and sure?  Because I was living in London and Nan came to visit and we saw a lot of theatre and I bought tickets to a musical that had just opened.  It was called Cats.

 

And Cats played the Gillian Lynne theatre for over 20 years straight.

 

So going into that theatre and having that flashback memory was very weird, it was all Elaine Page singing Memory.  Plus it was Halloween which, in the UK, is really just an excuse for young people to get dressed up, go out and party, and there were cats.  I mean not Old Deuteronomy cats but, you know, women in cat suits, women in cat masks just wandering about. 

 

Lehman Trilogy fun fact: The original Italian version ran over five hours.  Makes the three and a half in English whoosh by.  I was sawing logs in Nice at this hour!