Pt3 - 11:

LONDON the SECOND

Chiswick is a bustling hub of art and culture. Art of the culinary kind in Andy’s Kebab House and the curries of Sundarban, and culture of the drinking kind at The Tabard on the corner and All Bar One on the high street. Everything is within too easy a stroll of Rod and Rosie’s, ten minutes to get there and forty to stagger home. Connecting us to everywhere in the city in a matter of minutes, Turnham Green station is down the end of the street and round the corner; the four lines pass right by R & R’s back fence, each with its own distinctive note and rhythm as the trains rattle through. You might remember me saying rail offers the idle traveller a chance to peer fleetingly into the backyards of local life. Anyone peering into the local life of R & R’s small back yard would’ve seen yours truly installed in the garden with a beer on the table and Rod’s guitar, enhancing the rich cultural life of Chiswick.

Ok, I’m being flippant, but Chiswick did indeed boast a small amateur theatre attached to the Tabard and a cultural centre and dance studio a couple of doors up from R & R’s. And this second two week swing through London would have a distinctly cultural flavour to it, including an homage to Tess’s late Uncle John. We kicked off, though, with a scientific excursion.

We could’ve walked to Kew on this glorious summer morning, but we didn’t. We caught the bus instead and saved ourselves for a long day’s leisurely wandering through the vast and beautiful parklands forming this campus of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Although plant-wise I don’t know my arsinicus from my elbownae I can still appreciate a damn good piece of landscaping, and Kew is more than just a damn good piece of landscaping. It’s a bank, a repository of species from the kelps of the deep to mountain mosses. No plant is to obscure or too rare, too small or too large, too fragrant or too odiferous to be kept here. The glass and wrought iron Palm House is an architectural and engineering marvel in its own right, the various other conservatories, glasshouses, controlled environments and pavilions equally mesmerising. Even the infernal kids couldn’t detract from the indefinable joy that comes from immersing yourself in the sheer variety and scope of nature. Remind me to invent that spray for schoolkids when I get home.

R & R left for a couple of weeks in Antogny so we have the house entirely to ourselves. We just have to feed the cat; it’s overweight, white, with one red eye and one green eye and lives on the roof of the garden shed. If it were up to me I’d be feeding it alright, to a fifty kilo pit bull. Don’t get me wrong, I hate cats.

The Thames flows upside down. Nowhere on the fifty minute cruise from Westminster to Greenwich did we see anything you and I would call clean water, but it was a good day to be on the river and the commentary was witty and informative. I just assumed that Cleopatra’s Needle, the obelisk standing on the embankment at Westminster, had been filched by British archaeologists from Egypt like the Elgin Marbles were stolen from Greece, so I was surprised to learn it was actually presented to the British people by the then ruler of Egypt as a token of gratitude for Lord Nelson’s defeat of the French in the Battle of the Nile.

We stepped off the boat in the shadow of the enormous tea clipper Cutty Sark on display at Greenwich Pier. I’d imagined it to be a primitive, cramped vessel, tiny by the modern standards of the super tanker, but it is a very large, extremely sophisticated and beautifully maintained piece of marine hardware. The spaghetti of rigging alone is enough to boggle your average landlubber, how the hell they remembered to attach string A to flap B to unfurl W via H, M and P has me buggered. To drive the point home, right beside the Sark is Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV, which looks like a rubber ducky next to a blue whale; you have to wonder what possessed a 65 year old man to sail around the world in a craft that is to the sea what a speck of dust is to space.

The whole point of Greenwich is the Old Royal Observatory and the Planetarium. When I was a kid dad regularly took me to the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Ultimo (now The Powerhouse Museum) and we’d sit in the space capsule, pretend to fly a Lancaster bomber and play Casey Jones in the old steam locomotive in the rail sheds. It was a world of constant wonder with the planetarium as the pinnacle of the day’s adventure. I loved that place, would sit in slack-jawed awe as the heavens revolved above. I’m still a sucker for space porn and we landed the last two tickets for the two o’clock show. I was a ten year old kid again as we took our seats in the world’s premier planetarium. Which was just as well, because the little man with the beard who ran today’s show spoke at us like we were a class of primary school children for a full hour.

There was also plenty to ogle in the Observatory itself, like the massive telescope and, of course, the Prime Meridian. We dutifully did the tourist thing and straddled the line, with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and one in the West. What really captured my imagination, though, was the story of clockmaker John Harrison who finally resolved the problem of calculating longitude which had plagued contemporary navigation since the big bang. Frankly, the whole science of Celestial Navigation is voodoo to me and I have only the deepest respect for its ancient pioneers and practitioners, but what happens when you can’t see the stars? You can research John Harrison if you’re interested in his story, and it’s a bloody interesting story, but the maritime clocks he designed and built, many of which are on display in the Observatory, are astoundingly beautiful masterpieces of technology and art. Many of Harrison’s original ideas, most notably the temperature strip, are still in use as we speak.

Our way back to Chiswick took us beneath the Thames via a tunnel to Island Gardens light rail station in the Docklands urban renewal development. Docklands is just a depressing pile of pretty coloured boxes if you ask me, but you didn’t.

No Shakespeare play during The Globe’s summer season is like no test cricket at Lord’s during an international series, so I was mightily miffed to discover how much of the Bard didn’t appear on this year’s Elizabethan programme. Instead, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside was in open rehearsal when we paid the theatre a visit on a day dedicated to theatre visits. The Globe makes more out of daily tours and gawkers like us than it does out of the shows so the rationale for the light production schedule is obvious, but it’s a pity to me that the financial argument always wins; it is, after all, a theatre. Disappointment aside, it was a lot of fun to sit in on the rehearsal and the actors played up to an appreciative crowd. The theatre is a substantial building, more elaborate than the original with its rose marble columns, gilded decorative highlights and elaborate ceiling inserts above the stage but faithful in essence to the original. Musicians tootled away in the gallery where the script called for them and the lines echoed around the large space. It’s not hard to imagine a rowdy 16^th century audience responding to the action only feet away on the stage. I’d love to have seen a full-blown battle scene from one of the Henry plays created using Elizabethan stagecraft. Outside, paving stones recognising private donors to the project include names like Leo McKern, Derek Jacobi and the esteemed William Ward Cox, a relative so distant as to not actually be one.

That evening we arrived in the West End on the tube early enough for a pre-Mousetrap drink at an intimate little grog barn called the Snail and Cabbage, or was it the Slug and Lettuce? Anyway, only about a thousand city types yelled at each other in the controlled gloom; chic young things sipped radioactive cocktails while their besuited stockbroker partners swilled pints. St Martin’s Theatre is a small affair warmly dressed in highly polished timber. The show was entirely what you’d expect from the pen of Agatha Christie, with dozens of little red herrings that deflect no-one with a knowledge of the genre in general, and her work in particular, from the obvious conclusion that the culprit is the least likely character; and so it was – hint: it’s not the butler.

Buck House is compulsory viewing, even for a republican. The changing of the guard was so crowded with compulsory viewers, some of whom looked like they’d been camping overnight since 1972, all I could see were the tops of the guardsmen’s funny hats until I watched the video I’d captured with my periscope arm that night. I know it’s a ceremony with an ancient pedigree, but frankly it’s like watching a bunch of toy soldiers march around in little circles.

The palace itself was slightly more interesting, though not for the reasons you might think. For starters, the tickets are timed – ours for 12:30 – which means an orderly and civilised admission. The decoration is typically excessive in the manner of all the royal houses of Europe; after a while they all begin to merge in your mind into the one overwrought extravaganza. For mine, the star of the show was the pigeon in the Gallery of the Queen’s Pictures. Apparently it had flown in through an open window the previous evening and actually merited a couple of columns in the next day’s Times, full of dreadful puns like “…the Royal Household are in something of a flap…”and “…visitor attempts palace coo…” My personal favourite was the closing para: “It dropped in for a flying visit and left on a wing and a prayer,” said Dickie Arbiter, spokesman for the Royal Collection.” Dickie Arbiter? Really? Sounds like a Monty Python character.

And so to Tess’s colourful late uncle. John Heffernan was gay way back when the word just meant happy and carefree, back when gays were called poofs, back when they were routinely murdered for their sexuality. Born in Walcha in country NSW, he fled the suffocating small town conformity and deeply conservative social climate of 1950s Australia as soon as he was able. Like so many other creative, flamboyant souls of the time (think Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes) he set sail for London and a life in the theatre where gayness was more or less a condition of entry. Without ever ascending into the firmament occupied by Olivier, Gielgud, Redgrave et al, he was nevertheless in constant work. The pinnacle of his career came when he landed the part of Piangi in the original West End production of Phantom of the Opera. Sadly, John contracted AIDS and passed away last year. He’s much missed by family and friends in the close knit theatre community here.

In honour of John we made our way to His Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket for the current production of the ever popular Phantom. We were lucky to score tickets at all, so we weren’t complaining with our upper circle seats. The view of the stage was reasonable enough and I’d brought the little binos for the close-ups, especially Piangi’s grand entrance on the elephant. Our perch in the clouds gave us an unprecedented view of the stage machinery and the overall stagecraft was super slick, occasionally drawing gasps of appreciation and spontaneous applause from the audience. The Phantom himself had us in the palm of his proverbial and when he was off-stage the performance was a little the flatter for his absence. It was so much fun I promised not to mention the thoughtless dickheads who arrived just as the curtain rose and noisily took their seats smack in front of us, so I won’t. Neither will I mention it’s a long drop from the upper circle to the ground and I momentarily enjoyed the mental picture of their broken bodies draped over bloodied seats below.

*

The fifty minute trip to Brighton on the Connex express from Victoria station sped us through rolling patchwork farmlands punctuated with the odd grimy little village. We emerged from the station and wandered down towards the grey sea, undefined from the grey sky by any horizon. Even on what a European will describe as a fine day the sky is eternally damp, never quite blue. We enjoyed the quaint, if over-priced, novelty shops full of tea towels and snow domes that lined the narrow laneways.

The Royal Pavilion is yet another whimsical folly of the Regency period. It was built for the amusement of George IV who had the road to Brighton straightened and the pavilion erected just behind the beach to comply with a requirement that he remain within a fifty mile radius of the capital. The exterior is decidedly sub-continental, even Taj Mahally, while the interior is China-inspired, complete with dragons; the furnishings and decoration are lavish enough but the lino on the floor made the place feel like an eccentric aunty’s kitchen.

We impersonated the locals by sitting fully clothed on the beach for half an hour or so listening to the water hissing in the shingle, then wandered out along the Palace Pier. A relic of a bygone age, the pier is an immense structure full of fun parlours, sideshow stalls and gut-churning carnival rides. I liked the festive atmosphere and watching people having the shit scared out of them in the name of fun.

In spite of the greyness and the faintly sad sense of the pier, I didnt mind Brighton. Its diverse architectural heritage was a bit of a surprise and on the way back up to the station we detoured into an area behind the front called The Lanes. An intimate network of novelty shops, pubs and cafes, it had a welcoming feel to it even with the alarming number of young kids with scary hair and their faces stapled together who begged us for loose change. The fact we didn’t feel threatened suggested that perhaps we were coming out the other side of the Gaasperplas trauma, although even the thought of the pressing crowds in London still gave us palpitations. A good thing that tomorrow we strike a course for Cambridge and parts north.

Coming up: Travelling North...