July 22: London!! Tate Britain and Shakespeare's Globe

On Sunday we woke up and finished up packing - this was no small feat, as we had been in Oxford for over two weeks and had unpacked into closets, and had bought many books for the road (why have I not bought Stone a Kindle???) and some Lego sets to keep him busy during the random hours when Erik is working and Sophie and I are doing other stuff and Stone doesn't know what to do with himself (and hence asks for screens). There have been several days that have brought back memories of trying to home school this red-hot ball of pure energy, and it is exhausting just to think about it. He always has to be doing something, like every single minute. I just can't provide all the fuel that his flame wants to consume. Anyway.... we had a lot to pack. So we did! And we cleaned up, and Sophie had to collect all the trash in all the rooms, using black trash bags that had such a powerful burning chemical smell that you could feel your nose hairs sizzling as you inhaled. Thank you Sophie! 

Then the drive to London. We tried listening to The Golden Compass again, but every single time we try, half the car falls asleep (nearly including Erik). I think it's a book better read than listened to. 

Eventually we pulled up to the address given to us by the Air BnB guy, who has been the only Air BnB host who has been difficult to work with. And check-in was a huge pain. Wrong address, no key in the safe, blah blah boring annoying. Eventually we got in to our stylish, stiflingly hot apartment, lugged our suitcases up the stairs, put away food, and headed out to meet Grammy and Grandpa at the Tate Britain Museum! I had read that they had a permanent collection of William Blake, and it wasn't far away from our apartment so I wanted to squeeze it in. Lindsay, Lucy, Sophie and I walked over and eventually (after some hiccups) met up with Grammy and Grandpa, which we planned as a celebration of her 70th birthday this year.

The Book of Thel

I know this print very well - I spent hours and hours copying it and writing an accompanying sestina for the final project of my William Blake class this past winter.

On our way to the Blake exhibit we spent awhile looking at Turner paintings (so many ships and so many storms!), and I noticed how different members of the group related to the paintings. Some liked to know the story behind the painting, some liked to analyze the design principles, and some (especially Sophie, who adores drawing and painting) noticed color in terms of saturation, lights and darks, and balance.

After Turner and Blake we spent awhile in Pre-Raphaelites Room, taking in the originals of some very famous artwork. There was also a striking portrait of a red-haired Lady MacBeth that we stared at for a long long time.

Last of all we went to a special exhibition on Post-World-War I art. Ed and Elayne had each studied WWI in depth during the past year or so, and so had Lindsay, both in her AP History classes and at Oxford. Lucy also studied it this past year and I had covered it just a bit when we read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the poetry of WWI soldiers this past Fall, so we were all very interested. It turned out to be a huge, very harrowing exhibit. We have noticed war memorials all over Ireland and the UK commemorating soldiers who died in the world wars, and we noticed that prior to WWI, war memorials tended to glorify soldiers and emphasize the honor of the country; after the "Great War" the structures tend to emphasize individual names and the horrible sense of loss in individual families and communities. We have had a real sense of how deeply those wars impacted the people here - so much more than they did America. 

After the Tate Britain, Erik and Stone picked us up in the car and drove to the Globe Theater!!!! We had reservations at the Swan Restaurant, which is the official fancy restaurant of the Globe. I had booked us there as the special birthday dinner, and they showed us to a private room with gorgeous views of the Thames and St. Paul's! A beautiful huge wooden table with velvet seats and fresh flowers on the table... we felt so special. The food was definitely my least favorite meal of our whole trip - super bland meat, potatoes, gravy, boiled cabbage, and Yorkshire pudding, which turns out to be dry, hollow bread. What the heck?? Oh, and the tomato soup (which was the only normal-looking appetizer) was served cold. Yech. My sweet children did their best and didn't complain, but Stone was also highly highly triggered misophonia-wise and the room was so quiet he could hear every sound. Grammy and Grandpa didn't quite know what to make of him (I had forgotten to explain his symptoms to them) so there were some difficult moments and some big disappointment (privately, on my part) that this special dinner was not yummy - "the most expensive bad food I have ever eaten" I said to Erik afterward - but oh well! You win some, you lose some. Afterward we took a walk by the Thames and got ice cream cones while we waited for Hamlet to start. OH! And when I went to pick up our Hamlet tickets they couldn't find the reservation for the first 5 minutes so I broke into a sweat and my stomach dropped into my feet thinking maybe I had botched it. But at last they found the tickets and we went into the famed Globe Theatre.

Grammy and Grandpa have seen lots of shows here, but always as groundlings. I think it would be amazing to lean right on the stage where the actors look into your eyes and interact with you (and they did interact with those audience members, sometimes even sitting and dangling their legs off the stage, delivering their lines right to the audience members' faces! ... But it would be really hard to stand for three hours.

We had front row center seats on the lowest balcony. The seats were super hard wood but better than standing! And we could lean on the front banister thing. Also they had closed captioning!! That was really helpful, as we could glance over and read the exact script as the actors delivered their lines.

With the exception of Erik we had all read Hamlet - I read the No Fear Shakespeare comic with Stone, and my dear friend/classmate Rachelle had come to our house in the Fall to do a series of classes on Hamlet, even before we found out that it would be playing in London when we were there!! So the girls and I knew it very well, and Grammy and Grandpa had read the original and lots of commentary and viewed multiple film versions. So we were all ready. We had some criticisms and parts that didn't really work for us, but overall we loved it, and it was a thrilling experience to see it in the Globe. And wow was I amazed that Stone stayed engaged for the entire three hours. This kid really really really loves language.