Vacation continued, still in Soho:
We toured Carnaby Street, marveling that it’s still able to
trade on its name 56 years after London’s swinging creaked to a standstill. All
the modern big names are there, even though Lady Jane and Biba are long gone.
We didn’t buy anything. But at least it wasn’t closed.
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| The Coffee Store |
My old not-very-happy hunting ground, Patisserie Valerie, is gone now, but the tea and coffee store a few doors down is still there. I couldn’t see any of the thick, embossed tea bricks that so excited my imagination in those days, but you can get them on Amazon now. No need to visit the inscrutable orient, or for that matter Soho.
We did eat pastries from Soho – I had a Mont Blanc, which is not, as I
thought, a type of pen – from a patisserie nearby. Or it may have been a
boulangerie. In standard Soho fashion, all three square meters of the
patisserie were packed so we were sent upstairs where twenty to thirty people shrank
to fit themselves around five small tables in an area no larger than my bedroom.
At intervals, waiters and waitresses would appear at the top of the stairs and
attempt to give random pastries to punters, who would point fingers at each
other and shout out who needed what. (Each newcomer learned who had ordered
which pastry from the previous round of groans and finger pointing.) It was
like an Alice in Wonderland tea party, but the cakes were heavenly.
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| Third Man Records, London |
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| Fender Triplecaster on Third Man stage |
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| Pedal Board on Third Man Stage |
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| Third Man Stage in basement |
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| Literarium, Third Man Records, London |
Also on the menu, so to speak, were Third Man Records, Jack
White’s record store, and the Sir John Soane’s
Museum, a must-see. It’s been expanded since I was last there. Like the
zoological-taxidermy addiction of Walter Rothschild, previous post, the
architectural-stone jones of John Soane was quite insatiable and the museum,
which is really just a London townhouse, holds so much carved and worked stone
that it must be constructed of Tardis-material with steel foundations reaching
below the Tube layer.
Talking of giant stone monuments, we also (after a couple of
false starts) figured out how to queue for the British Museum. This *is* a
place I visited many times while I lived in London, but seeing it again was
wonderful. We spent a lot of time on the Elgin Marbles. (I’d never paid any
attention to them before as my parents took one of their dislikes to them.) I
then spent 90% of the remainder of the time in the Egyptian Rooms, a type of pilgrimage
for me.
Below: Pictures of items from the British Museum Egyptian Collection
The British Museum, unlike most I’ve visited in recent
years, has not dumbed down for schoolchildren and I’m pretty sure the
schoolchildren don’t mind that. (There were a lot of them around, all
engrossed.) There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of items on
display, with cards giving basic details and there was a complete lack of “activities,”
broken machines that show videos, broken machines that show how things were made
or used, or crayons, coloring books, sandboxes or play bricks.
It would take days to properly explore the museum, but we didn't have days. We did have fun.
Vacation to be continued...
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