Batting .333

Batting .333, Wednesday 3/15. [photos: Twinings Tea House; Imperial War Museum.] Today we decided to go to one of the recommended restaurants, “RSJ”, for lunch. Overall, not our best meal, and partially our own fault. Alice ordered a calamari salad with coriander, which she hates – a sudden attack of old-timers disease. Then she ordered salmon and did not see the word “seared” – she hates underdone fish. I ordered decent things, but in this case the management was guilty of hyperbole. The “terrine of ham hock” turned out to be Spam – good Spam, with real meat fibers, but there’s no getting around the fact that Spam is, indeed, a terrine, and with the ham hocks you get ham toes, ham lips and ham ears, so Spam is a better deal. My “braised beef on creamy polenta” was pot roast and grits. Good, but easily reproduced at home. One goes out for stuff you can’t do at home.

Today we split up after lunch. I went to the Imperial War Museum which turned out to be good, but the parts I saw were not the must-see the guides describe. I wandered the Great Wars exhibits and found lots of trivia, but it was a bit short on strategies and politics; those weren’t missing, but pride of place was given to memorabilia. After two hours I was ready for something deeper, but had no time. They have a Holocaust exhibit which is highly thought-of, and which I had passed on because we went to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin just last year and I didn’t think I could take it.

The two guns in the photo are 15” naval guns built in WW I and used in both great wars. The yellow things are the approximately one-ton shells. They accurately throw the shells about 20,000 yards. I read a description long ago that brings numbers like this into perspective. These guns can effectively shoot an old Ford Pinto 12 miles into the pool in your back yard where, naturally enough, it explodes.

Alice went off to see the interior of the Temple Church by day and found it closed for electrical work. Arrgh. She then took a long walk from the Temple, found lots of very old half-timbered buildings, Fleet Street, the Twinings Tea House, through the theater district and up to Covent Gardens. Then she walked all the way to St. James Park and on to Westminster Abbey, giving her sole title to Longest Walk in One Day, and that’s where I met her to pick up our tickets for Elijah (Mendelssohn) in Westminster Abbey.

Oops. Alice had already tried to get in and nothing doing. There was no concert that night, and the doorman said almost never a concert. “Try down the street at Westminster Cathedral,” he said. Rats. We had fouled out at lunch, taken an intentional walk at the War Museum, hit a long fly ball out at the Temple Church, and now it looked as if we had struck out at the Abbey. What a day – but wait, the catcher has dropped the ball and the umpire rules it a foul-tip. Still batting.

We walked down the street about 15 minutes to the Cathedral and the concert was there. The Cathedral is quite young, only a bit over 100 years old. It is designed in the Italian-Byzantine style with lots of multi-colored marble inside; the outside is massive but not aesthetically overwhelming. They are working furiously to cover the walls and ceilings with mosaics, which will take another hundred years at least (money trouble). Acoustically, it’s another huge stone building and the reverberation time makes concerts with large numbers of performers interesting.

The performers were the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, who are top-class musicians (no missteps from the trumpets tonight). The soloists were all very good, including a boy soprano who had a small role he sang from the pulpit. We realized that we have been here a long time, because two of the soloists we had seen before, in Sir John In Love. Our Elijah was Mr. Ford, and our all-purpose mezzo (Angel, member of the Crowd, and with a red shawl over her white dress, as Jezebel!) was Mistress Ford, who had sung ‘Greensleeves’ in the opera.

Alice went out to see the Cathedral about 20 minutes before the start, and she didn’t come back. Since I had just finished reading a very gory Patricia Cornwell murder mystery, I spent the first half with one eye on the performance and another scanning the crowd, the passageways, and all the other places she might be. It turned out she had been caught in the line to the Ladies’ Room and could only take a seat on the side until half-time. During the second half we were both able to enjoy the show, and it was a good show. The second half starts with a chorus, “Be not afraid …”, that was very English indeed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up frequently at Proms concerts. For the major climaxes the organ added rumbles, and with 125 people in the chorus, the stone church rocked. Home Run.