Tradition Wins

Tradition Wins, Monday 3/13. [photos: a touristy day, so we have the Tower Bridge and the Tower itself, as seen from our commuter catamaran.] Forecast was for sun (and a high of 40) so we decided it was a good day for the river trip. We bussed down to Greenwich but found that winter schedules weren’t even as good as in the official schedule book, so we had to go to the next stop upriver. This meant walking under the Thames at the Greenwich Tunnel, where we found that at high tide we would be 53 feet below the surface of the river. Not enough I say. (We were amazed at the tide difference on the Thames; it has to be 10 feet. The first day we walked the Thames Path we had water slopping over our feet. Today it would have been a painful fall to the waterline.)

We walked past more apartment houses built on the sites of a dye factory and the docks where they built the Great Eastern, largest steamship of its time and an economic disaster. Begun as a passenger ship it ended up laying transatlantic cables before being broken up for scrap. We live in an actual wharf building, refitted for apartments, that used to be the Navy Victualling Yard. On this spot were baked billions of ship’s biscuits and other treats.

The river trip was on a ‘commuter’ catamaran. There are lots of tours and cruises which we felt weren’t worth the extra money, but maybe in the summertime an open boat would be more fun. Either way, it’s a nice change from the underground to go to downtown London on a boat. Lots of photo-ops, with which you shall not be bored until we treat you to the Slide Show at home. We first got off at the Tate Modern, intending to spend a couple of hours, but were totally unimpressed with the building (a former power station) and the art within it. We’re not fans of modern art, so we’re a hard sell. After 15 minutes we were done and on our way back to the docks.

Last stop on the commuter run is at the Tate Britain where everything British that isn’t at the National Gallery lives. Alice insisted on having lunch at the restaurant in the museum. This is usually a bad idea; somebody once said that the food in art museums is no better than the art you find in restaurants. This restaurant, however, comes recommended by our guidebook and it was right. We had a roast parsnip and chanterelle mushroom soup which was wonderful. I had a steak and ‘hand-cut chips’, aka steak fries, with béarnaise sauce and Alice had sea bass over marinated fennel with rosemary new potatoes. We won’t mention the price; it would be undignified.

Admission is free to the Tate, as it is to most of the major museums. It doesn’t make up for the price of food and lodging, but it does give you a warm miserly glow to think you can absorb all this culture at no extra charge. We worked our way through on a time line, slowing down when we got to Constable, speeding up again in the pre-Raphaelite room, and then finishing in the Turner Galleries which are spectacular. I remember that at the van Ruisdael exhibit my favorite was a tiny painting. It was the same here – my favorite Turner was a small (8x10) watercolor of choppy seas at a harbor entrance, titled “Ramsgate.” Alice’s favorite was a Sargent (the museum has works painted by Brits, of Brits, and by people who painted in Britain) of two girls lighting Japanese lanterns.

We spent about four hours at the Tate and then it was time to find the 6:45 concert. Alice knew it was in the Temple Church but it took a while to find it in the rabbit warren that is the Temple. That’s where all the lawyers live, and it’s one of the oldest parts of London. The church was built by the Knights Templar and completed in 1185. The new addition, a Gothic choir, was finished in 1240. It was damaged in WW II but has been completely restored. The original church is a round tower modeled after the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Gothic addition contains an altar screen by Wren (1682) and the ceiling is textbook Gothic stone arches – very simple, very aesthetically satisfying. There are carved knightly statues of men who died shortly after Magna Carta (without more research we don’t know if they are actually buried in the original church). After a while one begins to think of the church/library in the Indiana Jones “Last Crusade” movie, and one itches to chop through the floor to see what treasures are buried there – Maltese falcons, sacred spears and the like.

There is a lot of reverberation in a 100% stone church. The concert was a Bach cantata, an instrumental sonata by Georg Muffat (?) and a Stabat Mater by Vivaldi. The reverberation blurred the Bach but the Vivaldi came out very clearly. It wasn’t an overpowering musical experience, but the atmosphere was right. Afterwards we wandered about in the church reading memorial tablets while the flower of British law had an invitation-only champagne reception among the Knightly effigies.