June 5, 2023

Dateline: London, England

And so I have returned across the pond to the motherland, less than six months since my last jaunt. It was never my intention to schedule two weeks in London in such close proximity; it’s just how life worked out, what with the winter trip having been postponed a year due to Covid and this summer trip a pleasant add on to my singing with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus for the last seven or eight years. The ASO folk are joining together with a number of other choral groups to present a program at Southwark Cathedral this coming Saturday night the 10th. I have a couple of friends coming, whose lives have led to them being in London on the correct date. I hope we sing pretty. (I’m pretty sure it will go well as the piece we are singing, a modern setting of the Latin Mass, is melodic, and neither harmonically nor rhythmically terrible challenging, unlike other recent pieces we have faced.

I am accompanied on this trip by my old college friend, Vickie Rozell, a friendship that extends back more than forty years and has encompassed times of being roommates, official and unofficial, other theater trips, kibitzing on each others theatrical projects, and just general camaraderie. The third member of our little college troika, my dorm roommate Craig Mollerstuen, was supposed to turn up as well but the state department had other ideas and delayed issuing his passport renewal. We will make do.

The trip has, so far proved uneventful. I spent the end of last week desperately trying to clean up various undone things prior to departing and, as far as I know, I managed to get them all done and the notes written and the various people on non-profit boards communicated with and the writing that needed to be done completed. This, of course, means that I have forgotten a minimum of three significant things which will be highly overdue on my return and I’ll arrive to a series of panicked emails and text messages. Vickie arrived from California on Saturday afternoon, on time and none the worse for wear for her early start from San Jose airport. We had a barbeque dinner, nice conversation, and then I went home to finish my much delayed packing for our departure for London the next day.

We Ubered over to our local dead mall at Brookwood the next morning early to meet the bus to ATL (cheaper by far than flying us all out of BHM). The bus ride was only marred by someone being left behind as they were checked off as being on board when they obviously were not. We took a little stop at the Alabama/Georgia border allowing him to catch up and get on the bus with a somewhat higher blood pressure, but otherwise, none the worse for wear. Then on to Atlanta, the Southwest quadrant of the belt way, and the international terminal of ATL which was not overly crowded on a Sunday afternoon. We had plenty of time before boarding so we opted for the Concourse F Chinese fast food place… don’t. It wasn’t that the food was bad – it’s no better or worse than any other fast food Asian, but the inefficiency of the five people behind the counter resulted in nearly an hours wait for my plastic tin of orange chicken and defective fortune cookie. Just another reminder of the decline and fall of the service economy post pandemic.

The flight was the usual – wedged into a seat much too small for my build whiling away the hours with the in flight entertainment system. I caught up with three films that I had meant to see: Damian Chazelle’s opus Babylon about the early days of Hollywood, which I truly despised. Up second was Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical ‘Meet the Fablemans’, which I quite liked, and Billy Eichner’s comedy ‘Bros’ which tried too hard do be a crowd pleaser while requiring a niche understanding of the jokes about gay life and relationships. It missed more than it hit. I had just switched to a Bollywood movie about ghosts that seemed to involve a lot of singing and dancing in skimpy clothes in a Himalayan snowbank. I hadn’t quite figured all that when bang crash and we were down on the ground. More minor dramas, this time a missing passport, and we headed to the shuttle bus which delivered us to our hotel.

No early check in, so Vickie and I dropped our luggage and headed up Glouscter Road to Cromwell Road, passed the Natural History Museum and popped into the Victoria and Albert for a dose of art and history We then continued on up into Knightsbridge and went to Harrod’s. It was no where near the zoo it was at New Years. I looked at the souvenir sets of Charles and Camilla tea bags and biscuits in the Food Halls and decided not. Vickie went back to get some rest before dinner, but I sallied forth again and went for a walk in the West End. The temperature is low 70s and sunny. Perfect walking weather. We then got together for dinner at a Portuguese chicken place near the hotel. We have opted not to theater tonight as we are both running on fumes and would just sleep through whatever.

Tomorrow and Wednesday are side trip days and theater nights. More to come… But now, to bed.