Saturday, March 28, 2009
London

Llew’s American Airlines’ red eye flight from Kennedy airport touched down at Heathrow sooner than he expected. He cleared Immigration in a jiffy, was on the Tube and at my doorstep faster than I could say “Welcome Back”! I was , in fact, in the shower, expecting his arrival no earlier than 10 am. When he buzzed my flat from the door of the building, I did not even hear him. Fortunately, our janitor Martha was around, doing her Saturday morning chores and she let him in. After we spent time laughing over the odd turn his entry had taken, we sat down to breakfast. It was SOOOOO Good to see him again after almost 3 months and he was absolutely delighted to be back with me in London! Then, after he had shaved and showered, I suggested he take a nap for a couple of hours. During this time, I made my way with my strolley backpack to the Sainsbury Central (while the rest of Holborn was slowly stirring to a weekend morning) to do a large amount of food shopping for the tea we were hosting in the evening for our friends, the Fradleys, and for the dinner party we are hosting on Monday evening for a few friends. With Llew back in town, I can finally have friends over and can entertain them–something I tend not to do when I am alone in the city.

Llew who was dead asleep had to be awoken about noon as I did want him to enjoy some part , at least, of what was a lovely Saturday morning. In less than a half hour, we were out of the house and on the Tube heading to the Victoria and Albert Museum as I did want us to see the special exhibit entitled ‘Forty Years of the Booker Prize’–an exhibit I had been waiting for Llew to come to London to see with him. London was buzzing with activity as scores of people were out on the town and Kensington was particularly active. We entered the museum through the South Kensington Underground station and the ‘subway’ or underground passage that connects the station with the museum.

Of course, once in the museum, I could not resist showing Llew the highlights of the collection as well as my own particular favorites. It was his first time in the V&A and he was deeply impressed by the size and variety of the collection and the splendour of the building. In fact, I did take him out on to the main road, Cromwell Road, to give him a sense of the architecture of the facade. We spent the next hour looking at the Highlights. In particular, I wanted him to see three things: The Raphael Cartoons in the Raphael Room, Raphael’s painting The School of Athens and Trajan’s Column in the Cast Court. This was because we will be in Rome next week looking at the real Column and the original painting and the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel that are based on the water colors that Raphael created for Pope Leo X who commissioned them.

Needless to say, Llew was delighted that I showed him these works and he was as taken by the Highlights as I was. When we did arrive at the Booker Prize Exhibit, we discovered that it was tiny indeed but immensely absorbing. Collected by Peter Straus who is a literary agent and book collector, Llew who is a book collector himself (he does collect autographed hard bound first editions of the Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Award Winners) was fully immersed in the collection and was deepy grateful that I had saved the viewing of this special exhibit for his perusal.

We did not have very much time to linger in the museum and at 3 pm, we left in order to reach home by 4 pm as we were expecting guests for afternoon tea. A few minutes after 4 pm, Matt and Rosa Fradley with whom I had spent Mother’s Day on Sunday at their home in Essex, were ringing our doorbell and meeting Llew for the first time. On entering my flat, Rosa exclaimed, “Now this is the kind of flat that one could only live in when in London on secondment!” We ended up having a wonderful couple of hours over warm sultana scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam and an apricot sponge roll cake with steaming cups of English tea. I was so pleased that Llew was able to meet my dear friends who have been so warm and generous to me even since my arrival in London. It is hard for me to believe that I got to know them when they arrived in New York almost two years ago and took not just one but two of my Highlights Tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. it was then that we exchanged email addresses and have kept in touch. They were very helpful when I was preparing myself for my arrival in London and have been equally helpful ever since I moved here.

Unfortunately, they could not linger too long as they had reservations for dinner with some friends at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restarant. Llew and I warned them not to be surprized if they felt they needed to get to McDonald’s afterwards as our own experiecne at Maze in New York (where we had celebrated Llew’s birthday last year) was that while the food was superb and very pricey indeed, portion sizes were tiny and though we had three full courses, we came away feeling as if we had barely eaten anything at all.

After the Fradleys left, Llew and I decided to take a walk along “Wobbly Bridge” (the Millenniun Bridge) to the Tate Modern as I was keen to show him the special installation entitled Thirty Pieces of Silver by Cornelia Parker. He had seen her work entitled “Breathless” in the morning at the V&A and had found it fascinating and I was certain he would find the one at the Tate just as intriguing. And indeed I was right. He loved the concept behind her work. When night fell over the city, we took the elevator to the 7th floor to see some of the most stunning views of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral from that unique vantage point. Then, we walked across Wobbly Bridge once more and took the bus home from the opposite bank. It had turned very cold indeed and both of us felt as if a bus ride home would be preferable to shivering all the way down Fleet Street to Holborn.

Back home, we rang the doorbell of my next-foor neighbor Milan Thacker to invite him to our place for a drink. Milan has also been very helpful to me ever since I came to live here and we had never really spent quality time with him. With Llew in town, I thought it best to hang out with Milan and over a beer and some red wine, tortilla crisps and cheese and crackers, we had a very talkative evening discussing everything from the impact of the global meltdown in the States to racism in the UK. As the evening sped on, we asked Milan to stay for a pizza dinner and as we moved to the dining table, our conversation got more animated. Indeed, it was a spontaneous evening full of scintillating conversation and laughter and we had a great time.

It was hard to believe that it had been less than 24 hours since Llew had arrived in London for he had packed so much into the day. The rest of his stay here promises to be just as eventful, though he does want to relax and take it easy and spend as much time as possible getting to know all the lovely people that have befriended me and have proven to be such marvelous company in his absence.