And then we saw the parrot whisperer…

As many times as we’ve visited / lived in London, we had never been to the Victoria and Albert museum. Today changed all that. We didn’t try to do too much: we lingered over the spectacular collection of Persian rugs centered on the Ardabil Carpet, said to be the oldest dated carpet in existence. Here’s more if you’re interested: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-ardabil-carpet

The collection includes one more very old, spectacular piece, the Chelsea Carpet and an intricate carpet owned by William Morris, who used it for some of the patterns in his own textiles.

Our next goal was the photography collection, but the museum is so rich that we were constantly tempted to stop by objects small…and very large.

The V and A has a remarkable photo collection, but the space itself is under construction and reduced to two large galleries. The first contained contemporary photography…most of which was relatively uninteresting. The second, however, was a revelation. Maurice Broomfield was a school dropout who started working at the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby, England. In order to escape what the perceived as soul-killing work, he studied art and photography at night and soon made a career photographing British industry. Much of his work appeared in trade publications, but he also had artistic ambitions, and made large display prints for gallery exhibition. We had just seen the large and impressive show of the work of Bernd and Hill Becher at the Met in New York, and Broomfield’s approach to industrial photography was diametrically opposed, but just as impressive. Where the Bechers removed any sign of human labor from their images, focusing on the vanishing forms of industrial architecture–what they called “anonymous sculptures”–Broomfield was concerned to show the worker in his, and very often her, environment. A spectacular show.

We will certainly be back to the VA…one could spend a week here and barely scratch the surface.

My knees weren’t cooperating today, so we hopped a bus to Hyde Park Corner and then walked through Green Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace and from there into St. James Park, one of our favorite places in Central London.

As we walked through the park toward Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square, we saw…a parrot whisperer.

The moment was eerily reminiscent of some key scenes–‘the silence”–in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (high cultural references are presumably permitted on the day the rednecks lost the Senate and may lose the House).

We wanted to duck back into the National Gallery for two small shows: one on Manet and his only student, Eva Gonzalez (really lovely) and the other “Turner on Tour.” The two magnificent Turners from the Frick (Dieppe Harbor and Cologne), which is closed, were displayed with a lot of ancillary information.

We put our feet up for a bit of reading and political gloating before it was time for another favorite activity: Evensong, this time at Saint Martins in the Fields.

The choir was unusually young, but in beautiful voice. This was a less formal, more vernacular version than what one hears at Westminster Abbey, with some beautiful hymns in place of some of the traditional elements. In looking around, I think we were the only non-parishioners in attendance.

We closed out our last full day with a wonderful meal at The Drapers Arms, a well-known gastropub in Islington.

The show stopper was our main: a gargantuan platter of vegetable surrounding a cote de boeuf that had been aged for 35 days. This was probably the best beef I have ever eaten…take that, Peter Luger! The bottle of Pommard that we splurged on wasn’t bad, either!