London, Friday, November 17, 2023
We started the day with a stroll into St. James, lingering in the lovely private garden at the center of St. James Square. It has been redesigned several times, but today’s shape is that given the garden by the great early 19th century architect John Nash (who also designed St. James Park). Nash’s small neoclassical garden house still lends the garden a feeling of calm.
We were in St. James, though, for an appointment with Richard Stenning , one of the owners and watchmakers at Charles Frodsham, the oldest continuously operating watchmaker in the world. We were picking up Sue’s brother’s pocket watch, a gloriously beautiful timepiece made at Frodsham’s in 1870; we had dropped it for cleaning exactly a year ago. Richard walked us through the operation and maintenance of the watch–setting the time isn’t exactly intuitive on a watch this old. But it really is a thing of beauty. For a fuller account of Frodsham’s and its timepieces, see my blog entry “Homered Abroad” under London, November 2022, above.
We then started out on a long loop through the shopping streets in search of the perfect gifts for our four young ‘uns. Well, OK, we started off with a bit of shopping for me. I hadn’t realized the extent to which my long suffering ultralight puffy, the staple of our travels, had fallen apart. I found a great deal on a new puffy at Cotswolds Outdoors, and walked out much less shabby.
An amble up Regent Street brought us to the pre-Christmas hubbub of Hamley’s, London’s best known toy store. We were accosted by dancing elves, lusty carolers, and one overeager salesman throwing gliders at us.
We did manage to find some pretty cool toys for the boys…don’t want to give anything away here!
From Regent Street we cut over to New Bond Street and followed it, canyon of wretched excess that it is, all the way down to Piccadilly. Where we braved the Christmas crowds at Fortnum and Mason in search of some small gifts for friends. Nerves a bit frazzled by shopping, we sat down at a nice cafe, L’Eto, for a cup of tea and a shared piece of absolutely delicious pistachio cake. After one more stop to get a little something for the girls, we were back at the hotel to put our dogs up after a cool six mile walk.
A couple of hours later we were back on the street, headed for Saint Paul’s to hear Evensong. This is an image of the Quire, where the choir sings the service: a dozen boys, 9 men, and 3 women.
It was a gorgeous service, with the choir in fine voice; apparently evensong is sometimes sung in Latin, but this was all in English.
Night comes early here in London; Christopher Wren’s great dome was already bathed in light as we emerged.
We walked most of the way back; it was still chilly, but it was a wonderful feeling to be immersed in the merry crowds in Covent Garden.
Dinner was at a real London institution, a pub called The French House. Opened in the late nineteenth century, the pub began to serve as a hangout and headquarters for a wide range of writers and artists, including Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Malcolm Lowry, and Brendan Behan. In 1992 Fergus and Margot Henderson opened a dining room on the upper floor; both went on to become some of London’s best known chefs, and the restaurant has been a cradle to a number of chefs who went on to be stars.
As we approached, the pub was throbbing, packed inside and out with people of all ages having a very good time. The door to the upstairs dining room mercifully avoids this chaos; when you step out of the stairwell, you are in a tiny dining room with only eight tables and two servers. As you can see, the walls are covered with photographs of patrons old and new.
Neil Borthwick’s food is a breath of fresh air in our trendy restaurant era: hearty English food with a Gallic flair. Sue had an incredibly fresh and fragrant scallop and I had a wonderful foie gras and chicken liver parfait; her main was a partridge (shot by the chef) with red cabbage, while I had a lamb chop with Swiss chard. Both were accompanied by a gloriously old fashioned aligot–potatoes beaten with alpine cheeses to form a starchy, stretchy band of deliciousness. We drank a Chateau Climens, a merlot from Pomerol in Bordeaux, saving some for the cheeses that finished the meal.
The best part of the French, though, is the human connection. The servers, and especially one older woman, has the perfect manner: affectionate, even with strangers, with a warmth cut by just the right amount of sarcasm. Several of the tables were taken by regulars, but the servers treated everyone like old friends. It was one of the best restaurant nights in many years.