London, Wednesday, November 12
Fortified with another fabulous breakfast, we set out on another walking expedition. The tube took us to Hampstead High Street and we walked down the hill and to the left to get to the edge of the Heath. Hampstead really is a lovely place.
Just across from the Heath, on Wentworth Place, is the house where John Keats in the winter of 1818-1819 wrote most of his most famous odes, including “To a Nightingale” and “On a Grecian Urn,” with its famous concluding lines “Beauty is truth—truth beauty / that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
The house is surrounded by lovely gardens, including this 250 year-old mulberry tree.
Around the corner is the Hempstead branch of Daunt Books; this is smaller but still lovely version of the original in Marylebone.
And to their credit, they had a copy of a book by a certain author of our acquaintance.
The color can only be described as mordant green…and thus wholly appropriate to the novel.
Book in hand, we headed into the Heath. To get to our next goal, Parliament Hill, we walked through a development set at the edge of the parkland.
At the far end, right on the Heath, is the house in which George Orwell lived in the 1930’s.
The walk on the Heath is glorious; it feels much more wild than most parks manage to achieve, despite the proximity of dense urban areas.
The view from Parliament Hill is even more spectacular than that from Primrose Hill, but you’ve seen those skylines yesterday!
Next on tap was one of Sue’s primary goals for the day, the Hampstead Heath Men’s and Women’s Swimming Ponds. These ponds are open year round, with a lifeguard present. They also have lots of mud…and ducks. We indeed see a man venture out, bravely doing the crawl stroke in th 52 degree water!
Next up was a visit to Highgate Cemetery. The path led through an enormous, gated development of rather swish Tudor homes called Makepeace Mansions.
They do have a rather nice view.
The entrance path to the Eastern Section of Highgate Cemetery is lined with the graves of people who considered themselves well known: each grave has an occupation listed. I understood the inscription “musician” for the grave of the Scottish folk singer Bert Jansch, but would you really want to be identified simply as “lawyer” for all eternity?
Much of the cemetery is an incredible jumble! To describe it as characterful is a considerable understatement.
Scattered among the variously sinuous Victorian angels is the occasional original marker.
The cemetery is the final resting place of many local celebrities, but we singled out the two that were meaningful to us.
I really do have to finish Middlemarch one of these days!
The other figure of interest actually occupies two sites. Upon his death in 1883, Karl Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen were buried in a section of the cemetery reserved for agnostics and atheists. Somewhere between 9 and 13 people attended his funeral (including Engles and Wilhelm Liebknecht, the founder of the German Communist Party). The original marker is simple in the extreme.
The remains of Marx and his entire family were disinterred and reburied at a new, more prominent site in the cemetery in 1954. The Communist Party of Great Britain commissioned a portrait bust by Lawrence Bradshaw; the new monument was unveiled in 1956 (just in time for the Hungarian uprising?).
The final line of The Communist Manifesto is just visible in my photo: “Workers of All Lands Unite.” As an American writing in 2025, I’m afraid the working class has indeed united…behind Donald Trump. The lines from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” are more timely: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it.”
Ever on the alert for swimming opportunities, Sue had read about a huge outdoor pool that is open year round at the foot of Parliament Hill. So off we went! The Parliament Hill Fields Lido was closed, so Sue could only take a peek through the window of the cafe. It looks like this in summer.
We made our way home by tube and bus; it was good to put our feet up in the hotel.
Dinner was at a restaurant familiar to us–and to our walking fellows, the B’s and H’s–after a meal there at the conclusion of the 2023 version of our coast walks. Viet Food is a very casual, very busy place with excellent food. We split some spring rolls, followed by chicken for Sue and Duck / Mango for me. Tasty!
Chinatown at night was its usual insane self!
After a nice cup of tea in the Resident’s Lounge at the hotel, we took the very short walk to the Theatre Royal Haymarket for a production of Othello. It has an exceptionally strong cast: David Harewood (who was the first black actor to play Othello at the National Theater in 1997), Toby Jones as Iago, and Caitlin Fitzgerald as Desdemona. The sets are both minimalist and riveting, with subtle, shimmering projections on the scrims and gold frames that lend a painterly quality to the opening scenes.
Harewood is such a strong physical presence that the other figures sometimes seem in orbit around him. He is particularly strong in the final scenes as his horrible misunderstanding breaks over him in waves. Jones, the veteran character actor, at first seemed too old for the part (he is an ensign assigned to Othello’s command), but his performance as “honest Iago” is so strong that the impression fades. Fitzgerald plays Desdemona disconcertingly as a somewhat flighty, flirtatious young woman in the first half, but that serves her well as the tragedy unfolds later.
Sue and I talked about the rather disturbing waves of laughter that passed through the audience as Iago wove his lies. Some of this is dramatic irony: we know more than the characters. And some of is the age; we’ve noticed that younger audiences keep their distance and that manifests itself as laughter. In the end, though, our laughter occurs as Iago recruits us, too, to his purposes, making us accomplices to the horror of the play’s end.