I started the day off very slowly because I hadn’t slept well. Caffeine in my system, I had just about enough energy to board a bus to Selfridges on Oxford Street. In years past they’d had some wonderful holiday windows. This year most of the windows were announcing the post-Christmas sales.
Back on a bus, I headed towards the Royal Academy of Art to see the show “Impressionists on Paper.” The show captured my attention—subtitled “from Degas to Toulouse Lautrec,” it included works I’d never seen. Some works were simple pencil or ink drawings, others elaborate sketches in pastels or thinned out oil paints. The composition and detail on many were extraordinary. I spent a lot of time looking and then going back to look again.
The Royal Academy is directly across from Fortnum and Mason, the most famous tea purveyor in Britain. I’d passed there several times this trip while on a bus and the queues to enter were staggering. Either people were preparing for New Year’s Eve, or they’d already returned home—I walked right in, and the store was relatively empty. Even more amazingly, I managed to immediately get a table at their café.
After lunch I walked a few blocks to the London Palladium where I was meeting Sue. The rain, which had held off all day, started in earnest. The streets seemed unnaturally quiet after the tourist frenzy of the last few days. Umbrella in hand, I sloshed through puddles and figured out where everyone had gone.
The crowd in front of the theater was ginormous, everyone trying to edge their way out of the rain. It was a 5 pm performance of Peter Pan, a pantomime. Pantomime is a uniquely British form of theater that includes broad humor, comedy, dancing, acrobatics, and anything that will get the audience to laugh. It also always features cross-dressing actors.
The Palladium is one of the largest and best-known theaters in the UK and their productions are over the top. This show featured hundreds of costume changes, elaborate sets and props, special effects and, it being Peter Pan, loads of people flying across the stage. The humor was full of inuendo that was way over the children in the audience, but which made the adults roar with laughter.
Post-show, we headed to a restaurant near where my friend Pascal lives for New Year’s Eve dinner. Pascal, Isabel, Sue, and I had a very low key (but delicious) dinner. Then Sue and I headed back to our hotel. The ride took forever because most of central London’s main streets were closed to traffic. As we were nearing the hotel we heard booming—it was midnight and several firework shows had begun. This was one of the first years in ages that I was out and about at midnight!
Happy 2024 to all. May it be healthy and joyous.