London, Holland Park and then an Eastbourne Day Trip

Our home away from home in London is an excellent mews house,
The Kiln House, which actually includes an old brick kiln, in Holland Park, one neighborhood west of Notting Hill. Our host, Lee Bender, is a designer who ran a chain of very successful women's clothes boutiques in the 1970s in Britain and through Bloomingdales in the U.S. Her home is 1970s contemporary so it feels very comfortable for us--reminiscent of Tennessee Avenue.

We're around the corner from a park where last night you could hear a soccer game as we were collapsing into bed. The local streets are mostly columned row houses, but at the corners are small groups of shops and restaurants. Portobello Road and its Saturday madness is about five blocks from here. We had a good walk through until the crowds overwhelmed us. Notting Hill is about half a mile away with its street scene, and upscale Wesbourne Grove is providing occasional retail therapy, read window shopping, for Ben.

We bought Oyster passes for the busses and the tubes but have avoided the tubes. They are not so quick, because of construction and the transfer times between lines, as the busses, and nowhere near as fun to see London. The busses, though, are quite crowded and we have only once managed two front seats upstairs.

On Friday night we dined locally at Julies, an Italian restaurant around the corner. We enjoyed a lovely half-bottle of red burgundy from Beaune, and I had sauteed calves liver and Ben had escalopes of bream. An early night.

Saturday we went to the National's Cottlesloe Theatre on the South Bank to see "Or You Could Kiss Me", a South African production about the death from emphysema of one of two lovers after 65 years together. The wonderful thing about this is that the two lovers are puppets, voiced by actors and moved by the cast. The lead, a black South African woman, plays housekeeper, doctor, analyst and narrator. It's an excellent production. Would it do well at Signature?

Dinner in Soho after the show is a show. Not only was it Double 10 in Chinatown, the streets were alive with birds in five inch heals and boys in low slung jeans. Bad hair designs, a true street scene. Balans, the gay restaurant on Old Compton St, provided a good meal. John had a meat pie, which he couldn't finish, and Ben had a pseudo-Thai curry. There was nothing Thai about it.

Sunday was family day in Eastbourne. John's cousins, Pat, Andrea and Frances, had recently lost their mother, so we went to see them and had lunch with them and Pat's husband Noel in Eastbourne. We visit the women's dad, Bert, whom John has known since infancy, but he scarcely recognized his visitors. He is 97 and in a home.

Lunch in Eastborne at Pomodoro e Mozzarella, was a good time. Ben had veggie lasagne, while John had excellent Italian sardines.

In the later afternoon we enjoyed the view from Beachy Head above Eastbourne, a high point on the south coast with a pub with a 360 degree view. We made it back to the train with five minutes to spare and had sandwiches before collapsing into bed--we had been up since 6 AM.

On Monday, our interests centered on museums. We got on the bus for the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert with two goals: the Dan Dare exhibit of mid-century Britain at the Science Museum and the Raphael Tapestries at the V&A.

The Dan Dare exhibit brought back memories for John of the days before his family left Britain for America and for Ben was an introduction to the Britain that "was" and is part of John. Dan Dare was an English comic-book hero, an interplanetary pilot, battling the genetically altered Venusian dictator, the Mekon, a little green man.

While the show wasn't what you'd call high impact, it documented the hopefulness of the post-World War II period, then the horrid life of the late 1940s when everything, including bread and potatoes was rationed so exports could pay for basic imports, and then the loss of competitiveness to American and then Japanese and European products.

Last night we had planned to go to Polpo, on the Currans' recommendation, in Soho, but we walked into a wall of ear-splitting decibels and decided a quiet Chinese restaurant down the street would be more fun. It was excellent, good guo-dz, duck with bean sprouts, sauteed bok choy, and salt fried squid with chilis.

Today we decided to bite the bullet and change our reservations to come home tomorrow. This meant cancelling the party on Saturday night in Paris, but I am not really feeling 100%, so we changed the flights and arrive in Washington tomorrow evening.