Month: April 2025

Partey like it’s your birthday

Amy O2 Comments

It actually was my birthday on Saturday, a big one. Lately, they are all big ones. I rarely make a big deal of my birthday because, let’s face it, after a while a person has had a lot of birthdays. However, for this one I treated it like a my 8-year old self would have: I am the center of the universe and no indulgence is too much. We had a family party on the day before we left for London, for which my sister made a beautiful and delicious cake and my kids came home and spent the night.

I treated the whole week in London like carbs don’t count. At all. If I wanted a blueberry brioche for breakfast at Gail’s, which I did almost every day–except the days when I wanted a scone with clotted cream–well, I had it. Yeah, I suspect it might be frowned on to have a scone for breakfast, just like in Italy it’s frowned on to have cappuccino in the afternoon. I have been corrected in Italy for my errors, but no one in England has ever corrected me to my face. I’ve already described the cream beignet I had from Fortitude Bakehouse. Plus I had a big, ol’ Guinness whenever I felt like it. Which was just about every day.

And because it was going to be my birthday on game day and–Champions League excepted–it is easy now to get tickets to Arsenal matches if you’ve put in a ballot, I was excruciatingly picky about where I would sit. No club seats–boring! And why sit in the rafters? I decided I needed to be in the corner or behind the goal in the North Bank, within 6 rows of the field. So that if there was a celebration, I would be right there. I turned up my nose at many a ticket I had in my hand until one finally met all my criteria. My husband held out longer but worked less hard than I did. I ended up finding him a ticket that was even better than mine. His was on the side closest to the substitutes and Mikel Arteta and row 2. When the players would get up to warm up, he’d be right there. Despite how good these tickets sound, these were some of the cheapest seats in the house. They are seats for someone who wants to be in the thick of things. In the thick of things you experience a lot, but you might not see everything.

The day had an inauspicious start. I was awoken at 4 a.m. by someone who was trying to open our hotel room door. When ours would not open, they moved to the one next door and tried that. Then back to our door. This is not really a hotel with a reception area you can call, and I really couldn’t think what to do about this. Meanwhile my husband was sleeping soundly. I let him. Finally, the activities of the person caused an alarm to go off, which did wake up my husband. A bit later we heard the police out in the hallway. What we ultimately heard about what happened is that a guest in the hotel had been “overserved” that night and was having trouble figuring out where her room was. And, using drunk logic, kept trying. After all that excitement, neither my husband nor I could sleep so we started the day.

After the requisite visit to Gail’s which was open quite early in the morning, we found a self-guided walking tour we wanted to do in the neighborhood using Footways. We did the walk from Farringdon station to Angel. There were some cool things to see. London’s only public statute of Henry VIII. He was looking pretty fit at that point. St. John’s Gate. Many lovely gardens, mostly associated with churches. Regent’s Canal. It was meant to be a 26-minute walk. We got lost a lot and it took quite a bit longer.

We had scheduled a tour of the ruins of Billingsgate Roman House and Baths for later in the morning. That was pretty cool. Romans occupied parts of what became London starting in the first century AD. They built homes that ultimately were built on by others, layers and layers of people building over centuries. As people now renovate in London, they sometimes find remnants of Roman life under the surface. This particular archeological find of parts of a Roman home with a Roman bath is under a nondescript office building. We took a guided tour of the site given by City Guides. The bath is largely intact and you can easily visualize the three rooms. So clean and perfect it almost looked fake. I enjoyed the tour very much.

But we were flagging so we took the liberty of having what for me was a fish and chips break at The Hydrant, right next to the monument commemorating the Great Fire of London. We were seating facing the window where the people watching was fabulous. Everyone stopping to take selfies in front of the Monument. The fish and chips were also quite yummy.

From there we decided to take an Uber boat from Embankment to Putney. It was a glorious, sunny and warm day to be on the River. And the scenery was great, until the gentle rocking got the better of me and put me into a deep sleep. I woke up not long before we arrived at Putney Pier. Putney Pier is pretty close to Fulham’s stadium, Craven Cottage. You can see the edge of one of the stands from the Putney stop. From there we walked over to the Tube station and returned to Farringdon.

It was just about time to head over near the Emirates. We were early enough that we decided to visit an Arsenal-friendly pub called The Bank of Friendship. It’s not really a Fuller’s pub but it does have London Pride, my husband’s weakness. The pub was packed with Arsenal fans. We’ve been to this pub before but never before have seen the very nice beer garden. As I walked into the garden I was invited to sit with a group of Arsenal fans. They were a mix of ages, all guys, and I mistook them for a family. But it turned out they were connected by loose friendship and Arsenal kinship to one of the guys. Some of them had only met that day. About that time the lineup for the Arsenal match had come out and we commiserated together about that. As expected, Arteta planned to put out an unusual team, including Thomas Partey at right back, not his best spot. Martin Odegaard, Mikel Merino, and Bukayo Saka were all listed as substitutes. Ben White, only recently returned from a lengthy injury was no where. With our new friends we also had the requisite conversation about Donald Trump.

Our new acquaintances kept saying they needed to leave and then kept going to buy one more beer. I don’t know where they put it all.

At last my husband and I said our goodbyes and walked over to The Emirates. I loved my seats. Although the announcer makes an announcement at the beginning of each match asking fans not to engage in “persistent standing” these were seats for which there is only persistent standing. It’s silly to expect otherwise. People (the ones who remain in their seats and do not go to get beer) do sit down at half-time. I’m pretty short and the rise from one row to the next is not much behind the goal so I had to do a lot of craning and shifting to see stuff over people’s heads. The people around me were spirited and good-natured and it was just fun.

The atmosphere was good, but there was no doubt that everyone in the stadium knew this Premier League match was not the most important focus. And for sure the atmosphere was NOT what it had been for the Real Madrid match on Tuesday. Our position in the Premier League is what it is. We can’t catch Liverpool, not really, and there’s probably very little chance we won’t finish in position to be in the Champion’s League next year. And we do have to be careful. We’ve battled injuries all season, bad ones with long recoveries. We couldn’t afford to lose focus on the upcoming match against Real Madrid at the fearsome stadium Bernabeu. As a fanbase we were for sure hung over from the unbelievable match and unbelievable spirt of the encounter earlier this week with Real Madrid.

I heard a lot of complaining in the press after the Brentford match about how boring it was. I did not encounter it that way. I thought Arsenal played well, and I felt fine about how things were going. Arsenal created plenty of chances to score. Brentford didn’t didn’t accomplish much.

In the second half, Arsenal finally did score. A pretty unusual Arsenal goal, where David Raya created a counterattack by rolling the ball to Declan Rice following a corner kick. Rice came away like a steam engine with three Arsenal players able to spring free and Brentford struggling to get defenders back. Rice passed it to Thomas Partey who rocketed it into the goal right in front of me. And he did celebrate pretty close to me. Arteta made some changes at that point to give some of his stars time to run a bit.

Unfortunately, Brentford, who didn’t do much on the night, did enough to score a goal. I didn’t see much of it live, but after reviewing highlights online afterward, have to say it was a good, opportunistic goal.

Arsenal continued to work hard after that. Our defensive midfielder for the night, Jorginho, who was a starter tonight to give some other folks breathing room, had a serious injury and had to leave the field. Arteta had made all his subs and we have to play about 10 minutes a man down.

We still looked dangerous and it still looked like we could maybe pull off another goal.

We could not. The match ended 1-1. Considering everything, it was good enough.

After the match, my husband showed me the pictures he took from his seat. They were unbelievably good and he loved seeing the details up close, but he said the people around him were very hard to deal with. Everyone was so negative, complaining about very decision Arteta made, every decision the players made. He said Arteta didn’t seem happy all night. It was funny how our experiences were so different just because of people’s attitudes.

It’s been a weird season. We have such a good team but had so much bad luck. Still, we sit in second place, albeit FAR behind Liverpool. We’re still alive in the Champions League, heading to the semifinals against PSG as of this past Wednesday, when we did beat Madrid in their own stadium in addition to beating them at ours. We’ll make a bid for tickets, but if we don’t get them officially, we won’t return to London. I think we learned our lesson this time.

We’re a team on the verge of something awesome, I just know it. But you know me. I always “know” it. And when will the “awesome” happen? No clue.

In my lifetime, if I’m lucky enough to have many more birthdays.

A little work, a little play

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So we were back in London for the week and, as has been the case the last few times, I worked from London. But this time is different because I am retiring at the end of May. My replacement has already been hired and she is a good one, rapidly coming up to speed. So while I did work every day and almost put in a full week, it was also pretty chill. Every day I got up and put in an hour or two of work and then my husband and I had a planned activity. We’d enjoy that, have lunch, and then I’d go back to our room to work until dinner time.

There are a series of “Pub & rooms” in London where a small “hotel” stands above a historic pub. We’ve stayed at one before, The Bull and Hide. This time we tried The One Tun Pub & Rooms near Farringdon station, a pub supposedly patronized, in some earlier version, by Charles Dickens. From the outside, the pub didn’t seem like much and it wasn’t as thronged as other pubs nearby. When I finally saw the inside of it on–I’m ashamed to admit–the last day, it was so awesome. Cozy, fun, with delicious Asian food.

The rooms had a separate door, up some steep stairs. There were 3-4 rooms on our floor and more up a level. Cute and large room with lots of character. We were just above the pub. About 3:30 each day the noise from people gathering both downstairs and in the street outside and music playing would ramp up until about 9 p.m. By 10:30 each night it was pretty quiet.

The location was great. Farringdon station was a block away, so it was easy to get where we wanted to go, and there was a good selection of coffee shops, restaurants, and pubs nearby. This was the first time we visited London where it was more convenient to take the Elizabeth line than the Piccadilly line to and from the airport. Have to say the Elizabeth line is an easy way to travel. New, spacious cars, and there was never a time when we had to schlep our stuff up a bunch of stairs. Hotel excepting. I only packed a carry-on, but a week’s worth of crammed-in stuff is still kind of heavy for a near-retiree.

In the daily “fun hour” we managed the following attractions:

Siena: The rise of painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery. This exhibit explores the art movement in 14th century Siena, dominated by Christian themes, drama, bright colors, and metallic finishes. That is a big oversimplification from an unsophisticated viewer of art. We sprung for the added mobile audio tour, which I highly recommend especially if you are an occasional art dabbler like me. It helped set the stage and provide details around what to look for, what was unique about the pieces it focused on. We’ve visited the National Gallery before and it has some great works with free admission. We only did a speed walk through the gallery on our way out of the exhibit this time. It felt a bit sinful to walk past Van Gogh’s sunflowers with only a sidelong glance.

War and the mind exhibit at the Imperial War Museum. The Imperial War museum is a great little attraction and it often has interesting exhibits. They are always thoughtfully done and thought-provoking, and this exhibit on “War and the Mind” was no exception. It covered how people become motivated to start and accept (even support) war, the impact war has on the psyche (and the reverse), both for soldiers and civilians, and then how we are motivated to bring war to conclusion, and think about it in the aftermath. There have been no wars on the mainland of America in the lifetime of anyone I’ve known, but things are different in England. Although the exhibit was not just about impact of war on England, the rich examples and artifacts available particularly from the second World War drew you in, made you think about things at a different level than you might normally. Than I might normally. Excellent exhibit, and I highly recommend it.

Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots at Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine gallery is located in the Kensington gardens. The day we went was sunny and springlike and the walk over to the Serpentine gallery was peaceful. Every dog in London seemed to be out for a happy romp among colorful flowers.

It was the perfect precursor to the Penone exhibit focused on the relationship between humans and nature. There were cool installations of fabricated trees just outside the gallery which we enjoyed until the gallery opened. The exhibit inside the gallery was also awesome. I might be guilty of overusing the word peaceful, but that is what I felt while seeing Penone’s works. My favorite exhibit was in a room in which the installation included sections of encased laurel leaves from floor to ceiling. There were also fabricated tree stumps that were probably the main point of the exhibit and they were lovely, but the smell of the Laurel leaves and their appearance, well, it was amazing.

Shopping at Harrods’ food halls. No matter how long you’ve read this blog, never have you ever heard me talking about shopping in London other than at The Emirates. I hate shopping, hate to be in stores. In this case, I took a special trip over to Harrod’s because I’d long heard about the food halls and I was hoping for some Easter candy inspiration. (My husband was on a loftier and more diverse quest elsewhere to London Wetlands, the 24-hour Pianothon at Liverpool Street station, and Traces of Belsen exhibit at Wiener Holocaust Library. Maybe I can convince him to tell us about it here.) The Tube station is right next to Harrod’s and it took some strolling through the departments before I located the Food Halls at the back of the building. If I felt out of place among expensive purses, shoes, scarves, and impeccably-dressed sales people, I clearly was not the only one. Not one person I saw in the store probably had any business shopping there. Anyway, the Food Halls were a special-occasion exception. I visited the room with chocolate, the one with cheeses and meats, and the one with teas, jams, etc. Every thing was so beautiful it was an experience just to look. I ended up buying some chocolate and tea.

Cream beignets at Fortitude Bakehouse. My niece long ago found out about Fortitude bakehouse online and every time for the past year it’s been on my list to get there. This is a bakery that has a famous cream beignet. I understand that people line up for them for hours. They are ready at 11 a.m. and are available until they sell out each day. But somehow I’ve never managed to get there. I made a mental note on my way from Harrod’s that I had to change trains at the station closest to Fortitude, Russell Square. The bakery is only about a block away from the train station. It was my lucky day because I arrived at about 11:30 to find a bunch of people sitting outside the bakery gorging on cream beignets and other yummy- looking pastries. And only a few people in line ahead of me. It appears they make one flavor each day. On the day I was there it was was pistachio and rose, something like that. What I have to say about the hype about the beignets is that it is simply not enough. Flaky, fried dough dipped in granulated sugar, split and coated with jam, then filled with thick, delicious whipped cream, and glazed on top, in this case with pistachio glaze and nuts. One cream beignet was all I could manage for lunch that day. That, and enough tea to wash it down. It occurs to me that I wrote significantly more about cream beignets than about any other activity. This is not an error.

Dear England at the National Theatre. We had intended to attend the play, Three Sisters at Shakespeare’s Globe, but on the day it was supposed to play we received a notice that they had to cancel that evening’s production. We scrambled and found a very different alternative, Dear England, written by James Graham. The play covers the foibles and fortunes (mainly misfortunes) of the real England national soccer team during England’s history and especially Gareth Southgate’s tenure as National Team manager. It’s named after an actual letter that Gareth Southgate wrote during the Covid era before England’s participation in the Euros, the tournament held for only European national teams. How to characterize the real letter? It’s a reflection on the importance of football to the English as well as sort of a plea to take it easy on the very real people who play for the team. The staging was wonderful, the play was interesting, and the characters both lovable and laughable. We thoroughly enjoyed it. The only nit was the poor football technique of the actors. But considering how much of the play focused on England’s misfortunes with penalty kicks, maybe that was intentional?

We went to the play on a beautiful warm night and were able to enjoy lovely scenes along the Thames on our walk back home to the One Tun.

You get what you need

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Declan Rice was preparing to take a long free kick following a foul on Bukayo Saka in front of Real Madrid’s goal when a fan near me asked derisively, “How long has it been since he scored from a free kick?” It was an easy question. As good as Arsenal were scoring on corner kicks earlier this season, I can’t remember a free kick ending in anything except disappointment in recent years. And at 0-0 with only about 30 minutes remaining in the second half, I didn’t have my hopes up.

What happened next seemed like a miracle. Rice hit the ball, it swerved around the wall of Real Madrid players and into the net with one of the best goal keepers in the world, Thibaut Courtois, at full 6′ 7″ stretch, unable to reach it. We were thrilled, and relieved. Arsenal had looked good all match but it still had seemed conceivable up to that point that the match would end at 0-0 and we’d have to meet Real Madrid on their home turf next week with the wind in our faces.

We learned after the match Declan Rice had never scored such a goal.

As you know if you are a regular reader (I see you, fam), I only write while I’m in London. There are two home Arsenal matches this week and although we had tickets for neither when we scheduled our trip we felt that our best chance of scoring tickets for both was to be in London. We were VERY confident we’d be able to get tickets for the Brentford match over the weekend and significantly less confident about getting tickets for the Champions League match against Real Madrid on Tuesday. But still, a little confident.

As small our confidence was, it can now be classified as overconfidence. I must have clicked more than a thousand times for tickets the last week alone. Maybe a thousand in the several weeks before that. Nothing. On the day of the match we hedged our bets by reserving a space at a pub where we could watch the match on TV, hoping fervently we’d be able to cancel it in the end. That did not come to pass. We found ourselves watching from The Hope with other fans who also could not manage to get tickets.

About 10 minutes after Declan Rice scored that beautiful goal, Arsenal found itself again with a long free kick, again following a foul on Bukayo Saka. Declan Rice again teed it up and stroked it through the hole in the stretch of the wall created by Arsenal shirts parting like the red sea. Real Madrid keeper Courtois again stretched across his goal, missing the ball as it struck the top corner of the net.

Having never scored even one such goal, Declan Rice scored two in one night.

I’ve never experienced a celebration anywhere like what happened at The Hope. The goal was so unexpected, maybe even more unexpected than the first goal. There was no “Yeah!” or jumping around or cheering. Everyone just laughed.

We waited only a few minutes more before youngster Myles Lewis-Skelly put a cross in toward our makeshift striker Mikel Merino. There was nothing easy about the shot he had to make but he made it beautiful. In another time and place it would have been the best goal we’d seen in ages.

We ended up beating last year’s Champions League winners 3-0. To prove that there is no team good enough not to be trash-talked while also trashing our fiercest rivals, through the TV we could hear the Arsenal fans singing, “Are you Tottenham? Are you Tottenham? Are you Tottenham in disguise?”

It was hard not to be at The Emirates. The place seemed to be rocking all match and for good reason. We tried to console ourselves that it was just a short walk to our hotel and wasn’t it nice that we didn’t have to wait in a crowd to get on the Tube? But the reality was harder to take. Probably the most exciting match of the season. We were so close, but so far away.

And it makes the away match next week in Madrid even more important to give best efforts to. The match over the weekend against Brentford for which we do now have tickets is likely to be one for which Mikel Arteta keeps our best players on ice. We must take as few chances as possible for additional injuries.

In the end we accept all of it, from a glorious win we could not be present for, to a possibly tedious loss or tie in the Premier League at home over the weekend. If next week’s match against Real Madrid ends the way we want, I lean on brother Mick. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you might find you get what you need.