Ghosts – WholeArsed

Although we weren’t able to do much London stuff in this visit, we did have Saturday gloriously open for fun around town.

Sadly, storm Darragh, which caused rain and winds all over the UK that day, wanted her say. So we made two plans that were respectful of her and one plan that ignored her completely.

It was pouring rain in the morning but we stepped out with our most rain-resistant shoes and umbrellas and went to the highly-rated local diner, Peter’s Cafe, for breakfast. It was nothing fancy but I had a perfectly delicious, basic, and reasonably-priced breakfast of eggs on toast with a latte.

After that, we went over to the Gunpowder Plot Experience close to the Tower of London. This is a tourist attraction whereby you participate with a group in simulating the attempted coup of 1605 on King James by Guy Fawkes. It’s a combination of interactive theatre and virtual reality. Not our usual thing! It was a lot of fun, albeit a part of history I’ve spent zero time thinking about. We played the part of Catholic co-conspirators. My favorite part of the experience was the virtual reality. It’s not that it felt actually real, but it produced some interesting effects and sensations of being there. With virtual reality, we flew over the city, took a boat over to Parliament, saw the aftermath of the attempted coup.

After that nice, dry activity we took the bus over to Millwall’s stadium, The Den, to take in some Championship football. We’ve attended a Championship match in the past at Fulham after they had dropped from the Premier League and before they came back up. Championship matches offer a grittier, and some say purer, experience than the Premier League. Whatever. We just wanted to go.

Millwall currently sits in the bottom half of the Championship and was playing on Saturday against Coventry City. It was very easy to get good tickets because of the expected bad weather and probably that thing I said about “the bottom half.”

Coventry City was even bottom-er in the Championship, and only recently started being managed by the villainous Frank Lampard, formerly of Chelsea. The fans at The Den seemed particularly annoyed by the presence of Frank Lampard. One guy near me shouted at him and insulted him the entire match. There is no possible way Frank Lampard heard a word of it, so far away were we and as windy and rainy as it was. Maybe Frank will read this and know the truth.

The chanting is a bit different at Millwall than at the Emirates. The chant we understood best went something like this:

We are Millwall
No one likes us
We don’t care

It was a bad day for Millwall and good day for Frank Lampard. Coventry City ended up winning the match 0 – 1. It was his first win as the manager of Coventry City, we learned the next day.

We took the bus over toward our evening activity and stopped nearby at a nice pub, The Royal Standard. Beer for my husband, mulled wine for me. Fish & chips for him, Avocado & Mango salad for me. Brownie for him, Apple, plum & Damson (don’t ask me) crumble for me. Very delicious, and a nice atmosphere.

Our final activity of the day was Edwyrdian Tales’ Christmas Ghost Stories at Charlton House. Charlton house is a 400-year old former manor house, so a great setting in which to hear three old ghost stories. For me, it was only two ghost stories, for, as good as the program was, I was exhausted from a long week and being in the cold and rain for hours (and maybe the mulled wine had something to do with it). I slept like a baby during the first tale about Jerry Bundler. Well refreshed from my nap, I thoroughly enjoyed the next two ghost stories, “Smee” about a haunting that occurs while people are playing a game at a holiday party and “The Kit Bag,” where a lawyer is emotionally haunted both by his involvement in a trial for a horrific murder and actually haunted by something in the bag in his room. The stories were performed by a single actor, writer, and historian Matthew Wood, who did a wonderful job transporting us to a time in which these stories would have been very popular. Great atmosphere and great stories, well told.

It was good to get out into London at last before heading back to Chicago.

The first time we came to an Arsenal match, it was during Christmas. We had bought a package that included hotel and match tickets for two matches, a Boxing Day fixture against West Ham (that ended up being postponed because of a Tube strike) and a New Year’s Eve eve match against Newcastle. Whenever we talk as a family about favorite holiday memories, that trip to London is always mentioned. We brought Christmas tree lights in our suitcase with the idea that we might arrange them in our hotel room in the shape of a tree, but the only electrical fixture that was usable was next to a mirror over a dresser. So we hung them around the mirror, prompting songs by our kids of “Oh Christmas Mirror, Oh Christmas Mirror!”

There was actually no need for anything special in our room because London is so beautifully decorated for the holidays.

This trip is the only time we’ve been back to London at this time of year, so my husband and I were both looking forward to seeing it all decked out again. My husband has been preoccupied with his parents’ move into assisted living in Florida, so I did some minimal planning for this trip. Minimal in the sense that every moment from 2 p.m. on Friday was planned, and not one thing was planned for Thursday (all day) or Friday morning.

I had seen information on a museum I thought my husband would enjoy, the Postal museum, situated at the site of an underground railway used for many decades in mail delivery. As a part of your visit, you can ride a train through some of the tunnels that accommodated the cars that carried mail. Unfortunately, it hadn’t occurred to me that the museum would be such a popular option. When we arrived on Friday morning after a delicious breakfast at Gail’s bakery in our neighborhood, all available visitor spots had been sold out for the day.

So we went back toward the Thames and had a leisurely lunch before the play we had booked, Ghosts. Ghosts was running in the Sam Wanamaker theatre, a small indoor space inside Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. The play is performed under the light of about 80 candles, which are laboriously lit at the beginning of the play by one character and laboriously put out at the end of the play by another. Candlelight aside, this was a very dark play about family secrets. Somehow we had considered dozens of lighthearted holiday productions and selected this one instead. Holiday fare it was not, but it was an excellent production and I’m glad we chose it.

We left to walk over along the Thames to a holiday light installation at Southbank Centre. Very cool.

In fact, you could also say very cold. Bone chilling dampness made my husband realize that we were very close to Gordon’s Wine Bar, so we crossed the bridge hoping to find ourselves in the cozy wine caves. Instead, we were offered outdoor seating which might not have fit the bill but turned out to be under a huge, very functional heating lamp.

After a very relaxing glass of wine and some warming, we walked back to St. Paul’s area for dinner at Krua, a Thai restaurant. Very delicious. And, because there are so many lights to see, we took the tube afterward into the shopping districts where some of the most fun holiday light displays are.

Our route back to the hotel took us over Tower Bridge, where the most fun light display of all is visible. The top of The Shard, the iconic tower near Tower Bridge, was fully lit in dozens of fun, moving & sparkly patterns. I enjoyed seeing it all over the city, but had the best views of it from Tower Bridge. Here are a few of the way too many pictures I took.