Into Deepest England: Ten Years Ago

[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid:  October 7, 2011]

So there I was, en famille, in London.   As recounted last week, we had flown out soon enough after 9/11 for it to have been a strange journey.  Strange to for me to adjust to London as a visitor - a tourist even - with a ten/eleven month old baby in tow.  A jet-lagged baby too.

But this trip wasn't exclusively a London jaunt.  Other destinations awaited.

While in London, I was making the most of the seasonal bounty.  For all the brickbats flung at British food, there are two things Britain does better than the rest of the world.  Game - especially game birds - and firm cheeses (I'll grant French superiority at soft).  It was back to Neal's Yard for a selection of the latter, and I picked up wild duck from somewhere or other too.

The wild duck was slowly pot-roast in red wine with rosemary and garlic.  This is an underappreciated way to keep game birds moist and tender.  Dry roasting is much riskier, especially with an unfamiliar oven.  A bottle of Montepulciano with the feast.

Next morning: to Bristol.  I wanted to show the family my old college town, a curious combination of the quaint and the bustling, set in the steep valley through which the River Avon flows into the Bristol Channel.  Unlike its neighbor, Bath, Bristol isn't a premium tourist destination; yet it has some of the most remarkable sights in southern England, not least Isambard Brunel's Clifton suspension bridge, miraculously flung across a dizzylingly steep gorge.  I had lived about twenty minutes walk from the bridge for six years in the 1980s.

We stayed at the bijou Berkeley Hotel on Berkeley Square.  After checking in, a walk up to the Downs, richly green in the sunshine which peeked out sharply from behind darkening clouds.  After a drink in the Richmond Springs (where it sometimes seems I spent most of those six years), we walked down to the dock area, long since developed as an art-entertainment center.  Elizabethan pubs, however, are beautifully preserved.  The sounds of trad jazz poured out of the Duke's Head.  The actor Pete Postlethwaite was drinking outside with friends; I think he was appearing in a play at the Old Vic.  We took a table outside the Llandoger Trow (1664) and explored pints of bitter and bags of crisps (yes, potato chips).

There's a rather stately Chinese restaurant on the same street, the Cathay Rendezvous. We dined there on aromatic duck, lobster with ginger and scallions and sizzling lamb. 

The next morning, I took them to one of the best vantage points to see the bridge and the gorge, the terrace of the Avon Hotel.   Breakfast followed in old Clifton, then it was already time to leave.  We had an appointment with my baby's godfather and his family, out in the Chilterns.

This involved taking a train across country.  A long journey, therefore.  We arrived in Princes Risborough in time to visit the local pub while a joint of pork roasted for us in the oven.  Then it rained.  But we were indoors, and the view over some valley or other was spectacular (I do not known the Chilterns).

After a lazy morning among friends, we lunched outside a pub in Marlow and took a walk along a river which I was assured was the Thames.  My friend was driving into London that evening, so ferried us back to Hammersmith.  From there to Shepherd's Bush and more friends, who billeted us for the night after a meal of sea bass with pesto.

The rain got steadier the next day.  A suitable backdrop for a visit to my family in Essex, a place I always recall as damp and grey.  My child made her debut before cousins and aunts.  A few faltering steps were achieved.  Dinner was splendidly English: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, vegetables, followed by apple pie and custard.  The flavors were entirely novel as far as my family were concerned, but they did their best. 

My diary doesn't reveal our ultimate destination that evening, but it must have been back to the apartment hotel on High Holborn.  I was certainly in town the next morning, because I headed off to the Michael Andrews retrospective at the Tate.  Andrews was a contemporary and friend of Bacon and Freud, but a less visible artist and one whose practice continued to evolve over the years until he was unrecognizable as the painter of Soho scenes like "The Colony Room."

After pre-theater tippling at The French House and The Coach & Horses, off to see "The Graduate."  At this point, Kathleen Turner had been substituted by Linda Gray, wearing much less than she ever wore in Dallas.  More wild duck for supper - Britain boasts many varieties; I think this was mallard.

One of the many purposes of this trip was to check up on the vast stock of books which I still had in storage just outside London and arrange for their transport to New York.  Off to a warehouse in Mitcham for the morning, then.  Afternoon consolation came with a trip to Fortnum & Mason's, that great gourmet store, and a review of their savory pies.

We had another dinner invitation that evening, this time in Islington.  Friends opened a splendid '95 Corton Grand Cru and fed us baked chicken and Vacherin. 

I had one more art show to get too, fifty years of Frank Auerbach at the Royal Academy.  Enough oil paint to keep most artists going for a century or more.  Then into the Gentleman's Court hair salon on Jermyn Street for a quick touch up.

I invited friends to the apartment hotel that evening and contrived a lengthy dinner.  My diary says "bouillabaisse" - it would have been the quick version I had learned, and no racasse of course.  Then a civet of duck and a plate of cheeses. 

After a final day of shopping and rest, a flight back to the city I now called home, New York.