[Pink Pig Time Machine: April 11, 2015]
This was a nostalgic trip for me. Accustomed to crossing the Atlantic to London for a few days of business and pleasure, I'd decided to extend this journey and re-visit Bristol, where I'd studied both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate in the 1980s.
For those who don't know, Bristol is the largest city of England's West Country, and although it's population is less than half a million it has some urban intensity to it. The grand city center, and the beautiful old houses in the Clifton neighborhood, were generated by the huge economic success of its docklands from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.
In my time there, the docklands had recently been transformed into an arts district, and the St Paul's and Montepellier neighborhoods, air thick with reggae, were giving birth to a post-punk dub and trip hop scene from which Tricky and Massive Attack would take on the world.
With the rich grey stone drinking the watery sunshine and reflecting it back, and the startling sight of the Clifton suspension bridge, on of the UK's unsung marvels of engineering and aesthetics, it was a beautiful city, and I've never regretted by six years there. It's less than two hours from London in what England considers a high-speed train.
But London first, and dinner at The Wolseley in Mayfair after a day-time Friday flight. I must have been traveling on my own funds because I put up at Manzi's, the quaint mediterranean-style hotel just off Leicester Square. Saturday kicked off with espresso at Bar Italia in Soho, then a revelatory show of August Strindberg's oil paintings and photographs at the Tate Modern.
Everyone knows Strindberg as the author of Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata. He was also a notable writer of autobiographical fiction, and I'd been working through his novels like The Red Room set in Stockholm's literary bohemia. I hadn't been prepared for the richness of his achievement as a painter.
The Tate Modern is just across the river in south London, as is Borough Market, so lunch came from various stalls there: a sausage roll, a piece of black pudding, some Neal's Yard cheese. Refreshments that afternoon back in Soho: the Coach & Horses, the French pub, two of the several pubs named The Blue Posts (blue posts indicated a kind of taxi rank for sedan chairs back in the day).
That evening, out to Chiswick for dinner with friends at the very French Le Vacherin. Saucisse de morteau with sauce gribiche and potato salad; pork belly aux lentilles; prune and Armagnac tart.
Bar Italia again for a caffeine shot the next morning, then a walk around Fitzrovia with Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan under my arm. Lunch was a ham and cheese croissant at Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street, then after catching up on some sleep in the afternoon, dinner at J. Sheeky, the fine fish restaurant in a court of the Charing Cross Road. Gull's eggs (happily in season), grilled halibut, and cod roe on toast (it being a British tradition to finish that kind of meal with a "savory" rather than dessert.
I was gobbling down art on Monday morning, visiting the Tate itself (Tate Britain, as it's now curiously known), and then the National Gallery for a show of Caravaggio's late paintings and a really splendid exhibition of John Virtue's heavy, brooding London paintings (followed by a look at his drawings at a twin show at the Courtauld).
Cocktails at The Player that evening, then a simple supper of dim sum in Chinatown. The next morning, a train out of Paddington headed west, with Russell Shorto's impressive New York history, The Island at the Center of the World. I checked into The Washington, one of many small hotels in the Clifton district, and considered my options--Bristol being legendarily stocked with interesting and historic pubs.
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