Taxi! (For three people, it's about the same as the Heathrow Express, and much easier to wrangle luggage.) Boodles found and checked in. This had created some concern, as Boodles is the very British, very proper, reciprocal club to JC's Metropolitan Club here in D.C. Boodles (and yes, that's where the gin got its name) has hall porters in cutaway coats! No electronics allowed! Coat and tie for men! Trousers TOLERATED for women, who are permitted in certain select areas of the club only...the Ladies' Dining Room and the Ladies' Lounge, which are totally separate from the main body of the Robert Adam-designed building. Humph!--or should I say "Har-rumph!" in the fine British tradition of gentlemen's clubs? At Boodles, it's the gentleman who rules. Ladies' menus in the dining room don't even list prices, as ladies are (no doubt) ordered FOR, being incapable of such vital decisions. (Seriously, prices are missing, but I was allowed to place my own order..) In any case, we debated whether we'd be quite 'dressed' enough for entry and exit. We were okay, save for the fact that we dressed more elegantly for breakfast than we did for any other part of our day. Why did we stay there? Simple economics: the Boodles price and location together were too good not to take advantage of. We were a five-minute walk from Pall Mall, from St. James' Park, from Fortnum & Mason's, from Brown's Hotel, from the Ritz--and from the Green Park Underground station.
In any case, checked in and settled in our rooms, we set out on foot across St. James' Park, teeming with Londoners on this gorgeous spring day. Trafalgar Square, with a new addition since our last visit: a big blue chicken. (We never did determine exactly why it was there. Perhaps I should google it.) Big Ben. Whitehall. A glimpse of the London Eye, also a new development. We headed for the Churchill War Rooms and did the tour. I have never been a great history buff, but history-on-the-spot has a much more riveting effect, particularly when these rooms were exactly as they'd been left (not including, of course, the mannequins who now man the phones and the maps on display.) Book accounts just don't measure up. Here, the war was real.
Soon after this, Sarah abandoned us for a nap back at the club. We soldiered on and found the Portrait Gallery, and sought out the Tudor and Stuart portraits that we've grown to know and love through our work at the Folger. There was Elizabeth, just like in her 'sieve' portrait! There was Ben Jonson, and a portrait of John Fletcher! Old friends, all, and more besides. We wandered back toward the club, met Sarah and went to Brown's for an early dinner.
And no, I am not planning to walk through our trip, day by day and museum by museum. Our first London day, however, establishes our modus operandi. We are gawkers, like most tourists. We are also history-gawkers, and art-gawkers, and tend to walk farther than we should. We generally have an agenda (or at least JC does) and a hazy plan of what we want to see and do, but we are pretty flexible and will often step off our private tourmobile to look at something that catches our mutual magpie eye. ("Ooh! Shiny! Let's go look!") I also (no surprise, folks) have a tendency to stop dead to snap a picture of something or other that may or may not make a good photo. The joy of electronics is that I can snap now and trash later without depleting my resources. There are an infinite number of pictures in my head. I am committed to putting at least some of them into my camera. And both of us should wear bumper stickers plastered on our backs that say "Caution! We brake for bookstores!"
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| Trafalgar Square and the big blue chicken... |
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| JC in his natural habitat at the War Rooms |
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| The Queen! |
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| Phones!! |
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| St. James' Park |
So, here we all are: arrived, semi-rested, and ready to board the train early next day for Scotland. King's Cross Station, here we come. Dundee is next.
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