Oct. 9

Jeff has taken over the kitchen and the smell of garlic, chopped onions and various boilings and roastings and herbs pervades the flat. There is just a touch of smoke from the singed chopping board: It is a very small kitchen. A Sunday “off duty” in the travel world.

We’re all three settled in nicely and very busy — so this is my first chance to write. I suppose the place to start is at the Wigmore Hall, London’s premier recital hall: a magnificent small, flat-floored venue built in 1901 with elaborate mosaics and decorations of the period — and a very nice restaurant in the basement, where I met William for a pre-concert dinner.

The hall was packed, and we heard the Pavel Hass quartet do the Five Pieces of Webern and the 2nd Shostakovich quartet before the interval, and then joined by a second cellist, we had the Schubert string quintet. London audiences are fairly staid and very knowledgeable, so the fact that we had a standing ovation after the third movement of the quintet will give you some idea of how exciting the performance was. I only wish I had not sat behind the World’s Largest Man, who kept rolling his head, and the floor being flat, seeing the quartet was a little like glimpsing scenery out of the window of a train as buildings race by. But superb music making. William thought the Schubert a bit raw, but loved the Shostakovich; I had never heard the Schubert live before, and enjoyed it — with all the repeats — very much.

After, William took the tube home, and I opted for a taxi. Unknown to me, everyone in London under the age of 30 goes out on Thursday nights and spills out onto the street, and with construction everywhere and bike lanes adding to the fun — a five-minute taxi ride took ages and cost £25! (Two cars get through the green light, you inch forward, and when you finally get to the light and after an eternity it turns green just in time for a gaggle of people to cross the street in front of you. Seattleites would feel at home!)

Yesterday we visited the Silver Vaults and spent an hour with Vivian Douglas. The Douglases and their cousins across the corridor, the Franks, are delightful and gracious people who clearly both love and deeply understand what they do, and an hour spent having the manufacture of old silver expounded and demonstrated is more like being a private guest in a very good museum than being in a shop. Jeff bought a salt cellar with a spoon, and was allowed to examine an 18th century tray of marvelous workmanship.

After the Vaults, we “Ubered” to Sir John Soame’s Museum (Uber drivers, as opposed to London taxi drivers, who know everything, don’t know much – we had to navigate for our driver). Sir John Soame was a very popular 18th century architect who bought the present house and completely reconstructed in in 1792, then added to it continually by expanding into neighboring houses. It was — and is — a show place both for his use of the illusion of space and light, and for his eclectic jumble of classical art. It was also the first public art museum in London. Well worth seeing, but alas! with far too many stairs for my poor feet and the revised entry and interior routing of visitors had me lost — several docents said getting lost in the house was very common. Taxi home.

Last night we dined — John, Jeff, William and I — at Rule’s, in Maiden Lane, three streets down from the flat. Rule’s is reputed to be the oldest restaurant in London, dating at its present address from 1778. Rule’s specializes in game, which it does very well indeed (I had venison), but you need to make reservations about a generation in advance. A number of years ago I dined there with friends and water began to pour through the ceiling. It turned out later that an upstairs loo (read “toilet”) had run over – but the truly English part of the evening was that an imperturbable waiter stood over us with an umbrella until the flow stopped. “Keep muddling on” might be the motto of this wonderful island.

Across Maiden Lane (said to be from the medieval “Midden Lane” — a less alluring address for a restaurant) is another interesting address — in the cellar of what was then the Cockburtn Hotel, No. 31 Maiden Lane, the American Fred Gaisberg set up the first purpose-built recording studio in the UK in 1898. He worked for The Gramophone Company, later to become His Master’s Voice, and a few years later HMV adopted the dog-and-gramophone logo, today the oldest business logo still in use. To test his equipment, which recorded mechanically when someone sang down a horn, Gaisberg hired a barmaid from Rule’s who, he said, had one of the loudest voices he had ever heard — perfect for acoustic recording. Rule’s, I will only add, is much quieter these days!

An aside: if you are interested in London — and I’m a London addict — find a copy of Matthew Weinreb’s “The London Encyclopaedia” [sic], now in a third, revised and enlarged edition. At 1,040 pages, you might not want to breeze through it, but it is an exhaustive source of articles on almost every street and building of interest within London, and invaluable. I donated a copy to the flat here, and keep another at home. I read most of it over a period of three years, and have referred to it over and over. Highly recommended. Just don’t try to lift it if you have a weak back!

Now Jeff and John are off to Cambridge to visit John’s college, where he is a fellow, and I am having a day off my feet. Tomorrow we train down to Biggin Hill, the foremost airfield during the Battle of Britain, and hitch a ride in a restored 1944 Spitfire. Dinner at the Atheneum after, and the opera on Friday. I’d better email this in now.

— By Nathaniel Brown

Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the U.S. Cross-Country team in 1989. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement six years ago