The long and winding road....

The long and winding road…..

Well, it’s time to return home. Sunday has come all too quickly, and now the fun must end…Boo Hoo! It has been fun but it has also been somewhat exhausting! Yesterday was a great day, though jam packed with things to be doing! Picking up from yesterdays post, we headed out last night to the theatre. When we arrived, we had a quick look around and mingled in the foyer with everyone else. I introduced James to the concept of ordering your interval drinks prior to the show, which is an old tradition in London theatres. Basically you pay for your drinks prior, give them your name and when the interval begins, you come out to the foyer. There on a shelf is a whole row of drinks with little tickets attached to them. It’s an honour system, and I have never had anyone swipe my drink before. It still works in 2009 which is fabulous. Anyway…best not get ahead of myself…

Armed with a bag of Fruit Pastilles (candy) and our program we headed into the Dress Circle of the Comedy Theatre. The theatre dates from around 1850 or so, and is quite small. We took our seats and marveled at the set on the stage. This was a re-worked version of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical of Sunset Boulevard. It had mixed reviews when it opened in the 1990’s, and ran for about 3 years in the UK and about 3 years in the US and then disappeared. It was revived last year with a newly orchestrated score and a leaner production. I had never seen the original so I can’t really comment on the changes, but this show was really excellent. The leading lady was off sick all this last week, so her understudy was performing. She did a very good job considering and it didn’t detract from the performance at all. A great show!

We rushed out of the theatre at 10:10pm and headed on our way to dinner. Having never been to Langans Brassiere before, I wasn’t really sure how to get there. I had asked the concierge at the hotel for directions. Well, he sent us in totally the wrong direction, so it took us a little while to get there. But get there we did, and we arrived in the nick of time for our 10:30pm reservation. Langans was wonderful. We both had Spinach Soufflé with Anchovy Sauce to start, and the James had Bangers and Mash, a British specialty, while I had the Fillet Steak with green peppercorn butter. Yes, we had a bottle of wine too….surprise! We kept our eyes open for famous people, but alas there was not a Spice Girl in sight…….heading out at 11:50pm we leapt into a taxi and returned back to the hotel and collapsed into bed at 12.30pm, which, considering the clocks went forward in England today was really 1.30pm. Yikes! Thank heavens for packing earlier!

I have to admit that this morning came all too quickly. We were up at 6:45am and showered, checked out, and in a taxi to Victoria station. The Gatwick Express train at 7:45am delivered us to Gatwick airport at 8:!5am where a holy dragon from Delta Airlines informed us that our preselected seats from 3 months ago had been reassigned to someone else. Now, I can put up with a lot of things, but I have a short fuse with the airlines. Having been shunted into the middle section of the plane from our window and aisle seat was not good for my spirits. Still, realizing that dealing with these people is often one of the world’s most futile past times, we just left it at that and headed for coffee, duty free, newspapers and ultimately our gate. On board and on our way at 10.45am!

The flight? Well it was what you expect really. It’s Delta. Ever moving down-market with their service levels, paid for by us as the public buying tickets, with not a hint of performance related pay for the people who work their flights. If there were, then they would all be penniless by now…..’nuff said, methinks…. I managed to get through some of my images on the plane and will continue to work on those tomorrow, hopefully for a print deadline of around Wednesday of this week, if not before. I hope I have enough!

So now we are back home again! Cats are all well, we are unpacked, laundry is in, British grocery shopping is put away, James has sorted the mail, and I have just spent the last two hours cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming and washing floors. Now it’s time to relax! A martini is calling followed by the ultimate treat……Dancing with the Stars from last week! Yay!

Thanks for keeping up with the blog and for all your messages and comments! We will see you all this week!

Big love,
D&J