Friday, 29 December, 2017
Right after Christmas, it’s nice to have some sensible eating days before the New Year’s Eve celebrations – whatever they may be this year. So we’ve been having our customary plates of raw vegetables, cheese, and hummus. This is a staple throughout the year. One of us will think of having dinner and proclaim it to be raw veggie day, and it’s always a roaring hit even it occasionally becomes dinner for company! (We snuck in some pakora from Ambala, lest we feel too healthy!)
Yesterday, Thursday, Krish announced that we should go to the Museum of London to see the performance of The Christmas Carol. It sounded like a great idea. The sun had finally started to shine, no rain in sight, and it’s one bus the whole way.
There’s only one lane in each direction but we were in the doldrums and things moved along pretty quickly. We went from the flat land of Dalston towards the increasingly high rise area around the Barbican. As you get closer, there’s one of my favourite views from the top deck of a bus (third photo)
The Barbican, opened in 1982 to replace slum dwellings, is brutalist architecture at its best, having been voted London’s ugliest building. Its mass is pretty stunning. It actually is on multi levels with numerous entrances from ground level, with staircases and walkways to join the whole. There is a theatre and exhibit spaces, and various community areas contained within this estate. Walking around here can get very interesting as long as you don’t get lost along the way. From a distance there are two tall buildings, from close up it’s a more practical hive of flats.
But today we weren’t lingering. Maybe I’ll take more photos another day.
The museum of London has just been enlarged. It tells the story of the capital from its first settlers to modern times. There are sites in east-central London, Docklands and in Hackney. We picked up tickets for the performance at the front desk and then went to see the new exhibition in the basement, called The City is Ours: “The future is urban. Confront global challenges, explore local innovations.” The exhibit looked at different urban areas and their populations. I was surprised to learn that only 6% of the earth is urban, yet a large percentage live in these areas. It was fun to see that Toronto was featured as an example city. Wonder what that’s about!
We wandered around the lovely gift shop. I always want to buy everything and usually walk out with nothing, but I took some mental notes this time so you never know.
We also walked around the new wing a little and looked at some of the exhibits. A few photos for you.
There was also an entire cell from Wellclose Prison, which was near the Tower of London. It doesn’t translate very well in a photo but the walls were fascinating, covered with graffiti by the prisoners.
The Christmas Carol performance was starting so we went in. Each adult had a folding seat and the children sat in the centre in front of the ‘stage.’ It was quite clever. Two actors recited bits of the story, with appropriate historical annotations, and acted other bits, drawing the audience in with questions and asking them to take a part in the ‘play.’ The main message, other than the obivous, was that there were many more poor than rich people in our cities and the circumstances of your birth will shape the way you live.
But all was merry, other than when one poor little boy had to be quickly pulled from the circle to be spectacularly sick on the stairs. The actors really did manage to contain the whole into a single hour, not really missing the important parts of the story. There were even some original songs!
As silly as it was, it was a lot of fun and now I don’t feel I have competely missed panto season!
On the way out, there was more history.
We meant to eat something but ran out of steam, so shopped for a few things to eat, and back to Hackney!
