Week 3

Another surprisingly eventful week!

Our Christmas present from daughter number 1 was a reservation for afternoon tea at the Swan at The Globe in London.

The Globe Theatre sits rather out of sync on the Thames, surrounded by the 1970's architectural concrete ugliness of the South Bank Centre and swamped by its near neighbours,  the Tate Modern and the London Eye. Here in the centre of London is a little piece of olde England, and next to the Globe is the Swan, Will Shakespeare’s favourite watering hole.

The Globe was resurrected by the American actor and director Sam Wannamaker who was determined to recreate Shakespeare’s original theatre in an authentic state and setting.   Constructed of English Oak and with the only permitted thatched roof in London since the Great Fire of 1666, The Globe’s one concession to modern design, apart from a concrete floor, is the inclusion of fire sprinklers!  The stage and the auditorium are exactly as they would have been in Shakespeare’s day.

On the guided tour you find yourself hearing the answers to all those unasked questions; where did the audience go to toilet - they didn’t (a ditch in front of the stage was multi-purpose); what did the place smell like – absolutely awful, and why did most of Shakespeare’s characters repeat their lines three times – once for the plebs at the front, secondly, and more eloquently, for the middle-classes in the seats beyond, and thirdly, highly refined, for the aristocrats sat at the back of the stage heckling the actors.

Next door, in elegant, decidedly un-Elizabethan surroundings of an upstairs dining room at the Swan we were presented with a platter of bite sized cakes and pastries, delicate finger rolls of smoked salmon and cucumber, and for the male of the species, a Gentleman’s Tea complete with English bangers, macaroni cheese and that other great British tradition, a fish finger sandwich.

Now I know where Will got his inspiration from!

Following our tea we met up with daughter no 1 (who conveniently forgot to handover the cash for said Christmas present) before we headed back to our hotel for the night. In our continued efforts to see as much of the UK as we can, we’d decided to stay out of London  on Richmond Hill, where on a winter-wonderland special offer we had been upgraded to a superior room  and a loo with a view! 

The Thames as seen from bathroom window

Then it was back home to the trauma of AS level exams, snow and travel chaos.