Classic English: London Holidays 2024, Part 2

A big motivation for this trip was to experience a classic English Christmas, thereby checking off several things on Lisa’s To Do list. (Which is like a Bucket List, but without the drama.) Accordingly, we needed to see a panto, eat goose, pop a cracker, and enjoy a just-flamed pudding.

We had a bit of an adventure getting to the Greenwich Theatre for our panto — we took the DLR! This is a kind of a train that goes from various places in central London out to . . . the suburbs? (Kind of. Sort of.) a bus based on a map that showed us getting out at a park, crossing it, and being only a couple of blocks from where we needed to go. No problem with the bus, off we popped, alighting at Island Gardens, right on the Thames. Lovely place. Really. But on the opposite bank of the river from Greenwich.

Our hearts sank. Had google been day drinking that early? Look for a bridge. Nope. Look for a boat or taxi service. Not there. Then we spot a metal-topped round building and go have a look. Hooray! It’s the Greenwich Foot Tunnel! Sure enough, that was the walkway our map indicated.

This very long tunnel is not for the weak of knee — there are hundreds of stairs and although there are elevators at each end, it’s not guaranteed they both will be in operation. (We, for example, had to walk down the stairs, but were able to take the elevator up on the other side.) Annoyingly, lots of people abandoned their rented scooters on the stairs. It was, nonetheless, kind of awesome.

Having a bit of time to kill, we wandered Greenwich, home of the famous “Mean Time.” Paraphrasing from Wikipedia: As the United Kingdom developed into an advanced maritime nation, British mariners kept at least one chronometer on GMT to calculate their longitude from the Greenwich meridian, which was considered to have longitude zero degrees. While synchronization of the chronometer on GMT did not affect shipboard time, which was still solar time, this practice led to GMT being used worldwide as a standard time independent of location. However, the daily rotation of the Earth is irregular and has a slowing trend; therefore atomic clocks constitute a much more stable timebase. On 1 January 1972, GMT as the international civil time standard was superseded by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), maintained by an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world. The Shepherd Gate Clock (below) at the gates of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich is permanently kept on Greenwich Mean Time.

That was interesting, but we were actually there to see the Monument for a Dead Parrot. Located on the grounds of student housing, this sculpture is pure silliness. Not much is known about it except that it is the work of Jon Reardon and was installed in 2009. The bird is a Yellow Crested Cockatoo, which is in the Parrot family. Presumably, the monument refers to the famous Monty Python sketch, but that is not confirmed.

We booked Dick Whittington and His Cat for our panto (link goes to a proper review). The tale itself — intrepid country boy makes his way to London and rises to fame — was fun, and we felt we could let our inner children out to play for a few hours. It was glorious! The children booed the Rat King, ate ice cream at intermission, and tidily deposited their detritus in proper receptacles. The panto itself was a rock n roll time-traveling adventure full of laughter and bright colors. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Smashing!

(A note about pantos, formally called pantomimes: nowadays they are almost entirely children’s shows and based on children’s stories, like Peter Pan. But their roots go back to the 18th century and the commedia dell’arte, the Italian tradition of improvisational theater. The stories of the commedia dell’arte had many stock characters in them such as clowns and jesters and always had a villain. Traditional plots were woven into fairy stories and folk tales, then gradually evolved into the dozen or so familiar stories of the panto repertoire that are still used today. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pantos changed to accommodate the popularity of music-hall entertainers, adding more comedy and music.) 

We enjoyed a late lunch at Davy’s Wine Vaults, which we highly recommend. They were cool about allowing us to order in waves — appetizers, then mains — which was great because we had a good chunk of time to fill. . .

Before meeting right by the London Eye to go on a bus tour of the Holiday Lights. Apparently London has been doing Christmas lights since 1954, although they switched to re-usable (low energy) LED lights several years ago. Angels soared above assemble above Regent Street, contemporary installations lit up King’s Cross and Coal Drops Yard, and iconic Chanel perfume images floated above Bond Street. It was fun, although the level of traffic — foot and vehicular — made for slow going. We don’t think we’d do it again, although walking might be fun.