On John’s list of long-term goals (“bucket list” is too morbid for his taste) “living in one of “the great capitals” for a long stretch” rates very high. Not moving to one necessarily but spending more than just tourism-time there. Paris, New York, London, Rome, somewhere like that. The idea is that he has the barest understanding of what goes on in a place like those for people who live there, and the hints he’s picked up have been tantalizing. Concerts, plays, exhibitions… all sorts of events that are too “small” or too fleeting to make any sort of news in the wider world, but absolutely intriguing if you know about them. Plus, the difference of living in a neighborhood like a resident rather than just a vacation rental customer. Welp, serendipity is a hell of a thing. By definition you can’t plan for it, you just ride the wave when it comes along. When friends of friends needed a pet sitter for several weeks and their usual source – the mutual friends – weren’t available, we were asked to step in. We’d probably have done it in any case, but the fact that they live in central London was a stroke of good fortune.

The details of the sit were straight-forward enough. Their friends (well, our friends too, now) live on a Mews, which is not a thing we really understood before; history aside these days they’re just small streets sandwiched between larger avenues, and they allow for relatively quiet stretches in the midst of all of … everything. It’s a mix of residential and a few businesses, zoning not being so much of a thing in London apparently. They have one elderly pooch, a sweet girl named Molly who doesn’t need much special care, just the usual love and attention, with maybe a few extra, short walks because none of our bladders are like they used to be, eh? She had recently taken ill and had a condition that could make her very wobbly (almost like bad vertigo) but it comes and goes and under (the “new”) normal circumstances she was a snoozer and a sniffer. A good girl, in other words. Their home is a lovely place that could be described as “rambling” only vertically; four stories with a Merry Poppins view from the terraces on the roof – seriously Dick Van Dyke was out there somewhere, racking up overtime.

When the day came we made the almost normal trip for us, Porto in the morning and landing in Stansted airport by lunchtime. One train, the Stansted Express is a direct line from the airport to Liverpool Street Station and runs every 15 minutes all day every day. From there we took a black cab later (we later figured out how it could easily have been a second train, but alas…) and we were walking ourselves up the Mews and into Molly’s abode. Our hosts (who Lisa had met once but John only in Zoom calls to date) instantly made us feel at home and we spent the day settling ourselves in and learning our way about while they went about their normal lives and packed up for their trip to the States. One of their hobbies is tinkering with home automation – they didn’t just hire someone to come in and install a fancy, bespoke system, they’ve been learning how to integrate software with devices that lock and unlock doors, adjust lights, raise and lower blinds and so on. It’s really neat and has John pondering a new hobby, but it also requires knowing what’s-what so many buttons and switches were fiddled with.

Our hosts took us to Moro for dinner. It’s a charming little place in the neighborhood serving — of all things — Moorish cuisine with a Spanish influence. Although it’s an old favorite of theirs, we each tried different things. A tomato soup with fig and cumin, wood roasted turbot tranche with tomato, chickpeas and fried aubergine, charcoal grilled lamb with roast carrot salad, charcoal grilled sea bass, spinach, pine nuts and raisins, and a mixed vegetable mezze made for a filling meal. The flavors were complex, but not overly spicy. It was perfectly delicious; we loved it and will return again. Once we got back to their home we got another round of walkthroughs for care and maintenance, a last stroll of the pooch, and then all heads down for the big shift change on the morrow.

By which we mean our trip to London, natch.

When we were in the midst of planning for our move to Portugal, it could get hectic. Very, very hectic. To the point where more than once we’d ask ourselves just what the hell we were doing, and maybe let’s think this through again. So, to keep ourselves sane (by our standards, ok? no judgment), every now and then we’d revisit our reasons for wanting to move in the first place. As you might remember from our talking about our winter trip to Spain and France, we spent a lot of downtime planning out that “first trip” to other countries, and made a point of putting it early in the calendar so it would feel like something to look forward to. (In retrospect, Braga itself would have been the “something to look forward to”, but we hadn’t been here yet.) The other things we’d daydream about were the spontaneous trips that we didn’t even know about yet, but that we were certain would happen because it would be so much easier to accomplish.

(Again, foreshadowing. It can’t be over-used, can it?)

On many of our trips to cities both abroad and within the US, John would grab the local Time Out or similar publication and check out what was going on in the city that wasn’t big news. When we went to New York a few years ago, Lisa bought John a ticket to “Hamilton” while the original cast was still performing, and that was great. But John found out about a play called “The Woodsman” that is in the running for our favorite theatrical experience ever. It was something wondrous to behold, and it helped give rise to John’s working theory that amazing things are going on all the time, all over the world, and outside of their homes you hear very little about them. (It’s not much of a theory, more of a “no shit, Sherlock”, but still…) Case in point: “Hamilton” was a cultural phenomenon that managed to break through for the world’s attention, but “The Woodsman” was our favorite. On our honeymoon in 2012, we found a theatre housed behind a socialist bookstore in Dublin, a little black box with maybe 100 seats in it; but, we saw Love in the Title and haven’t forgotten about it in the 10 years since. (Although, to peek behind the curtain for a moment, we forgot the name of the play, and there’s been about two hours between those last two sentences as John went down the rabbit hole to find it. No, you probably wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t name it, but once he starts looking…) From events like these we (and John in particular) have latched on to the idea that if we had easier access to more places, and more time to go with it, we’d take advantage of interesting cultural events that would have passed us by in the past.

So, back in March, John had a review cross his feed from The Guardian newspaper about an exhibition at The British Museum titled “The world of Stonehenge” that was rapturous in its descriptions. Interesting, he thought. Then, the very next day, he say a different review for an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (and let’s not be coy here, he had no idea where that museum was until he looked it up) presenting Camille Pissarro in the context of his relationships with the Impressionists. That was very interesting, he thought. And then, no more than a couple of days later, he read about A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery and it was apparently really excellent. Once he confirmed that Whitechapel is, in fact, in England, this sealed the deal. He presented all of this to Lisa, and with no reluctance at all they decided to make a weekend out of it. And so it was that on very little notice we decided to make a quick trip to London, with a day trip to Oxford(!), to take in highlights of the artistic season. And to top it all off, we decided to add a delay for the National Gallery since we hadn’t been the last time we were there, and with no notice whatsoever we discovered an exhibition of Raphael’s work, giving us all the omen we needed, if we needed one, that this trip was a good idea. And so, coming up next, our long weekend in and around London.