Somerset House and Tandoori Chicken
As some of you may know, I am in London through November 3 for an arbitration pending before the London Court of International arbitration. The proceedings start Monday.
Our team all flew over to London to arrive today in time for a 4 p.m. kickoff meeting at our London office with our client and most of our witnesses, and the London staff who are helping us get everything done. My flight landed at 7 a.m. this morning and I got to my hotel door by 8:30. I was several hours too early for my room.
So, I set off into the drizzle with my fashionable black nylon topcoat buttoned up tight and my brief case slung over myself like a messenger bag. I was in search of a Starbucks, to while away the hours until the hotel called to say I could check in. I knew there was a Starbucks on Leicester Square -- I'd been there before -- but I was hoping to find one closer to the office than that.
So on the way, I found myself walking through Somerset House -- a huge Georgian palace built right on the Thames, a stone's through from our London office. It is where the Royal Barge used to disembark and is where George III lived -- the Mad King from whom we won our independence. It is a massive collection of buildings that surround a very 18th century stone courtyard and which connects the Strand to the River Thames. The public is permitted to walk through the courtyard from the Strand to the Waterloo Bridge.
There is an art museum in the Somerset somewhere, and a stairway made famous by Admiral Nelson, and nowadays there are a number of bureaucratic offices, like the office of marriage licenses and of internal tax, etc., in the buildings. In the winter the courtyard is an ice skating rink, with vendors of all kinds stuffed into the arcade around the cobblestones selling chestnuts and grog and white Christmas lights hung everywhere on the old stones and people whizzing by with fur muffs and long scarves. I remember walking through the skating mayhem a few years ago when I was here in December.
But when I walked through it at 8:30 this Saturday morning, it was completely deserted and totally silent. My footsteps across the cobblestones echoed loudly. The courtyard glistened in the rain -- the massive arches through which the horse and carriages used to pass were solid and glowed slightly in the grey morning light. You could barely hear the traffice from modern London outside on the Strand. The palace extended down three
of four stories below the courtyard, and you could peer down through open air stairs and see the "below stairs" areas where scullery maids and boot blacks presumably used to work. You could almost hear the ghosts of the horses who had clattered into the courtyard in full royal regalia to deposit Admiral Nelson, or perhaps King George III's carriage, or the luggage of the visiting royalty of France, or something. You could almost see the contingent of servants and women lined up in front of the main door to welcome them. You could almost hear the string quartet playing minuets on the back terrace facing the Thames. You could imagine Handel conducting the first performance of the Water Music and Music for the Fireworks from the terrace on the river -- to celebrate the King's jubilee in the height of summer. I learned later that this Somerset House was build on the the site of the palace where Elizabeth I grew up as a princess, never expecting to inherit the throne. It was very still. A ragged Union Jack flew above the top floor. I felt as if I'd walked onto the set of a Merchant & Ivory movie. The only odd thing was you could see the big jumbo jets on the south side of the river making their final approach to Heathrow -- a position I myself had been in only a few hours before. I sat for a long time in the courtyard at Somerset House, thinking how funny that this spot used to be the seat of power for the Western World -- the most privileged and protected spot on earth -- and now I was sitting there all by myself in the rain with my briefcase and my coat, completely unexpected and anonymous.
Later, after we were done with our afternoon meeting, we took the client and the witnesses out to Indian food. By this time it was dark and the rain was pelting down. We all sat at a long table in an Indian restaurant north of Charing Cross Road and consumed huge amounts of Indian beer and Tandoori chicken. Our boss regaled us with stories of his childhood washing dishes (or something similar) in his parent's family-run Greek restaurant. The client told stories about racing Porsches outside of Houston. We all giggled helplessly, perhaps overcome by our long flights earlier that day and also the influence of our mirthful and jolly Indian hosts. We stumbled out a few hours later into the still driving rain, and toddled back to our hotel, the Waldorf on Aldwych (Danish for "outlying farm."). Somebody paid for the meal, but I'm not sure who.
So we have ten days of rain and silly meals and unexpected historical excursions ahead of us.
There could be worse ways to make a living, I suppose.
posted by Anonymous @ 7:49 PM
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