London & the "other" Marble Arch

My daily commute to Croydon didn’t seem to be having a great deal of impact on my client. In fact, I probably could’ve stood naked on the water cooler and sang “Smoke on the Water” in Flemish without causing a stir. So, Christine and I decided that I should finish up whatever work absolutely had to be done there in the next few days, and she would see about finding us some plane tickets to Seoul, where our friend Brenda had lined up some work and some digs for us.

We had a nice final dinner with Lucinda, signed her bulging guest book, and said farewell to Balham, without having once taken in the rather upscale-looking pizza place on the corner. Christine had lined up our next couch-surfing destination: the London apartment of her dance buddy Amari’s parents, in Marble Arch. Now, my only association with the name “Marble Arch” was the seedy hotel on Richards Street where I used to play drums in a blues/R&B cover band way back when. It was one of the more lucrative gigs for bands in our, um, “echelon”, mostly because the place was absolutely packed on “welfare Wednesdays”. People would cash their cheques at the bar, and the more frugal drinkers would have enough left over at the end of the night to take a cab home. The rest are probably still there.

Anyway, the reaction we got when we told people we’d be staying in Marble Arch the next three nights suggested that we might be seeing a better sort of clientele than the Richards street drunks of yore. What an understatement. The suite we were given keys to was massive, beautifully and artistically decorated, and had sweeping views in all directions. We knew we were in for something unexpected when the elevator opened into the suite itself, but we still wandered around slack-jawed for over an hour. We had been given the master bedroom, which was larger than many London flats. The ensuite bathroom looked like a particularly upscale spa. Incredible.

We finally got to meet Amari’s kind and wonderful father the following evening, as he made a brief stop between work and sleep. He made us feel extremely welcome and comfortable – almost as if he was the houseguest. We slept like babies there, partly because it was so incredibly quiet in amongst all that plushness, but mostly because the enormous bed made you feel like you were in your very first grown-up bed, where the corners took some time to get to.

The next day, Christine took a Contemporary Ballet class at Pineapple Studios then roamed around the Natural History Museum for the afternoon. We had cheekily agreed to meet up at Trafalgar Square, and sure enough, we found one another in short order and strolled off for a pub dinner near Leicester Square. Our after-dinner walk was filled with endless romantic-movie London moments. Hearing some sprightly chamber music, we walked up to the closed doors of St-Martins-in-the-Fields just as the music ended and two ushers pulled the huge doors open right in front of us, engulfing us in warm light and a wave of energetic applause. We stood in the doorway, looking straight up the aisle, and watched the smiling musicians take their bows. It felt like it had all been staged just for us.

Walking towards the Thames, we went through part of the City of Westminster and passed by several beautiful old pubs, one of which was gently emitting “Tears of a Clown”. We rounded a corner and were suddenly confronted by a looming Big Ben, looking utterly magnificent with all its lights on. It was five to ten, so we waited for the famous chime. There was a dramatic pause after the expected two-part melody, then the deep thunder of the huge bell (“Big Ben” itself) just sort of emerged into the night, the effect not becoming any less awesome over the course of its ten slow BONGs.

The banks of the Thames were alive with lights and people, including a group of non-English speaking women who seemed to be involved in the late stages of a meandering stagette. We kept bumping into them, and helped one lost pair find the rest of their pod before we crossed the river again and climbed onto the busy tube to make our way back to our temporary palace and our grown-up-grown-up bed.