London, part 2

Current work: Capri medical romance
Listening to: Daughtry
Reading: (next on TBR)

On Saturday, Fi and I went to the William Morris gallery in the Water House, Walthamstow. (Morris lived here from 1848-1856.)

The house itself is beautiful, and as for the contents… Fabulous. I particularly loved the Burne-Jones stained glass. (Please indulge me with the pics - much of my stained glass has been removed from the Venice book, sob – and EBJ is my favourite artist of all time.)

This is his Praising Angel, originally made for the house of George McCulloch in Kensington. The design was also used in the windows at Salisbury Cathedral and churches in Painswick (Glos) and Montreal.

And this is his St Cecilia.

And a detail I really liked.

This is a lock of William Morris’s hair, in a silver and glass case, which was cut after his death in 1896 by his friend John Carruthers.

These gorgeous fish tiles were designed by William de Morgan.

These two Minstrels windows were designed by Morris for The Grange, Fulham. (And because they use of glass roundels is pretty much how windows are in Venice… There was a little whimper from me, here, for the slash and burn job I did on my windows in the book.)

I also really liked this peacock feather plate (designed by one of the Faulkner sisters – nobody’s sure if it was Kate or Lucy). I can imagine this done in glass - would be amazing and you'd get the blues and the greens.

Back to Fi's for lunch (her risotto is just fabulous), much talking, and then off to Piccadilly Circus for dinner before going to the Gielgud Theatre

to see 'Yes, Prime Minister'.

The theatre is absolutely beautiful - here are the ceiling and the circle (as seen from our seat in the stalls, four rows from the front).

Henry Goodman was absolutely brilliant as Sir Humphrey (came across as terribly corrupt and manipulative, unlike lovely Nigel Hawthorne in the TV series - scary to think that was 24 years ago!); David Haig was an excellent Jim Hacker; and I thought Jonathan Slinger was superb as Bernard (came across as cleverer and much more moral than Derek Fowlds's original). Emily Joyce was very good, too, as the spin doctor. Very, very contemporary - brought in a lot of the issues in politics today and updated them from the original series. We were laughing out loud in quite a few places. Superb writing - and a real treat.