As I promised the last day I blogged we were headed off to dip our toes into the property pool in France last week.
In the Dwyer Travel Agenda things seldom work out as planned.
This trip was no exception.
We were to fly to Stanstead and then on to Montpellier, hire a car there then proceed down to a house we had rented for the week in Marseillan, a little fishing town on the Mediterranean.
We boarded the Ryan Air flight in Dublin, hopes and expectations high on Saturday morning. We had plenty of time in hand to brave the queues of Stanstead and make out 3.30 flight to Montpellier.
As soon as we went to go through immigration in Stanstead Sile realised that she had no longer got her passport.
She had put it in the pocket of her jacket which I had put into the overhead locker.
It had to have fallen out in transit.
The Ryan Air people in the airport didn’t hold much hope of us getting it during the 25 minute “turn around” time (they didn’t) and they couldn’t let us continue on our flight without one so we were faced with no chance of proceeding before Monday morning with either a new passport or a found one.
So we had an unexpected 48 hours in London.
I was I confess all for going home.
Sile was the one who decided that we should tough it out.
We bought a copy of the “Time Out” London guide in the bookshop, booked into a hotel in Bayswater (all London districts have a certain raffish sound) and headed, reluctantly into the huge smoke.

It wasn’t too bad at all.

The hotel, The Garden Court Hotel in Kensington Gardens was clean, welcoming and sympathetic to our plight, and (unusually for London) included a buffet breakfast in the reasonable charge of £46 per person per night.
We ate very well, again thanks to “Time Out” in a place called the Cow Dining Room in Westbourne Park. I had the very best Seakale(unexpectedly but very successfully served with Chanterelles) that I have eaten since I had cooked them myself in Snaffles.

Round One to London.

Unfortunately my cousin Vicki and her husband Rhod were in the states (as we later discovered) so we were left to our own devices on the Sunday.
I had a memory of Mary Boydell telling me that there was an excellent glass collection of glass in the Victoria and Albert.
Here was an excellent opportunity to find out.

There is.
Round Two to London.

Here are a few of the delights that I photographed there

These beauties from Persia were assumed by
the Victorians to have been used by the daughters
of the Shah to gather their tears. They do have a
certain long necked and very feminine mystery to
them that makes that thought understandable.
Nowadays they are thought to have been bottles
from which to sprinkle perfume into rooms.

I miss the Victorian idea.

There were of course numerous examples of wine
and beer glasses from 17th and 18th century England,
beautiful and simple enough to make my pulses race

Some good examples of both Waterford and Cork Glass

And some wonderful modern pieces

Including this witty piece called; Half Full or Half Empty?

I loved the stained glass

This was by one of the Pre-Raphaelites
(I should have made notes!)

But the lovely thing about the V and A was that all
of the details were beautiful, I got a quick glance
into a reading room

And through a window into the garden

And all this for free!
On the way out of the Museum (We decided that to
do one section well was enough) we passed by
the textiles section

This beautiful tapestry I am sure I have seen used for
the cover of a book somewhere.
And I also took a shot of the model of the façade of
the Cathedral in Compostella to give to our friend Finola
as a “Scallop Shell” for the pilgrimage she is taking at Easter

Then it was on for a flying visit to the Tate, again free.

I thought the Alison Lapper sculpture looked great on
Tralfalgar Square (as did the bird on her knee)

This time as well we knew that there were two
artists we wanted to see a “live” picture of.

Piero Della Francesca,

I had too see his “Baptism of Christ” having loved so
many of his pictures when I was in Tuscany

And this particular Vermeer,
Lady with a Balance, is just one of my
all time favourites.

After all this culture we headed to the cinema and finally caught up with Brokeback Mountain, as yet unseen in Waterford, which we loved.

The following morning we queued in the Irish passport office (opposite Harrods) for a passport for Sile, which she didn’t need at the end as Ryan Air did eventually manage to find the other one, and to sell us new tickets to Montpellier (for another £360) and disgraced themselves by demanding a “finders fee” of £5 for the passport.
So 48 hours later we were on our way.
But London, to give it its due, had turned up trumps.