Greenwich Naval Academy as viewed from the Planetarium.
I’m massively behind with blogging which only means one thing: I’m having a fabulous time and enjoying every minute of it! So I’ll just be blogging behind the times for a while. It’s actually kind of fun to relive this week because so much happened the next week, I never had time to process it all!
The next day – Monday – I walked to The Ivy restaurant to meet Faber’s Managing Director, Stephen Page, for lunch. Nice stroll through Drury Lane and Covent Garden but at the last minute I got lost and hailed a cab for a very short ride – it was the only way to sort things out and get there on time. The Ivy’s a wonderful place and popular with the theater and publishing crowd. Conversation with Stephen was wide-ranging – though a hamster named Humphrey was brought up more than once. Frank spent the day visiting friends he knew in Zambia when he taught there too many years ago to mention!
After lunch, I returned to Faber and Laura Smythe and I headed out to sign books at the incomparable Harrod’s department store and the gigantic Waterstone’s in Piccadilly.
Signing books at Harrod's
That evening, Frank and I went to see Agatha Christie’s venerable play, The Mousetrap, which has been running continuously since 1952. It’s a bit creaky, as I expected, but we loved it anyway and also the St. Martin’s Theatre … which happens to be across the street from The Ivy!
After the theater, Frank and I decided to give it a try and actually got in. (Apparently this was unusual as my Faber friends later couldn’t believe I’d gone to lunch and dinner at The Ivy. Dumb luck or good looks?)
Buckingham Palace was our destination on Tuesday – the only day it really rained on our entire trip so far. We toured the art gallery first, then the horses, carriages and cars, then the state rooms in the Palace itself. Everything is opulent, gilded and grand, of course, because it’s a palace!
The palace also has huge grounds and gardens which we had to walk through to exit – pouring rain and mud-puddly. Soaked to the skin, we managed to get a cab back to the hotel and dry out in time for the real highlight of London – champagne with the Faber children’s team – people I work with all the time but rarely talk to or see. A very attractive group, I’d say, and they turn out beautiful Humphrey books (and The Princess and the Peabodys).
Then some of us went on to a pub in Soho and dinner at a wonderful restaurant Arbutus, where we dined with booksellers including Sarah Walden, buyer for The Book People, John Newman of Newham Books and I also met Amanda Li, who devised all kinds of amazing activities for the UK Humphrey activity book Faber is putting out next year.
It was truly a whirlwind week in London and we were sad to leave so soon … but little did we know what pleasures awaited us in Caterham, Surrey! Wonderful people, parties, helicopter rides, an ancient church, a castle, a trip to Oxford, the Cotswolds, Stratford-upon-Avon, Brighton and FUN-FUN-FUN coming up soon!
I should take this excellent advice from England!
