The Angelic Bread

Wednesday is an antiques market day in Camden Passage and Terrace in Islington.  Mostly small stallholders, but the antique shops are only open a couple of days a week, and this is one of them.  Camden Passage is very close to us - on our way from the flat to the nearest tube station. 

Browsing is extremely hard work, so we stopped for lunch at The Elk in the Woods http://www.the-elk-in-the-woods.co.uk/. (CR:  I had a cup of chorizo and pancetta stew and chips.)  They serve Monmouth Coffee - the very most fabulous.

Then we walked off lunch by going back the other direction along Upper Street toward the Highbury and Islington tube stop, where poshness comes to an abrupt halt.  I have noticed that you can often tell when you are approaching a tube entrance, not because the sign hoves into view, but because you will pass a grotty but delicious-smelling kebab shop.  Before we came to the kebab shop, we saw other things.

Highbury and Islington is on the Victoria line, which will helpfully deposit a person back in poshness, in Piccadilly.  We had a tea break at the Royal Academy and dinner in Soho (CR:  beef ho fun and Singapore noodles and gai lan in garlic, at the same restaurant we have been going to ever since we started coming to London - the name of which I do not remember but which I can find in a trice once I have exited the Leicester Square station). 

We just got back to the flat from dinner at the Cafe in the Crypt at St. Martin in the Fields. When I was first introduced to the crypt, it was dark and, well, crypt-esque, except that there was cake.  But a few years ago, it was renovated and now it looks like this:

We dined beside, and nearly on top of, these ladies:

I'm not sure how Rebecca and Martha feel about suddenly being in the middle of restaurant.  However, if I were a ghost, I might like it.  There are jazz concerts in the crypt every Wednesday night. 

There was this, which was not so much a wodge, as an enormous blorp of bread and butter pudding with custard:

Upstairs to the sanctuary for a concert that included choral music sung by young women from a local Catholic prep school, and works by Mozart and Gounod.  The choir sang, among other things, Panis Angelicus by Franck - always a tiny bit of a weeper.  They were marvellous.

During the interval, the woman seated behind us made a phone call home.  After a long list of questions, admonitions, and instructions, covering pizza, homework, and varying bedtimes for all the children, she said, "Is the kitchen tidy?  Have you done the washing up from yesterday?  Do you remember I asked you and you said that you would do it?  Will you go do it now, please?  If I come home and it isn't done, I shall stab you in the chest with a carving knife.  Your father wants to speak to you."  And then the man took the phone and said, "Don't pay any attention to the crazy lady."