The Day Long of This Troublous Life

 One of the two escalators down to the Northern line that we take every day.  It makes me think of The Accidental Tourist every time.

 A shopping day today.  It's cold and wet - really feels like January, so all the other tourists seem to be somewhere else. 

 Lunch after watching a little busking, at Le Pain Quotidien, which has opened a branch at Covent Garden. (CR: Caribbean soup and ham tartine for me, chicken and mushroom pie for JY.)

 We split up for shopping, after procuring two Manchester United scarves for fans of our acquaintance, from the Jubilee Market. 

 See?  Cold and wet.  And pretty empty.  I suppose that sensible people were somewhere warm having some tea and wodges of cake.

This is the view from the steps of St. Martins, where we met up again for choral evensong.  A small choir of about 12, but a very big sound. 

A wodge of strudel at a cafe off Leicester Square before going on to the starriest performance for which we have tickets:  The Children's Hour with  Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth Moss, and Keira Knightley.  You can tell it's a starry production because they had bag checks before they took the tickets, and there were a lot of stern warnings about using cameras.  As if I would ever.  Pehrleese. 
http://www.thecomedytheatre.co.uk/index.htm
A lot of Americans in the audience, and a lot of debate and snarking on the steps of the theatre after the performance.  The girl who played Mary, the one who tells the lie that propels the rest of the action, was a real standout:  You hate her from the very beginning.  She's evil, but believable. 

Dinner after the show in Chinatown.  Strings of lanterns are up across the streets in preparation for Chinese New Year.  (CR:  mah po tofu, hot pot of noodles with crab, Singapore style noodles - everything steaming and/or spicy because, did I mention, it's cold and wet outside?) 

On the way home, at the Euston station platform, we were accosted by a young man who asked if we were Portuguese.  Did we speak English?  And then he had a lot to say, loudly and generally to those on the platform, about the eventual downfall of the monied classes and either the rise or fall of the Arab nations (it's difficult to say which).  He told everyone that he had learned his style of declamation from watching Hitler.  Mostly I watched him back closer and closer to the platform edge, well over the yellow line.  I was wondering what would happen if he fell in.  You could tell most of the people exposed to this event were English, because everyone politely pretended it was not happening. 

Travel is so interesting.  You meet so many people.