We were off to the Royal Albert Hall this morning (actually to the Elgar Room there, a small studio theater) for coffee and classical music. We heard the brilliant young pianist Jean-Paul Gasparian playing difficult bits from Debussy, Mozart, and Chopin on a bright red piano formerly played by Elton John. Between you, me, and the piano, I think Jean-Paul is a better pianist. He had brilliant technique and great expression, and played for an hour or so from memory with no music to refer to. Of course, he just said it was Chopin he was playing, he might have been making it up as he went along.

From there we crossed the road to Hyde Park and wandered along the the Flower Walk.

There were song thrushes in the bushes chirping musically.

Bird song sounds great until you realize what they are actually saying is shit like “You kids get off my lawn! off my lawn! off my lawn!” and “Wannafuck? Wannafuck? Wannafuck?” Except for the swans of course, who are mute except for the occasional hiss which is actually encrypted communications regarding plans for a military coup.

Princess Diana is dead, and while she may not be as dead as Prince memorial-is-my-middle-name Albert, Hyde Park does contain the Princess Di Memorial Fountain, the Princess Di Memorial playground, and an exhibition of Princess Di’s clothes at Kensington Palace. Clothes? Seriously? The best thing they can find to say about the poor woman is that she wore nice clothes?

Outside Kensington Palace there is a statue of Queen Victoria showing what she looked like before she was dead.

I just discovered that the Greek version of the Roman goddess Victoria was called Nike, which would make Queen Victoria the patron saint of running shoes. No wonder Albert died young.

After lunch we headed over to Nick and Margaret’s house, and the four of us headed into darkest Hampstead to visit the former abode of the poet Keats. Keats was the author of Ode to a Nightingale, a poem which did for ornithology what The Compleat Angler did for bicycling.

There was a certain amount of hat wearing.

When he lived there, Keats was broke, unappreciated as a poet, and fell in love with the girl next door, but could not afford to marry her. When he first met her, with true poetic inspiration he wrote, “…her nostrils are fine though a little painful…” Keats contracted tuberculosis, moved to Italy for the warmer climate, but after a year or so of coughing up blood he died at the age of twenty-five. At this point we have a story tailor made for Victorian sentimentality – unrequited love, separated lovers, and a lingering death. All that was required to complete the tragedy was for Keats to be a poetic genius, so of course he became one posthumously.

I’m happy to say that the lady with the painful nostrils eschewed Victorian sentimentality, and instead of pining away or committing herself to a nunnery, she married someone else and lived happily every after.

Keats House is a fully interactive Keats experience. Not only do they have a picture of Keats sitting in a chair reading a book…

… they also have chairs that you can sit in as well…

… and they even have books to read.

This is the “melancholy border” in the garden, in case reading Keats did not make you melancholy enough.

However, if you are feeling too melancholy, they have nightingale stuffies in the gift shop. Give one a squeeze and it sings in an RSPB approved manner that complex nightingale song, “It’s dark! it’s dark! wannafuck? wannafuck?”