Started off with tea & cake at the Café de Pierre. My cake was rather good, new to me, a sort of apple tart, possibly a member of the fangipane family. In fact the café was rather good altogether, although the background music was a little loud. I was also rather struck by the casual, not to say shabby, dress of most of the tourists, both inside or on the street. There was the odd person smartly turned out, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
Then off to Apsley House, free to us given the membership we had bought, as it happens, at Walmer Castle, the place where Wellington died (see reference 1). My first visit since my undocumented visit with FIL, which must now be some years ago. BH's first visit for a lot longer than that.
The dining room had been cleared up after the banquet of the night before. BH was rather shocked to find silk flowers on the table, but the trusty explained that most of the real flowers used for the banquet had been carried off and replaced with the regular silk. But the two big displays, one at each end of the table were the real thing. He also explained that although the banquet was laid on by outside caterers, rather than by the Palace or by the Heritage people, he himself had been there with his vacuum cleaner at 0800, clearing up the royal crumbs - but failed to comment on my suggestion that he should get each crumb encased in a little block of clear plastic and sold off to souvenir hunters.
We rather liked the way that the house was presented, fairly much as it was in the first Duke's day, with no special effort having been made, apart from the banquet, for the bicentenary. There was lots of interesting stuff. Collections of field marshalls' batons and of swords, these last mainly from India. But they did make one wonder how many of the general officers in the portraits had the wrist and arm needed to work such things as I would have thought that a good deal of regular exercise would be needed to keep a sword arm battle ready, particularly if the sword in question was a whacking great sabre. See, for example, Herbig's portrait of Frederick William III.
Quite a lot of the royals illustrated looked like rather rum specimens. That by Gérard of Louis XVIII made one wonder, at first, why one spent all that treasure & blood getting rid of Napoleon, but then one remembered that in those days it was royals or revolution on the continent, none of the sensible middle ground which we managed to carve out on our island. We did not get to find out why a white hand on the end of a short stick was part of his regalia.
Quite a lot of quite good paintings, with plenty of old masters around. Unusually good for a stately home.
We quite understood why the large model of an Egyptian temple did not much impress the former empress Josephine when it was given to her by Napoleon as a present to mark the occasion of their divorce.
Out to the Hard Rock for lunch to find that we would have to wait for half an hour or more to sit in what used to be considerable noise, so repaired to the nearby Rose and Crown where we had a perfectly respectable caesar salad for about a tenner each. A good invention, which places like pubs can turn out reasonably reliably; not much excuse for getting it wrong. The Rose and Crown, which we were using as a restaurant, was quite a decent specimen of an old style London pub. Plenty of character in the furnishings, both of the wooden and two legged varieties. Including, for example a very large piece of fried fish being shared by some Dutchmen and a party of older gentlemen out for a walk - quite a long walk by the sound of it. But despite their big talk, they only managed a pint apiece during the course of our luncheon.
And so onto the rose gardens at the south eastern corner of Hyde Park which were in splendid form, could not have been better. BH pleased that they were keen on the sisyrinchium striatum of which we have quite a few in our own garden but rather irritated by the smell of someone's cigar, a cigar which I had, unusually, failed to notice. Usually I can smell the things from a long way away.
Unable to find the bus stop to get us back to Vauxhall - despite there being at least three buses which worked the route - so got a bus back to Victoria. Where we actually got to ride in a Southern Trains ten coacher. And saw some aeroplanes flying down to Heathrow as we rode.
Back home, I made up for missing the cigar by a hallucination while watching ITV3. Someone was lighting a fag on the box, a lighting up which induced in me, for a second or so, a strong hallucination of both the taste and smell of a freshly lighted cigarette. Something that I have not experienced for real for many years now. And I don't recall ever having had a hallucination of quite this sort ever before.
PS: the Heritage people offer a handy public catalogue of their paintings. See https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/apsleyhouseartcatalogue.pdf.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/walmer.html.
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