Queen the Musical

We had our final breakfast at Jumbo's today. It's like our depot cafe in London.

After breakfast we went to try to get into the beer fest, but we hadn't noticed that the first day it was only open to industry people. We were right next to Holland Park (which is where Adina from AbFab likes to say that her house is even though everyone else thinks it's in Shepherd's Bush) so we took a quick stroll over to Kensington Gardens.


By round pond we grabbed some of the cool lounge chairs for a break. I thought it was great that the London Parks Service provided them and I wondered how they could afford to keep nice chairs around that could be easily carried away. I quickly found out how when someone approached us and collected our 2 pounds each chair rental fee. It was still worth it.


After getting our money's worth of comfy chair sitting, we went to Serpentine Gallery. I managed to fit 3 pieces of cool puzzle together.


We caught the tube over to the National Gallery. My favorite display was a set of paintings on the failure of an arranged marriage.
Panel 1 - A rich merchant is marrying his daughter to a broke Duke's son to gain title.
Panel 2 - The wife lounges about taking breakfast in the afternoon after a party while her
husband sneaks in with a maids bonnet in his pocket
Panel 3 - The quack doctor is administering leeches to sores that the wife
Queen the musical
Panel 4 - The husband is jumping out the window after killing his wife's lover.
Panel 5 - The wife has poisoned herself after losing her lover. Her miserly father is removing her rings while the head of the house scolds the servant who brought her the poison.
It's a disturbing story even by today's standards and back in the day this must have been absolutely shocking.

The Queen musical was silly fun. It is based in the year 2300 when all music is computer produced. However a boy and a girl refuse to be part of the mall culture. The boy keeps getting visions of bits of Queen songs. He eventually frees the magic "axe" and rocks the mall culture into dust. The band was excellent as was the encore of Bohemian Rhapsody. The set had 6 large independent video screens that were constantly reconfiguring themselves as well as a hydraulic podium that could be raised and rotated, all very impressive.

We walked for a long time, searching for a sushi place, but they were all closing. We finally found an italian place with a good mushroom sauce and some potatoes that were dripping with butter.

Back at the poker table we found an easy table and made back losses plus a lot more. We knew who was giving us their money and why. We were able to bet for value against the calling stations, raise the rocks out, and semibluff check raise the good players out. We were up to 4AM though.