Highlights-London Day 4
I used an LLM to shop for sport coats (blazers) and found one I really liked. It was made from a special wool weave and was a big step up from the “Duffle Bag” styling (calling it styling is a stretch) of the one I brought on the trip. I attended my third theater event of the trip, a performance of The Play that Goes Wrong.
Modeling the new blazer
Don’t polish
Notable Items
I bought a new blazer (English for sport coat). At the risk of boring readers, I sometimes write about my travel gear and clothes. I doubt I possess any great insight about either, but how I think about what I bring gives insight into my approach to travel and clarifies my own thinking at the same time. Buckle up.
The blazer I brought was functional, but something was lacking. Taking it with me on this trip was part of an investigation. My Research Question: Is this jacket suitable for travel to Europe in April? There’s a lot of subjectivity in “suitable” that I’ll leave out of this post. I don’t have any full body photos of it on the blog, but you can see most of it in the 17 and 23 April posts.
The jacket was warm enough. It had a few pockets, but not so many or so deep that I looked like I was smuggling something. Functionality wasn’t a problem. The issue was the way it looked on me. I got tired of seeing “The Man Wearing a Duffle Bag” in shop windows as I walked around London.
Instead of waiting until I returned home, I bought one in London. A first for me, I used a Large Language Model (LLM) to search for a lightweight, unstructured blazer in shops on Regent Street, 500m from my AirBnB apartment. There were two benefits. First, the LLM educated me on what to look for given the performance criteria I specified. Second, it gave me a path from one recommended store to another (after I asked for it). That was very convenient.
I purchased the jacket in the picture above at Hackett. I asked the salesman to take the picture (after getting permission from his manager to wear it outside) so I could get my wife’s opinion. It seemed sufficient to keep me as warm as the duffle bag blazer, but with a light weave of wool so I could wear it in Barcelona and other warm parts of Spain later in the trip.
One of the best things about going to London is going to plays and musicals. Today, I went to the matinee performance of The Play that Goes Wrong. This was my third time seeing it. The last time was in Spanish (with the title, La función que sale mal). Several of the sight gags were different between the three productions, but that is part of the fun of seeing it staged differently.
The Play is about an amateur theatrical society’s production of Murder at the Haversham Mansion, which becomes a disaster because of defective props, poor placement of props, actors saying their lines incorrectly, actors being knocked unconscious, and other support problems. Members of the support team participate in on stage action. The disasters made me appreciate the attention to detail necessary by the support team for the actors to play their roles without worrying about whether the whisky flask actually contains paint thinner! Drinking that looked unpleasant.
The play is a genre of theater that I find particularly interesting: a play about a play. There are many movies and other theatrical works where one or two characters have to simulate acting (usually to fool other people, like Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire), but it isn’t common for the entire cast to be doing it.
While I took notes throughout the play (in the dark, barely legible later), this isn’t the place to give a scene by scene account. You can find samples of various productions on the web at the usual locations. I took the notes because editing them later helped me appreciate what I saw more. Either a few gags were new or I didn’t understand them the first two times I saw the play. Yes, I missed a few things as I scribbled, but I still think it was worth it.
I did a navigation experiment following the play. I returned to the apartment in Soho via Covent Garden and Leicester Square trying not to use a map app. I like doing this after I’ve been somewhere for several days. London is a particular challenge (lots of dead ends and twisting streets), but I managed with only one or two glances at my phone.