Reading: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Moving: the airport hustle

9 September 2001: Newark to Heathrow,

7:20 a.m. GMT

In a holding pattern, waiting to land. Remembering lines: "O England, my lion heart." Kate, of course. Tommy Bassumtyte (Bassumtyte Treasure) could not quite believe such a large thing could fly, and imagined other ways for it to cross the Atlantic. And Julian Barnes's England, England, because I think we flew over, not England, England's Isle of Wight, but Cornwall. It was thin enough to see the Channel on the other side. I think. I'm the one still convinced I saw the whole of the Florida peninsula, east to west, when I flew into Tampa at the age of ten. There was a wide river and more watery land as we passed; if I'm right, we've flown over Bristol and Cardiff. Land, anyway.

5:30 p.m. GMT

The abrupt cut-off was due to our circling London. Our circling was due to traffic. So anyway, suddenly we saw the city, including the Millennial Dome, the Big Ben clocktower and the Houses of Parliament, Regents Park, Hyde Park, and wow.

So here we are. It's unreal, in a bad way: my bad. Tired.

After escaping the plane and the conversation of an older woman who was very nice but not worth fighting my incipient grumpiness to converse with, we stood in line at immigration for approxmiately ever or the better part of an hour. Customs took no time, as we had nothing to declare. We bought day passes for the tube and boarded the Piccadilly line.

London has better starlings, if they are starlings. They're bigger and have better speckles: not so inbred as U.S. starlings.

Tower of London. St. Paul's. Sleep. Dinner Savoir Faire.

---

25 September, and I don't want to forget:

A trip on the Underground (which is surface for a long ways from Heathrow east to London) was my first glimpse of London. The architecture was different, but the plants were the same as at home. Probably because New England immigrants brought plants as well as livestock. Lots of sycamores. But they're such an old tree that they probably originated on Pangaea.

We staggered from the Russell Square stop to the surface, around the Square, to Great Russell Street. RDC doubted my navigation, but I have been looking at more maps than he. We weren't on Great Russell Street but some other M street and I popped into a hotel to ask if when we reached Great Russell we should turn left or right. Right, which confirmed my guess, woohoo!--although I wonder if my father would be proud that my sense of direction serves me in England as well as in the States--and we found first one Radisson and then another, directly across the street from each other. A shower woke us both us, and contacts enforced wakefulness in me.

Walking to Tottenham Court Road, I saw my first Smart car. Damn. I know Europe does smaller cars, and I know that Mr. Bean drives a Mini, but these Smart cars are way, impossibly cool. I covet one.

Also, this trip will be refreshingly lacking in pictures of moi. I'm in this one for only scale. The whole roof is glass, too.

Behind me is an interesting detail of London life and that of Paris as well: not enough rubbish bins. RDC was so looking forward to following posted instructions: "I refuse to be put in this basket!" But there were very few bins. Much more litter. Also, no water fountains. It must rain often enough--I say this coming from parched Denver--that people are used to turning their faces to the sky whenever they're thirsty, or perhaps they have reservoirs in their brollies. Also, not enough public toilets or desire to use them, which is more a Paris thing and therefore comes later.

Before we got to the tube stop that would bring us to the Tower, we made a fatal mistake that we would not have done if I had memorized the kindly email that Usual Suspects who're also London denizens had sent me. One specifically said, "Avoid chains like [something] and Garfunkels. Overpriced and bad food." We, who had been awake for about 24 hours by then, saw only a restaurant whose name meant nothing to us (PLT: here's where you make your blond guy joke). What a repellent place. The iced coffee was instant, I think. The music was someone three steps down from whoever sang the theme to "Moonlighting," male, doing bad covers including "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," which, not to be sexist, belongs to a female part, no?

Tower. Oh my. This is my reaction to everything. I can't describe anything. We bought tickets at the Tower tube stop and didn't know to look around for Tower Hill upon which most people were executed. My Tudor gossip ones--the ones embarrassing to the monarch, like two of Henry VIII's wives and Lady Jane Grey and Robert Essex--happened within the walls, away from public eyes. Approaching the Tower, we saw a glimpse of poisonous green in the moat, and I thought "cholera." But it wasn't gruesome water left over from the last of the Lancastrians but extremely green grass.

Through the Middle Tower (now on the outside, pretty much), we joined a yeoman warder for a little bit. We bailed, for two reasons: he was giving dead basic history (why William the Conqueror wanted a fortress), and he seemed disappointed when no one chimed in with "Anne Boleyn" when he paused meaningfully without naming Henry VIII's second wife and looking put out when we failed to break into song at the mention of Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have worked damn hard to curb my brash blurting, having sped bonnie-boat-wise, but more like a bird on the wing, over the sea to England not Skye, and braying out such obvious trivia as that would have branded me a know-it-all and I can't sing. Cisatlantic, I wanted to hide my light under a bushel (basket), and I didn't like getting the hairy eyeball when I was disguising my loudmouth Usanness. So we went on sans guide.

We saw the walls bounding the different extents of the fortress, the very large rocks that people wear on their heads, the window in the Bloody Tower from which Edward V and his brother were last seen, Traitor's Gate, armor for one and all (Henry VIII's codpiece was not only exaggeratedly large but looked like it was meant to accommodate an erection*), the chamber in which Raleigh spent his last years (not too bad), the Bell Tower in which Sir Thomas More and others were imprisoned. It is round on top and hexagonal below because construction started and stopped. We saw the ravens, which looked about twice as big as Colorado ravens, which are themselves much bigger than Colorado crows, which are again bigger, I think, than East Coast crows. (That Camelot site is a good one, as is the hrp one.)

The White Tower. This is almost the exact same angle the Camelot site uses, but their picture is clouded solid and we have texture in ours, plus the U.K. flag. Nyaah. The darker bits of wall are Kentish stone and the paler bits are from Caen. I was in Caen. Actually I drove around the periphery of Caen. (This still astounds me.) The choppier low piece of wall is Roman and therefore another 500 or 1000 years old. The book I bought was about armour, not about the Tower as a whole. Inadequate.

On the other side of this walls is the mews for the ravens. Nothing on either the Camelot fan site or the official Crown site for the Tower says whether the ravens are clipped. I guess if the Ravenmaster tames them, they might not want to stray, but I thought for some reason or other that their wings were clipped. If the fate of England rests on six birds, I guess they'd be clipped.

It's the White Tower because Henry III whitewashed it. He's been lax about the painting for the past 700 years, but it's still markedly paler than the other buildings. Within this is the armory (containing the erection armor, of which a side view would prove my point better), and on the north side (this is the west) is the Waterloo Block were live the rocks people wear on their heads. Five hundred carats in one rock alone.

The crowns are encased in superduper glass and there are people movers to keep you moving on either side. Also there is a passageway so you can start over, or you can walk backward. There's a careful path set up with railings to control crowds and form queues, and in one room you can zigzag through the maze or hang back and watch films of the crowns, blown up into magnificent detail with lots of flashing gems.

Everywhere we went in London there were lots of people, but no where felt really crowded, not as I had expected. Throngs, but not hordes. Here on the first day I began to learn how superfluous common language can be: coming out of one tower and mounting three steps, I slipped. A man's voice behind me: "Attention!" but in French: "Ah-tehn-see-on!" which doesn't sound quite so much like a bark as it would in English. I had already caught my balance but smiled in thanks for his concern, and he smiled at me, glad I was fine.

Especially in the midst of Afterward, after the 11th, I noticed such acts of human decency often.

Which means that this gilt lion, whose significance I do not remember, seems even more superficial than otherwise. I don't remember if it was solid gold or "only" leafed. Going by the order of our photographs, it was in the Armoury, but I don't remember! Argh! Another item in the Waterloo Block was an enormous bowl in which two toddlers could have splashed about. It was a punchbowl, solid gold. Could it have been? Few things survived Cromwell, but many things were made after the Restoration, and this bowl was one. Possibly the late Stuart monarchs' children were baptized in it as well. I wondered if McTeague's landlady, Maria, had ever been here, because this place would have driven her mad. Or Trina. Maria spun stories about an entire dinner service in red gold (when she wasn't muttered about the flying squirrel she let go). I also thought of John Christopher's Empty World, which I really should try to track down, and how mad Clive thought Queenie--of whom he spoke nearly that familiarly, because they were likethat--would have appreciated the jewels coming into his custody.

I didn't realize we were leaving until we were out, on a wharf along the Thames. We had seen most of it, but not Lady Jane Grey's grave in the chapel, damn it. St. Paul's wasn't too far away and RDC suggested walking thither before giving up for the day. I wasn't enthused about walking through the City on a Sunday, because as a Wall Street sort of place it's dead at weekends (note Brit idiom), but mostly I wasn't enthused because I was exhausted and my feet hurt. The stupid shoes I bought the Monday before might have looked like L.L. Bean's walking shoes and had an alleged sportif label on them (Tommy Hilfiger, proving that labels = bad), but they were Not.

I soldiered on, slowing but not squawking, to St. Paul's. Unfortunately, Sunday is not the day to see the cathedral, because, imagine this, of a Sunday the place is reserved for worship. Who'd've thought. RDC was looking forward to climbing (which sounded hideous to me) up to the Whispering Gallery under the dome, which is enormous and after which the U.S. Capitol is designed.

London. We were in London. The architecture was absolutely different, the cars wonderfully, cleverly small, and we heard every language under the sun. We were in London!

But I was completely knockered by this point. Here was the Lady Diana Spencer married. Yawn. We tubed back to the hotel, were referred to a charming French bistro three blocks away (geography in London in plastic: that night, we must have walked four miles along those three blocks, but by Wednesday, when I had adjusted, it was just around the corner). We ate pasta with vegetables within walls painted in cloud-dappled sky, with Toulose-Lautrec figures silhoutted over that, and philosophical quotes permanent-markered over all. I slumped at the table with my head in both hands, and I fell asleep at least three times during the meal. What I wrote in my book and appears at the top of this page is therefore what I scrawled in bed before falling asleep at well before 6:00, and the passages about starlings and Savoir Faire look like the notes I wrote in my 8:00 a.m. psychology class the semester after I had mono. Despite falling asleep at dinner, I began about customs and starlings wanting to write detail. Ha! Hence the last paragraph.