London Calling!

We met Sue and Bill in London and spent a day touring the  city before heading off to the Cotswolds and then to Ireland. London is a fascinating town! Extraordinary history, a wonderful mix of architecture, art and culture.

We wanted to see Westminster Abbey but, hard as it is to believe, the lines were even longer than the lines at the opening of the new iPhone store! The history of the place is pretty impressive. The coronation of all the kings and queens of England have occurred here going back to William the Conqueror in 1068, and of course there's more than a few well-known dead Brits buried here. Some of the monuments are majestic, ornate, and impressive, but as you can imagine, having buried people here now for more than 1,000 years, space is getting a little tight, so parts of it seem more like a filing cabinet or one of these new pod hotels where you crawl into a little box and someone else closes the door behind you. Still the list of people is impressive, including St. Crispin, Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Percy Shelly, and Charles Darwin to name but a few. Steven Hawking was interred here next to Sir Issac Newton earlier this year bringing the total of permanent residents to more than 3,300. The memorial plaque reads "Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking" and includes a version of the Berkenstein-Hawking Entropy Equation relating to black holes. But even the exterior is impressive, I was startled to see a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. standing shoulder to shoulder with nine other guys peering out from a niche above the 15th century door on the west facade. Not a bad legacy for a poor, black, Baptist preacher from the South!

Big Ben was muffled in plastic and tied up in scaffolding, perhaps a reminder of the struggles and turmoil churning below in the Houses of Parliament as Brexit continues to limp toward an uncertain future. A statue of the puritanical despot Oliver Cromwell continues to rage against the Irish, the Catholic Church, and the British Monarchy from atop a stone pedestal in the sunken gardens outside the House of Commons, while at the other end of the building Richard, Coeur de Lion incongruously sits astride his bronze steed, sword held high seemingly saluting or challenging the House of Lords surrounded now, not by his vast armies arrayed  in  an unholy war against the  Muslims during the third Crusade, but the cars and buses jockeying for space next to him in what has become a vast parking lot. All this serves as a reminder of the conflicts in our own shrine to democracy, the U.S. Capitol building, where at least a dozen statues still celebrate the Confederacy despite multiple skirmishes to enact legislation to remove them.

A little further away St Paul's Cathedral sits atop Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the city of London. It is the crowning achievement of Sir Christopher Wren's remarkable career as England's pre-eminent architect and has dominated the skyline of the city for more than 300 years. This is where Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married, where the Duke of Wellington, Horatio Lord Nelson, Florence Nightingale, Lawrence of Arabia and John Donne are buried. Many memorials include commemorative plaques with inspirational statements or quotes from speeches or sermons once given by the deceased. The inscription above church dean and poet John Donne's memorial includes a quote from one of his sermons beginning with "No man is an island..." and ending "Therefore, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee". 

Funerals for Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and George Mallory were also celebrated here although their remains are interred elsewhere. George, most notably absent from his own funeral, remains somewhere near the summit of Mount Everest. Sir Christopher Wren was the first person to be buried here and a plaque on the wall above his tomb reads in latin "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" - Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

But by far the most fun, and entertaining attraction, if those are words that can be used to describe a place that once served as a medieval prison and torture chamber, where multiple traitors were hanged, drawn, and quartered, where princes were murdered and queens of England beheaded, was the Tower of London. The Yeoman Warders, dressed in full regalia, and armed with commanding voice and dry British humor, are the quintessential tour guides to this historic site. The captivating and irreverent stories about Anne Boleyn and the unfortunate wives of Henry Vlll, Guy Fawkes, Sir Walter Raleigh, the uproarious comments about Mel Gibson's portrayal of William Wallace, as well as the disparaging comments about the Brits favorite punching bag, the French, and fellow compatriots in the Royal Marines, are brilliant and hilarious. "We didn't execute ALL our prisoners" he barks gruffly at one point, followed by " Well it's a better ratio than the state of Texas!" If my  teachers had been half as knowledgable and engaging, I'd have chosen history as a life long career. The following link is to a video of a tour of the Tower of London, given, not by the same Yeoman Warder as we had, but one equally enjoyable and informative. https://youtu.be/8YS0vGq0QsE

Saying goodbye is always painful but saying goodbye to London was particularly difficult, not because I was sad to leave (which I was) or that driving out of the city was particularly arduous (although it was) but because no one simply says goodbye here. It's Cheerio! or Ta Ta! or Cheers! or Bob's your uncle! or something unintelligible in an indecipherable British accent or slang. Best to just wave. The Queen's wave of course, otherwise known as "opening the marmalade jar".