As soon as I headed for London I entered into a rather pleasant state of flow. I got to the train station two plus hours early because of the timing of my ride to Axminster. Two days ago I was told by the train service center on the phone that I would have to buy another round trip ticket for $40 just to get back to London one way, even when I had already bought a round trip for $32 four months ago, just because I wanted to get back to London a few days sooner. As it turns out, there was another train going to London eight minutes after I got to the station. Not only would I not have to wait hours, the stationmaster told me to go ahead and get on the train and did not take a penny from me. The fellow running the trolley quoted me twice the printed price for some red wine. I called him on it and he gave me the wine for less than the printed price.
After the conductor in the train really did validate my ticket without extracting more portraits of the queen (money) from me and I had a glass of red wine and was watching the emerald Devon countryside pass by, my temperament was in a good state. I was in London by 3 PM, had train tickets to Windsor Castle for today (Saturday), a weekly journey card for the underground, and was situated on the fourth floor of a hotel by 4 PM.
With unlimited travel in town I went over to Westminster Abbey at sunset and listened to the chimes of Big Ben, no doubt the grandest clock in the world. I just missed the evensong in the Abbey but will be there for the festival Palm Sunday mass at 11 AM and then an organ recital at 5:45 PM. I wandered around the House of Commons as war protestors were on one side of Whitehall Road and police with machine guns were on the other. There were no American tourists around the city that I could discern. There is clearly a much stronger police presence here than in the past but the city does not feel uncomfortable to me. For certain, Americans are staying close to the roost and are not manifest here.
I went to the theater district just to see what was on, figuring everything would be sold out and if not, $50 or more per ticket. Tourism must be down. I could see anything I wanted. I found a new show “Mum’s the Word” at the Abery Theater that could be seen from the cheap rafter seats for ten pounds. I bought a ticket and then wandered off on Charing Cross Road to find a healthy vegetarian Lebanese dinner nearby and still had a few minutes to poke around in a second-hand bookshop before the show.
I went back to the theater expecting to be escorted by the porter to the five flights of stairs to the ozone region. He took me instead to the main floor and put me in the fifth row dead center, perhaps twenty feet from the stage. I showed him my ticket and said there was an error. He insisted I stay there. No complaint from me. Amazing how differently my day flowed. My life used to flow like this all the time. The show was a comedy satire of six women going through pregnancy, childbirth, and raising toddlers. It was rather a good laugh and I had rather pleasant conversation with two couples during the intermission. We agreed that this show would make a good sex education module and would prevent most teen pregnancies. The show through comedy showed just how exceedingly difficult the job of being a mother really is. Teens are clueless. I was amazed at how much my mood improved during the show.I have been photographing castles for a long time, ever since I lived in one in 1984 up north near Glasgow. I thought I had seen really big castles after the likes of Edward the First’s giant Caernavon in Wales. I was to get a new definition of big and opulent today. After fifteen journeys to London, I figured it was time to ante up and go see Windsor Castle. I went to the station this morning and found the same kind of flow I had yesterday. A train was leaving for Windsor in five minutes. I arrived in Eton an hour later, where Windsor is located and walked into the magnificent St. George’s chapel in Windsor Castle at precisely the beginning of a communion service. The timing was surreal. St. George’s Chapel is a late perpendicular gothic structure that feels much like the magnificent space in the King’s Chapel at Cambridge with its fine glass, fan vaults, and much gothic ornamentation. I found it a rather complex experience to take communion in the same chapel, as have kings for 800 years. What made the experience rather peculiar in one respect is that there were exactly four of us that took part in the entire service, aside from the clergy. During the entirety of the service a continuous flood of hundreds of tourists flowed around the perimeter of this numinous space. It is the first time I have participated in a communion service and felt a little bit like I was on stage. This is a commentary on just how completely secularized western culture is becoming. Churches are essentially seen as museums here, rather than structures to contain living functional Christian communities. It was disquieting. Most of the active Christians I know living here in the UK do not attend church.
After the service, I had plenty of opportunity to fill my eyeballs and visual cortex with opulent images of the state apartments in the castle. “Apartment” is a completely misleading word. The space is probably in excess of 50,000 square feet, perhaps more with 25-foot ceilings. The castle covers thirteen acres. In 1992, a large portion of the state apartments were destroyed by a fire that took 18 hours to douse. Five years and $56 million later, there is no evidence of a calamity that opened the place to the sky for the first time in half a millennium. Most of this money was generated by opening the Buckingham Palace apartments to the public for the first time since the place was built. As one might guess, both sites are filled with Rembrandt, Van dyke, and every other notable that painted or made anything. After four hours of gawking about the realm I went back to the station to find a train leaving in 90 seconds. And I am in my ninth day with no rain and the moon is presently visible over London.
It’s hard to find real English people in London, it would seem. At breakfast one table had three French girls, another had a Spanish couple, a single girl from India was at one and the people running the hotel are from Eastern Europe. I notice the same thing on the underground and on the streets. There are people here from every place on the planet. I think the only place with a higher density of humans than Leicester Square on Saturday night is to be found in Calcutta or New Delhi. I roamed around tonight while eating a take-away dinner, observing this incredible organism of a city in a state of frenzy. Small towns are not so bad in some respects.
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