A Visit to the United Kingdom

May, 1999

I took advantage of the visit to the UK to tour some things I hadn't seen in my previous visits. The Windsor Castle, rebuilt by 1997 after the disastrous fire of 1992, was a marvelous display of how the English view history. The event of the fire is described in the displays and the guidebooks with quite the same equanimity that the first building of the castle by William the Conqueror just after 1066 is described.

  Plan of Windsor Castle
(The Round Tower was what William the Conqueror built soon after his defeat of the Danes.)

The Quadrangle

And here's my attempt to stich together three images taken at ground level.
 

There were photos of the Queen inspecting the damage, and some descriptions of the choices made in the rebuilding as to whether to restore or to redesign certain parts.

And interspersed, were the descriptions of the changes made by George III around the time our country was founded, and by George IV a little later and then by Queen Victoria. My conclusion, looking back on this visit, is like "not good, not bad, just is." "Not old, not recent, just past." And here's what we remember.

Several other visits I could include in my itinerary were to places well south of London. Winchester Cathedral, where St. Swithun is buried, was one I enjoyed.

Another was to the H.M.S. Victory, aboard which Admiral Nelson led the British fleet to victory over the Spanish French Armada at the battle of Trafalgar, and aboard which he died.

Admiral Lord Nelson
The Battle of Trafalgar

HMS Victory

I stopped by the marina in Southampton, and saw the round-the-world racing sailboat that holds (or maybe once held) the world record for that trip; it looked like it was shaped like a rocket designed for water travel.

The event that really was a different experience for me was to drive in the UK. Here I am, going on to sixty years old, visited the UK a dozen times, and until this one, never had driven there. I knew I was going to have trouble in driving, so I bought the additional insurance, even though the company doesn't reimburse me for it. Glad I did. My driving style there was to keep a little to far to the left. (I suppose it might have been to compensate for a tendency to go to the right side.) As a result, I kept bumping the curb on the left side. Almost always, it was just a little bump of the tire (tyre?) on the curb.

Almost. On one occasion, in Windsor, I had to deal with a construction zone, where there was one-way traffic on the side of the street that wasn't blocked off. I came by the zone entering town quite uneventfully. That's because I was on my newly discovered home side of the street, the left side. Now as I was leaving town, I was forced to go over to the right side of the street. And I was tending to be too far left. And I hit a sign marking the construction zone just by an inch - enough to take a strip of molding off the left side of the car. (The other bump was coming so close to a bus in Winchester that the mirror on the left side of the car got folded back. No problem. Whew.)

After class was done, I had planned to visit London for a day and a half, departing about four in the afternoon. I stayed in Earl's Court, a district of London that was a ghetto for a while but now commands pretty high rents. My hotel was a Comfort Inn occupying about three usual London row houses. It had about ninety rooms. Mine was a single, nine feet by seven, with a private bath, for 69 pounds sterling a night. Stayed two nights. The ethnic flavor of that area is mostly English with a significant south Asian element, though bits of other cultures show up, as well. My meals both in Swanwick and in London were mostly Indian food. Only when I strayed from my diet did I indulge in a pastie or pie. On the way to London, I stopped at a McDonalds on the M5 motorway and had a veggie burger. Burger King has bean burgers. Lots of vegetarians in England.

My touring on Friday was first to visit my old friends in the National Gallery, some memorable impressionist paintings. The nice Renoirs and Monets and Manets and Seurats were there, of course. But on this visit, the Van Goghs really struck me. There were four in a row on a half of one wall. They were all the same size, each about a meter wide and 3/4 of a meter tall. They were "Grass with butterflies," "Sunflowers," "Vincent's chair," and "Wheat fields with cypresses." The "Grass with butterflies" occupied me ... filled me up ... for a half an hour that seemed like a minute. It was an unusual experience, a painting bringing tears to my eyes.

The St. Martin in the Fields church is right there next to the National Gallery in Trafagar Square. The church has for years supplemented its income with tourist attractions, even for natives. One of these attractions is small group concerts at noontime and in the evening. The day I was there a quartet composed of a piano and strings played a Dvorak piano concerto and some avant garde music. The unusual part of the avant garde was that it sounded like a child was squawking in the audience; only on the third squawk did I discover it was part of the composition.

I rode a tour bus and listened to the guide for a couple of hours and then I went to the Tower of London.

Bird's-eye view of the Tower of London

The exhibits I visited further convinced me of the Brits' timeless view of history. The most spectacular exhibit (and clearly the most popular, judging by the blocks of railed off line or queue space preceding it and the moving sidewalk past it) was the crown jewels exhibit. Three items in the exhibit set themselves in my memory from this visit. The first was the 'sword of atonement.' (This is the item in the coronation ceremony that the new monarch presents to the head of the church to atone for his/her sins, I suppose. In the system of queues, there were movies of the coronation of Elizabeth II shown, and that's what it looked like.) There was no angle from which you could view this sword without at least a dozen of the diamonds encrusting it glinting in your eyes. It was spectacular. It had emeralds, sapphires and rubies on it, too, but in many fewer numbers. Thousands of diamonds.

The second was the royal scepter. It is gold and about three feet long. Its about half covered with jewels, but bigger ones than the sword. At the end of it is one of the largest diamonds I've ever seen, the Cullinan I, about 500 carats. This is the symbol of the power of the British Empire in the time of Queen Victoria, started by Admiral Nelson showing the superiority of the British fleet at Trafalgar.

Queen Elizabeth II with the orb, scepter and imperial crown.

(In 1905 the largest gem quality diamond ever discovered was removed from the Premier Mine in South Africa. It weighed 3,106 carats and was named Cullinan in honor of St. Thomas Cullinan, who originally opened the mine. The rough crystal was presented to King Edward VII in 1907 who had it cut into 9 major and 96 smaller stones. Cullinan I, known as The Great Star of Africa, is the largest cut diamond in the world; it is a 530.20 carat pear shaped stone set in the Sovereign's Royal Scepter as part of the Crown Jewels, in London. Cullinan II, known as The Lesser Star of Africa, the world's second largest cut diamond, is a 317.40 carats square brilliant mounted in the Imperial State Crown, also part of the Crown Jewels. -- from http://www.jewelryexpert.com/articles/diamond4.htm.)

The third was the Crown of Queen Elizabeth the queen mother. It is a platinum crown. The main stone in it is the Koh-i-Noor diamond, about a hundred carats. When I looked at this, I understood what folks mean when they say "the jewel in the crown." This symbolized the place that India held in the British Empire. My interpretation is that the Empire is the crown and India is the jewel.

(Historical facts about the Koh-i-Noor date back to the year 1304, when it was owned by the Rajah of Malwa (India). Two centuries later, this magnificent gem fell into the hands of Sultan Baber, the first Mogul emperor; it was passed down the line to all the great Moguls, including Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal for his queen. Legend has it that the conquered Mogul ruler, Mohammed Shah, lost his great possession to Persia's Nadir Shah through an Oriental custom of exchanging turbans. When this great stone fell from Mohammed's turban, Nadir Shah was alleged to have cried "Koh-i-noor," meaning "mountain of light" and thus christened the diamond. In 1850, Queen Victoria was presented the Koh-i-Noor. This Indian cut 186 carats diamond as displayed at the Crystal Palace Exposition (London, 1851). Viewers were disappointed with the stone's lack of fire; therefore, Victoria had it recut into a 108.93 carats oval brilliant.-- also from http://www.jewelryexpert.com/articles/diamond4.htm.)

If you want to see some of these jewels, see http://www.royal.gov.uk/faq/jewels.htm.

You can tell from the adornments on this part of my story that this stuff really left a mark. In 1969, Ellen and I visited London in August, we did view these jewels. But in that part of my life, I sure wasn't attuned to understand what it was that I was seeing. I guess that it was the same frame of mind that precluded me from going to the Frank Sinatra concert at Kennedy Center a couple of years after that. Ah, well.

The Tower also houses two other exhibits I saw, amongst a bunch I didn't see. A Swiss Guard told me that I needed to spend three days there to properly see the Tower. Swiss Guards no longer carry halberds, those spears with hatchet heads on them. They carry cell phones in holsters. Much better self-defense! The other two exhibits were the armory and medieval castle.

In the armory, there were several dozen suits of armor. Some were built for princes when they were little. Others showed the evolution from complete coverage with sheet steel to leather and steel combinations to breastplates and helmets as the time went from the mid 1500s to the mid 1600s. The most remarkable suit of armor was one of complete coverage. It was the one belonging to Henry VIII. He was a big man for the time. The suit was as tall as I am, six feet. The remarkable part of the suit was that the king had the armorer shape the part of the suit in front of his genitals to conform to (apparently) his erection! Really strange.

Armor belonging to Henry VIII

In the medieval castle, there was a room that was set up just as it would have been for a dinner in about 1500. There was a chap dressed in the garb of the time describing what things there were on the table for holding food and eating. He told me a lot about what I saw, and nearly every other camera weilding tourist wanted just a picture of him. The room was the Florida room of the time, set up for eating, sleeping and fighting; even the winch to raise the drawbridge was in the same room. The next room was the throne room, where there was a wooden throne raised three steps from the floor, and two great six candle candelabras on either side and an eight foot diameter chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The other rooms were all small and dark, with little to add to the splendor - really lack of it - that royalty had at that time. So different from the Windsor Castle of today, in its peak of splendor after the restoration.

Throne room in the medieval castle

One other thing I noticed in the Tower ... in the Crown Jewels exhibit ... there was an anteroom that had a row of chairs all around the walls that was marked with the names of all the monarchs since William the Conqueror. All the chairs in the room were labeled through one marked with Elizabeth II. There were only two chairs left unmarked in the room, with no room for any others. One for Charles and one for his son William. Is that the end of the monarchy in the UK? Is it the end of the world? It corresponds to the end of the Aztec calendars in (I think) 2012 or 2042 (can't remember).

Before I got on the plane, I went to Portobello Road. Each Saturday morning, antique dealers from all around the region congregate there to sell their wares. The market starts at about seven and ends about one in the afternoon. I got there at seven, even before some dealers and spent 'til one in the afternoon. The two wares I really enjoyed were a Viennese bronze pekinese dog for Susan

and a second or third century AD Roman oil lamp, much like the ones in Christ's time;

complete with Certificate of Authenticity. Written out by the same person who sold me the lamp. Who knows.

And then the airplane was late. By four hours. It needed a fuel pump. And they didn't slide the delay any, though I'd really be worried about a fuel pump that didn't last the eight hours going home. Got home OK.