Trafalgar and Westminster
The day after Oxford, we hopped on a bus to Trafalgar Square, which is quite impressive in good strong daylight, with all the ex-colonies’ embassies around it and Nelson’s Column amidships (so to speak). I confess I was relieved to learn that the rather horrid sculpture to the north of the National Gallery is only one of a string of temporaries. They can’t get rid of that thing soon enough.
We strolled down Whitehall past Downing Street and the Queen’s Life Guard, one of whom was having a bit of trouble keeping his horse still in the face of gawping tourists. I insisted on giving the poor animal a wide berth, but I expect its opposite number, standing good as gold despite the fuss, was probably a more steadying influence. Security is everpresent in the area, though no more than around the Mall in DC, and the self-important cell-phone conversations of government functionaries fill every available silence—and there aren’t many silences available.
Despite my mother’s enthusiastic recommendation, I found Westminster Abbey a difficult place to visit, and should I return to London, I don’t believe I will return there. The church itself is well-built and handsome, but its graceful old bones are impossible to see for all the plaques and busts and sculptures and coats-of-arms and regimental flags and inscriptions and decorated tombs and every other imaginable memorial created by the hand of man tumbling all over each other and fighting for attention.
Many of them would be quite beautiful, were there enough negative space around them to let them breathe. As it is, their tawdry overcrowding (combined with the sad tombstones effaced by years of being trodden underfoot) crushes the spirit with insistent reminders of not only death, but insignificance. Many interred there led thoroughly uninteresting and undistinguished lives, landing in Westminster Abbey by virtue of exalted birth or exalted wealth. Saddest of all to me are the many women whose tombs only remarked on their husbands or sons.
Dampening the experience further are the Abbey staff, who are clearly caught in a deeply unpleasant dilemma: tourists are their bread-and-butter, but they hate tourists, hate the hundreds of profane feet defiling sacred ground. Not a good mental space to be forced into, and they don’t hesitate to make their distaste known.
That said… I did like to see the memorials purchased for a soldier or an engineer or a musician by his friends and colleagues, or for a wife by a husband, his grief plain in the words that break out of the formulas. I liked paying my respects to Newton and Darwin and Vaughan Williams and Ben Jonson and Purcell and too many others to list. I also liked the garden, surprisingly peaceful considering its surroundings, and the kids in one of the Abbey schools playing kickball on the other side of the garden gate.
After leaving the Abbey, we traipsed through St. James Park, greeting the greylag geese like old friends because of a pair who somehow made their way to Madison’s Lake Mendota to rear a brood one summer. Pelicans and moorhens and swans (both white and black) and grebes and herons and several different sorts of ducks (including the really quite striking eider duck, and the formally-besuited tufted duck) paddled in the lake and padded about on the shore; David wisely had his binoculars with him, so we got excellent views.
We waved at Buckingham Palace (Her Majesty appeared to have been in residence, judging from the royal standard) and walked down The Mall back to Trafalgar, where we picked up a late lunch to defend from the pigeons. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the National Gallery, which we did not by any means manage to see all of.
Our bus driver had barely pulled away from our stop when he was stopped by a bicyclist banging on the side and yelling about having been cut off. And so we saw the famous British bobbies in action; one stepped onto the bus, swiftly ascertained the course of events, diplomatically calmed the agitated cyclist and sternly warned the bus driver, and had the bus on its way again in under two minutes. Impressive.
We were honestly too tired to forage for dinner, so we collapsed into bed. Given that I would sprain my knee the next morning and my husband would have to manage the move via tube from King’s Cross to Kensington, probably just as well.