A day in London

An English breakfast

My day in London started off with a 20 Pound breakfast (e.g., $40): coffee (tolerable, for once), orange juice, cold cereal, milk, toast. I made the mistake of saying yes when they asked if I'd like a glass of water...kaching! 2 pounds! At both hotels I stayed at in England, you couldn't just order an ala carte breakfast. You had to pay for the whole "buffet" even if you really just wanted a croissant and coffee. Sure, I could also have had the deep fried fish, the red Leicester cheese, the cold cuts, the bangers and mashers, the ham, bacon, and kidneys, the scrambled eggs, the ubiquitous whole stewed tomatoes, the baked beans, the danishes, blood pudding [think something like blood sausage], fried mushrooms, kippers, really scary looking spuds, and croissants. But I really just wanted joe, a little wheat (they call it brown bread) toast and some f***ing corn flakes! The day just got better and better after that.



I went into the Underground, jumped on the Central line subway, and headed east to St. Paul's Cathedral. I was knocked out last May in NYC to see the exponential leap in the subways from when I lived there. Well, the London subway system, The Underground, is even better than that. I took probably five train rides today, and I don't think I ever waited longer than three minutes. Is this cool, or what? About 12 minutes later, I climbed out of the subway station about a block from St. Paul's Cathedral. It was hard to miss, even for a functionally retarded orienteer like me.


view through the transept to the altar

There were a lot of tourists, of course, and there was about a 20 minute line just to get in and pay your 10 pound admission. Unless you were a worshipper. Wow. It is one of the largest domes in the world, and the naves and transepts are fantastically ornate and gorgeously baroque. The paintings and frescoes and mosaics picturing the various Apostles are lush and understated. The scale of the place is humbling.


The interior dome of St. Paul's seen from the transept. It some three hundred feet high, and massive


Outside St. Paul's

I spent a great deal of time in the crypt, after I explored the sanctuary, side chapels, organ room. I saw the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, Christopher Wren, and William Blake's (God bless his soul) tombs and monuments.

Aside from some bishops, poets, artists, and cardinals, the statues and memorials are largely for British war heroes who seemed, many of them, to have died heroically in obscure wars and battles, mainly--so far as I could read--defending or working to acquire more colonial real estate back in the days of the British Empire. The inscriptions on the statues are hilariously bombastic, florid, and jingiostic. Marcel Proust or Faulkner would have been bollixed trying to unravel some of these fantastic paragraphs of hero-worshipping verbiage!

Next, I sat in on a morning service in the nave. There are no pews (it really would spoil the effect of that vast, gleaming marble floor), just solid, ordinary chairs. They did have kneeling pads attached to the back. It was the usual mumbo jumbo, someone in red robes fiddling with water and wine at the altar, getting everything ready for the big Kahuna to stride in in his starched white habliments to say mass and communion.

I dropped by the store, and picked up a book about Henry the 8th's wives, and another one on the Blitzkreig. After that I started climbing the stairs up to the Whispering gallery, about 300 steps up. Whew. I didn't go all the way to the outside dome at top (with it's excellent views of London). It wasn't so much that I didn't want to climb anymore, as my fear of exposure at great height. I didn't want to lean on that rail! I trudged back down after circling the entire dome (where a whisper can be heard a hundred feet away), and spent some more time staring up at the ceiling and the dome.

view down the nave of St. Paul's grand altar

I left St. Paul's after about two and a half hours and stopped for quick double espresso at a cart outside (my first decent coffee this whole trip). I walked the couple of blocks to the millenium bridge, or as the locals call it, the Wobbling Bridge [1] and cross the River Thames. It was filled with boats--both private and tourist. I was tempted to hop on one of the tour boats. Well, not that tempted.

Just a block from the Wobbling Bridge, I arrived at the Tate Modern museum. First I visited the Picabia-Man Ray-Marcel DuChamp show. It was good, but I've never been a huge fan of any of them except for DuChamp's magnificent and kaleidoscopic "Nude Descending A Staircase."

I spent a lot more time in the set of galleries they call "Poetry and Dreams" with its unique way of showing contemporary art growing from and reconnecting with art of the past.

A large room in the center of this cluster of galleries is devoted to Surrealism, and the nearby galleries show other artists who responded to or rebelled against Surrealism, and explored deeper into dreams and archetypes. Surrealist techniques such as free association and weird symbolism have been reinvented in new and sometimes bizarre contexts. I love this stuff! I saw a lot of great paintings today, and a lot of new paintings I was not familiar with before today.

A Miro canvas from the Dreams and Poetry galleries

A colored realist concrete sculpture by Peter Peri--it's larger than life

The Tate Modern is fairly close to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, so I decided to go for a "twofer." Other than knowing Shakespeare once trod there, it wasn't really much different than, say, the Elizabethan theatre in Ashland, Oregon. I'd love to see a play there some day.

After the Globe, I walked back across The Wobbly Bridge toward the subway. I got off at the Tottenham stop near Oxford Street to go to a couple of record stores, and a touristy t-shirt store, where I bought a Union Jack, and a t-shirt for my son Del. It was getting late, and I went
back to my hotel, fagged, and knackered, as they say here.

[1] The day the Queen opened the bridge in 2000, thousands of Londoners walked on it the first time. Their synchronized footfalls caused the bridge to wobble frighteningly (think about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge a/k/a Galloping Gertie, and its collapse). CNN wrote about the Seven Million Dollar Fiasco:

LONDON, England -- London's Millennium Bridge has re-opened to the public after a £5 million ($7 million) repair programme to correct a wobble which forced its closure after just three days. The bridge - described as a "blade of light" by promoters - was inaugurated by the Queen in May 2000. The bridge was described as a "blade of light" More than 160,000 people crossed the bridge during its opening weekend during which the swaying effect was noticed. The extreme wobble meant the bridge had to be closed after fears for public safety. Those who had made it across said they had been surprised by the swaying sensation, comparing the vibration to the feeling of sea-sickness. They later fixed the problem by adding a series of shock absorbers to the bridge.


The Wobbling Bridge in an AP file photo after
is was re-opened and pronounced "safe"
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