The last six days have whipped by, the first slow at times
and the last three all too fast. We parked up outside Chris’s sister’s
semi-attached house in Elmswell for three nights after travelling down in the
dense fog from Norwich, the trip otherwise uneventful, and our return warm and
welcome. I made the most of the domestic facilities to catch up with laundry
and we marvelled at how much colder the motorhome was when it was only used at
night as a sleep-out.
One day we dined out at the pub in the next village where
Margie’s youngest daughter had recently been employed as manager; a watery sun
was shining which suggested dining al fresco was in order, a preference
influenced by the fact we were accompanied by another of Margie’s daughters and
her very cute little Westie, Hamish.
Our last evening in Suffolk was spent over at Chris’s
nephew’s house, a recently renovated and very trendy terrace house in a smart
part of Bury St Edmunds. Andrew proved to be an excellent host, an even better
cook and we three, his father, his aunt, uncle and aunt-in-law, left well fed
and wined.
We left the following morning after having stripped the van
of borrowed linen and left remaining food and other bits and pieces for Margie.
Mavis had to be left for Donna to collect from her grandmother’s so we
travelled down to London with a list of roads, turnings and roundabouts I had
compiled from maps, also borrowed. Apart from the trip being slow through the
heavy fog, all went well and we fronted up at Motorholme’s Brentwood depot long
before the pumpkin hour of 11 am. Ben was as efficient as he had been on pick
up, but easier on the personality stakes; perhaps we had simply caught him on a
bad day. We asked about a taxi to the nearest train station, that at Upminster,
hoping he would offer to drop us himself; instead he made a telephone call for
us and we were soon on our way, soon joining the throngs piling onto the train
down through the outskirts of London, past high rise ghettos, and the scenery
one gets from the rail as opposed to the more attractive road entrance.
Construction, renovation and repair is going on everywhere
in London, and so for us as tourists on foot carting heavy luggage was a
nightmare. We dragged our bags up flights of stairs and down others until we
found ourselves on the Underground Rail to emerge at Victoria Station, where we
wound our way around safety barricades, turning one direction, then another,
all without a compass and making for a long winding route to our hotel.
The streets on the Pimlico side of Victoria are quite
charming, lined with neat terrace houses, smart entrances and the odd “square”,
a small green area to break the monotony of residential rows.
Our hotel had been selected, booked and paid for based entirely
on cost, offering bed and breakfast, coffee making and en suite facilities,
this appearing to be suitable for our needs. “Needs” were duly met by this
budget hotel and we found the hosts, an Indian man and his extended family of
United Nations, all warm and friendly. The sheets were clean, the towels fresh
each day, the television functioned and there was space for our luggage to be
opened providing we utilised the bed and took turns. Alas the plumbing was
appalling; the shower only just functional, the hand basin hot tap out of
order, the cold offering but a dribble of water. The rooms, bathroom and
bedroom, were so much in need of paint, that good cleanliness was impossible.
Oh, and I omitted to mention that our room was below street
level! Breakfast was in a room close by, a room also desperately in need of upgrade,
consisting of cereal, milk, copious quantities of freshly toasted wafer-thin
white bread. Filter coffee washed it all down and the crowd of French school
children added to the communal experience.
In fact the number of French school children all about the
city, or more specifically, at all the tourist attractions we visited, amazed
us. They, unlike the English children, obviously did not enjoy their “vacances”
immediately around Easter.
On the afternoon of our arrival, we took the train back to
Tower Hill and spent the entire afternoon at the Tower of London, along with
several thousand others. I had always thought the Tower was simply that, a
tower in which historical traitors were held before being beheaded; how wrong I
was.
The Tower of London, or more correctly, her Majesty’s Royal Palace
and Fortress, is a historic castle located on the north bank of the River
Thames, built by William the Conqueror in 1078, the first royal palace. It has
played a prominent role in English history, besieged several times, served as
an armoury, a treasury, a menagerie, the home of the Royal Mint, a public
records office and the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. It has
been a prison, both short and long term, from 1100 for Bishop Ranulf Flambard
until 1952 when the Kray twins were incarcerated here.
I was amazed at the extent of the castle; we spent hours
wandering about the White Tower, a structure of three storeys high, the Norman
Chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, the outer and inner walls, and so much more. We
queued for such a long time to view the Crown Jewels, standing in a long snake
of people of all nationalities and ages, and filed through a labyrinth of
darkened rooms to see elaborate jewellery and crowns, flamboyant and appalling.
(I am not a bling girl and struggle to see beyond the reality to grasp the
symbolic.)
We took a free walking tour led from one part of the
location to another by John, a recently employed ex-servicemen, now a
Beefeater, one of thirty seven who all live within the precinct. We heard
stories of kings and queens, bishops and pirates, beheadings and burials. We
learned that kings through the ages had kept a Royal Menagerie from at least as
early as 1251 when a polar bear was kept to entertain. The collection swelled
to include elephants, monkeys, leopards, in fact in 1828 there were over 280
animals representing at least sixty species.
We stayed until we were ordered to leave and returned to our
salubrious hotel to ready ourselves for dinner, the first night at a hotel
restaurant just up the road from our own.
Our second day in London, the first of the two full days,
was spent in the Tate Modern art gallery, walking across the River Thames on
the Millennium Bridge, along the Embankment, visiting Westminster Abbey,
Westminster Parliament and Westminster Cathedral, the last the only one we
actually went right into, since this is free.
This was a surprise; I had not realised that there was an
Abbey and a Cathedral of the same name; Westminster, although I had wondered
where the main Catholic church was in the city. Here it seems that there is
little attention paid by the lay people as to who or what is Anglican or
Catholic, or at least this is the attitude of my dear husband.
I was delighted to discover this relatively new structure,
construction started in 1895. It is the largest Catholic Church in England and
Wales and the seat of the Archbishop of Westminster.
My distant kinsman, the late poet-laureate John Betjeman,
called it “a masterpiece in striped brick and stone in an intricate pattern of
bonding, the domes being all brick in order to prove that the good craftsman
has no need of steel and concrete”.
For me, it reminded me of the churches I saw in Geraldine
and Mullewa, in Western Australia, those designed by Monsignor John C Hawes.
The whole building, in stripy Neo-Byzantine style covers an area of 5,017m2, a
massive structure semi-complete in order than each generation to come through
the ages may add something to the final project. Many of the side chapels are
elaborately decorated and on further exploration, I found the cathedral to be
more ornate than first impressions. The good news for the tourist is that entry
is free although there are numerous donation boxes about inviting spare change
or more, and there is a charge for the lift to the top of the 274 foot tapered
campanile, a luxury we did not allow ourselves.
As regards our visit to the Tate; we had debated at length
as to which art gallery or museum should be part of our tour, given the limited
time, and it was the Tate Modern that won, for me in part because I remembered
my step-daughter singing its praises when she went about fourteen years ago.
Since learning that the Modern was opened only in 2000, made it all the more
interesting that she and her husband were there in its genesis.
The Tate is an institution that houses the UK’s national
collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is
a network of four art museums: Tate Britain, London, known as the Tate
Gallery until 2000 (founded in 1897), Tate Liverpool (founded 1988), Tate St Ives, Cornwall
(founded 1993) and Tate Modern, London (founded 2000). Tate is now a government
institution, but its main sponsor is the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport.
The gallery was founded in 1897, as the National Gallery of
British Art, when its role was changed to include the national collection of
modern art as well as the national collection old British art. In 1932, it was
renamed the Tate gallery after sugar magnate Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle, who
had laid the foundations for the collection. The Tate Gallery was housed in the
current building which is situated in Millbank, London near the Pimlico
Underground Station. In 2000, the Tate Gallery transformed itself into the
current-day Tate, or Tate Modern, which consists of a group of four museums:
Tate Britain, which displays the collection of British art from 1500 to the
present day; Tate Modern, which is also in London, houses the Tate’s collection
of British and International modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the
present day. Tate Liverpool has the same purpose as Tate Modern but on a
smaller scale, and Tate St Ives displays modern and contemporary art by artists
who have connections with the area. All four museums share the Tate Collection.
One of the Tate’s most publicised art events is the awarding of the annual
Turner Prize, which take place at Tate Britain, where the Turner Collection is
also housed.
That afternoon we walked and walked for an unknown number of
kilometres, all the way back to the Victoria Station and on to our hotel, having
used our Rail Oyster card hardly at all.
The next day was mainly about finding our way to the Opera
House and enjoying our rather special day. We checked the weather forecast on
our cellphones and found that we need not bother with heavy jackets or wet
weather gear, a relief since we wished to travel as lightly as possible. We
found our way through to the Covent Garden’s station, changing at Green Park,
emerging not too far from the Covent Garden Markets which were still in
preparation mode. I purchased a pretty scarf from one of the well prepared
stalls, bought too large coffees at
Starbucks and resolved never to buy anything larger than a small coffee should
we find the need to patronise the franchise again, then made our way to the
ticket office, dodging cold blustery showers all the while and cursing the
unreliable forecast.
The matinee of Madam Butterfly was just wonderful, the Opera
House impressive enough even without such an excellent production. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was first staged in
1904, with little success, but in more modern times, and certainly after he
rehashed it in those first years, it has become one of the most popular for the
average opera goer (average in so far as excluding the educated and discerning
critics). Madame Butterfly was the first opera I ever attended, in my life and
with my husband. Here at Covent Garden I learned it was the only opera Chris had
ever attended before at that venue; here I was thinking we were having a
unique experience together!
We emerged to great
crowds, out into a watery sunshine and decided there was still enough time to
take in another tourist destination, so joined the river of people flowing to
the Underground at Leicester Square, travelled on the warren of rail travel to
Pimlico, walked along the embankment to the Tate British. We had just less than
two hours to explore this gallery which warrants at least a day, especially if
one wanders about as we do. We hunted out the Turner Collection, something we
might have done had we not seen the recent film titled “Turner” but now even
more determined to do. Truth be told,
even as we rushed about from one gallery to another, faster in some than
others, this, the Tate Britain appealed more than the Modern. I am an old
fashioned girl after all!
We had bought our Oyster cards on the advice of a very
helpful woman in the Victoria Station ticket office, who had assured us that we
could seek a refund of the card cost as well as any travel credits remaining,
something that surprised and delighted us. Alas there was no manned (or wo-manned)
office at Pimlico, so we caught the train back to Victoria and the promises
were realised; we came away with money in our pockets and minus our plastic
travel cards, something that would have suited us very well in the main
Australian cities (we are still carrying about our public transport cards for
Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney)!
With this new found wealth, we headed off to an Italian
restaurant just up the road from our hotel, O Sole Mio, where we had an excellent
two course meal accompanied by a bottle of their house wine, which came to a
lower price than the previous night; dinner at a local Thai restaurant recommended
by our hotel host, he a man who seeks commissions on referrals to all tours,
restaurants or transfers.
Back here at the hotel we packed our bags, organised a wakeup
call, set our own alarm clock and will now head for bed. The days ahead will be
ragged, but we are well satisfied we have made the most of the days available
to us here in London.
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