Milk and Churches

It is quite a work, developing the English. I mean, they've only been around for a thousand years or so, since the French liberated them from themselves. That's a powerful lot of cultural resistance to overcome, yes?

But Ilse and I are the ones for the job. After a gawdawful flight over--the coots behind us were in the bulkhead row, and kept whining loudly about how much we were reclining our seats, and kneeing us in the back and, in a couple of cases, pushing our seats upright as hard as they could while we were asleep--we arrived at Heathrow, which is one of the world's finest examples of how not to be an airport.

Heathrow is approximately the size of Nevada. It is poorly signed, and rife with pickpockets and Immigration agents. My worst fear was not realized when no Customs folk stopped me, demanding to know why I was smuggling a diamond ring into the country. We drew a stunningly indifferent taxi driver who decided that the best way to whisk us into central London was to take the most traffic-choked streets possible, along routes that would reveal none of the grandeur of England to Ilse, a first-time visitor. Thanks, you clueless gob of Cockney spit.

Upon arrival at the hotel, my second-worst fear was realized, and our room was not yet ready. So we dumped our considerable load of baggage and headed off into the streets. Off we went to the Tube station at Tottenham Court Road, around the corner from our hotel, and into the bowels of the City so that I could show her some sights. We wandered around down by the river, and I showed her that clock thing and that Parliament thing and that river and Trafalgar Square (Lord Viscount Nelson still, thankfully, faces France) we stumbled back to the hotel around two, exhausted. A lengthy nap and a shower refreshed us so much that I was emboldened before dinner, and Did That Thing.

That Thing being that I fished around clumsily in my bag, and whipped out the ring, and said something very much like, "Look! Ring! Marry!" After a brief interlude during which we established that yes, it was possible that my name was Thag and that my intent was very likely for there to be, somewhere in that statement, a question, Ilse cut me some slack and said yes, although it's still unclear what she thinks she said yes to. She seems to be nonargumentative when I refer to her as my fiancee, though, so I guess it worked.

But this is travelogue. We had a lovely dinner with our friend Doctor Death (his full name is Whisper of Death, but he is an Actual Doctor of something more impressive than the rest of our intellects combined and, for this purpose, we'll go with the short form) at a really cool Chinese restaurant called Poon's, up near Russell Square (between Russell and Tavistock Squares, for anyone without the good grace to get here while we're still around, but still deserving of a good meal despite being schedulifically challenged).

The next day, with Ilse recovered and me still thrashing about in jetlag, we met up with Doctor Death and headed off to the Number One site on anyone's London list, the Tower of London. The Tower is officially, as you may know, a Royal Palace, run by gentlemen in Elizabethan uniforms. These gentlemen are colloquially known as the Beefeaters, and formally known as Yeoman Warders. A Warder of the Tower must have served 22 years in the British military and achieved the rank of sergeant-major; we're talking seriously Real Men here.

Warders are also among the funniest humans on the planet. They conduct tours for countless visitors to the Tower, and the tours consist of about 90 minutes of one yuk after another. Much is made of the Tower's bloody history; it has served for a thousand years as a prison for state criminals, and as an execution ground. When I first visited the Tower two years ago, our warder was a guy named George; his schtick was that every time he'd tell us of a beheading, he'd pronounce the sentence: HEX-eh-KEWSHUN! George had, apparently, been late to work that morning for the first time in his seven years as a Warder; every time another Warder passed by, he'd sing out, "Good morning, George! Bit to drink last night?"

This year, Doctor Death and Ilse and I enjoyed the company of a pleasant enough fellow named Simon, who had no particular schtick, but was generally entertaining enough. He cut our tour short, because the tour ends at the Tower's chapel, and it was Sunday and services were going on. He invited us to join another tour at the point where he ended ours, after services were done.

And that's how we met Yeoman Warder Paul. Our time with Paul was short, in the range of a half hour, but in that time, this fine gentleman sung out the phrase, "blood drippin' from th' 'eadless body!" no fewer than four times. I'm going to adopt it as a catchphrase. He was also big on telling us about less well-managed executions, to wit: "'is 'ead was still attached to the body by spine and gristle and sin-yew, and the hexecutioner 'ad to pull out a knife, which 'e kept for just such an eventuality, and pull up the 'ead and sever it from the body while the traitor's very life gooshed out over the block." Paul finished the tour by telling us that his name was Paul, unless we hadn't enjoyed our tour, in which case his name was Allen.

Yeah, it's hard to believe I feel a need to develop other countries, innit?

Monday we took a boat ride to Greenwich, which you may know as the center of the universe. No, really. It's the location of the zero meridian, zero degrees longitude, and there's a little statue and a line that you can straddle so you're standing in both hemispheres at once. Ilse did that, as I took her picture, and it was only disturbing because she was bouncing up and down and moaning as she straddled the line. Okay, that would've been less disturbing if she'd kept her shorts on.

The day was also notable because I managed to get a sunburn. In London. I was not aware that this was within the realm of physical possibility, but apparently I'm just ignorant. Sunburn. My head. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Tuesday was War Day One. We had hoped to do the rounds of three of the four war places in one day--the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, and the Royal Air Force Museum. The Imperial War Museum, however, stopped us cold, taking up the whole day, or at least a day's worth of tourist energy. I've nothing to report about it, really, except that it's unbearably cool, like the totally coolest military museum on the planet, bar none, and I'd really have nice things to say about the British Empire if I weren't a Scots/Welsh separatist whose favorite toast is "Up the Queen."

Which is funny, because my great-great-grandmother, or maybe one of her sisters, is reputed to have been a very much English wet nurse in the Royal Household of Victoria and Albert. This was particularly screamingly funny today, because on a long wander about the area of Whitehall and the Palace, we came upon the Victoria Memorial, a giant hulking dropping of marble and bronze statuary directly opposite the gates of Buckingham Palace. Vickie herself is the centerpiece, of course, but around the other side is a giant stone carving of some Royal Wet Nurse with babies at her breast. That? Spoke to me.

We also saw today the Horse Guards Parade, the Cabinet War Rooms, and Westminster Abbey.

Ilse was so darned cute at the Horse Guards Parade. When we got back to the hotel and I downloaded her day's crop of photographs onto this very laptop, I couldn't help noticing that she took ten pictures today, and six of them involved men in silly Napoleonic uniforms astride giant, heaving, hulking mounts of pulsating equine flesh. Fortunately for me, horses are notoriously poor at paying the mortgage. My finest moment during the ceremony (which is, really, quite precise and impressive) came when one of the mounts forgot his potty training. It must suck to be in the cavalry.

The Cabinet War Rooms are the rooms under Whitehall from which Winston Churchill ran Britain's part of the Second World War. It includes a pretty fabulous museum about Churchill himself. Turns out that other than being a pretty fine conductor of a world war, Winnie was mostly an opportunistic pig who changed parties twice in his career, opposed Indian self-government, and supported Edward VII during the abdication crisis of 1936. However, he also spearheaded, early in his political career, a remarkable series of social, labor, and economic reforms. He apparently did all of this to show up and/or impress his father, and died as perhaps the most beloved non-Royal figure in English history.

Which certainly shows up in where they buried him; he's the last stone you walk over as you exit Westminster Abbey, where something like 3,500 dead Britons live. I've been lucky enough to visit England and France a total of four times in the last three years, so I'm pretty inured to this whole medieval cathedral thing. But I gotta say, these Euros certainly know how to kiss God's ass. The gilt and the stonework and the stained glass and the Latin and the burying people in the freakin' floor...it would be a lot more breathtaking if I didn't have some weird switch inside me that says, "Hey, you're in Europe! Better go visit some seriously old churches!"

Tomorrow: Saint Paul's.