London

adventures / history / London / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on A lovely little layover
26
May 26

A lovely little layover

We’ve landed, which is to be expected, and is the desired conclusion of a long plane ride. We flew overnight, which was the plan. I watched movies, all British things since we were on British Airways, which was the plan. I actually slept bit, which is surprising, since I’m bad at that, and airports are noisy and somewhat uncomfortable, even if you’re flying in the comfortable section, which we were, because that was a long overnight flight and we have tasted how the other half live.

We have come to a place which is not our destination. It has been our destination on previous trips. And it is pleasant enough. Also, they have the second most considerate sets of stairs anywhere — second only to escalators, which have the decency to move me around.

So we are in London. Which is the plan. Not the original plan. This is the secondary plan. Originally we were supposed to fly into Doha, but then the world happened and nothing was happening at the Doha airport, nothing good, anyway. So we re-booked, which made everyone happy. And we’re in London for the better part of a day.

The first idea was we could just stay in the airport, but we went a different route. We got our luggage, and then took it to a place in Heathrow where you can pay people to hold your things for you. We left our things with that business and I wondered how I would answer the old airport question about have my bags been in my control the entire time.

The entire length of time? No. For I am a mortal man with other hopes and dreams and wishes and preoccupations that have meant that, at some times, these things have not been under my careful and watchful eye. All of today? Also no, because there is a storefront downstairs where you can rent a locker for five pounds an hour or something, and who knows what they did to or with my stuff while I was in your beautiful, steamy city.

You don’t get asked those questions much anymore, though. Just as well. My desire to amaze myself with literal answers to rhetorical questions will get me in trouble one day.

So we dumped our bags at this place which has earned the approval of the airport and has, hopefully, carefully vetted their employees. We caught the train away from Heathrow and then caught the hop-on, hop-off bus. We did that after wandering around in the wrong direction two or three times, and then sitting for a while at a bus stop that wasn’t on the bus line. Also, it was quite hot in London. It was 35 C today, which is 95 degrees for American readers. That’s about 30 degrees higher than the seasonal average.

Don’t rush, indeed. Don’t rush, don’t sweat. Those stairs knew some stuff. We are, as they suggested, taking one step at a time.

Here’s the National Gallery, where the banner is enticing you to come in to see some of the works of Francisco de Zurbarán, a Spanish Baroque painter. He painted still-lifes and a lot of religious works.

The exhibition brings together works from major galleries across Europe and the US that span Zurbarán’s career from his first religious commissions to paintings made for private devotion. Stand in front of monumental works that can still move and inspire us today.

In the background is the beautiful St Martin-in-the-Fields. It first shows up in the written records in the 13th century, though they are celebrating the tricentennial of the current building this year. It’s been a proud centerpiece of Westminster for a long time, long before there was a Trafalgar Square, or before Nelson’s Column was installed.

Horatio Nelson’s column was built in the 1840s, made of Dartmoor granite. The statue of Nelson at the top was carved from Craigleith sandstone. It is 17 feet tall. There are four bronze relief panels, each 18 feet square, made from captured French guns. They depict the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, the Battle of the Nile, the Battle of Copenhagen and the death of Nelson at Trafalgar. This is the latter.

The sculptor of this one was John Carew, an Irishman who had a lot of work, but this is his most renowned. It depicts the death of Nelson. He was killed by a Frenchman aboard the Redoubtable as that ship and Nelson’s Victory tangled. Nelson’s unorthodox approach to the battle won the day, despite being outgunned and outnumbered. It ended French invasion plans, but otherwise did little to sway things in that particular war. He was, nevertheless, a hero. The column was refurbished in 2006, and found to be 169 feet and 3 inches tall from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of Nelson’s hat. That was a surprise. They seemed to think it should be some 14 feet taller.

I guess it never occurs to people to measure things.

One man who never forgot to measure was William Slim, who was a World War 2 hero. This statues was installed in the 1980s and it has the unnerving ability to look as if he has a different perspective from different angles.

He was wounded three times, twice in the Great War and again in World War II. He led the Fourteenth Army, the so-called “forgotten army” in the Burma campaign and rose to some considerable fame — beloved by his soldiers, respected by his peers, and duly honored by his country — which all became secondary after allegations of child sexual abuse while he was the governor-general of Australia (in the 1950s) emerged some years after his death.

The London Eye and the River Thames. The Eye is the world’s tallest cantilevered observation wheel, and the UK’s most popular paid tourist attraction. More than three million people a year take a ride. We did it several years ago.

And here’s the Queen Elizabeth Gate, or the Queen Mother’s Gate, guarding the entrance to Hyde Park. It was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 to celebrate the 90th birthday of The Queen Mother. The red lion and unicorn represent England and Scotland, respectively.

Still stands out, all these years later.

And so we rode around on the bus, until we decided we must leave the bus and march back to the train station, to ride the train back to Heathrow. We had to collect our bags, check back in, and then went to a lounge with showers. After a long hot day like this, that was the right plan. You get a private little fiberglass room, sink, toilet, shower, and a fold-down seat. It’s all cleaner than you might imagine, and it was necessary after a day in the heat, a night in a plane and so on.

Now we’re boarding another plane. But to where?

adventures / Auburn / baseball / cycling / family / Instagram / Italy / London / memories / photo / running / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Let’s go back in time
17
May 22

Let’s go back in time

Ten years ago I took this photograph, and published it on my Tumblr site. (Remember those?) This is the agapanthus, the African lily. From the Greek agape (love) + anthos (flower).

The plant is believed to have a hemolytic poison and can cause ulceration of the mouth. It does have other medicinal properties, however. There are about 10 species in the genus.

(Haven’t put anything on that Tumblr since November 2014. I wonder why? Probably just rightly remembered I should put everything here.)

Nine years ago I was at a baseball game, and the good guys won. We found our friend watching from a nearby parking deck.

(Happy times!)

Eight years ago we ran a triathlon in the morning, and watched a baseball game in the afternoon. (Good guys lost.) And I got Aubie to take a selfie on my camera.

(Happy times!)

Seven years ago we ran a 10K. I did it in brand new shoes.

This was a fundraiser in London, and on part of the route we ran around Wembley Stadium. The guy that won the race was an Egyptian Olympian. He lapped us. It was amazing to watch him run. He could not stick around to get his medal, they said, because he ran off to run another race. Long distance runners, man.

But look at this awesome bling!

(The next day we were in Paris. It was a whirlwind.)

Six years ago, plus one day …

I’ve never been able to eat watermelon without thinking about that. And I can’t eat watermelon without being a bit sad. Had some this morning, in fact.

Five years ago, boy, I was right about this one.

Four years ago, we were in Tuscany, specifically, Siena, and just one of the beautiful things we visited that day was the Duomo di Siena. In the 12th century the earliest version of this building starting hosting services, but there’d been a church on this spot for centuries by then. The oldest bell in the church was cast in 1149! These beautiful facades started appearing in the 1200s.

That was a grand trip. We’d do that one again, I’m sure.

Three years ago, the 17th was a Saturday, and we went on an easy bike ride.

Two years ago I apparently sat around and thought of little more than Covid. Remember the pandemic?

And last year at this time I was recovering from my first long drive in a year. We’d just come back from visiting my vaccinated family members. It had been my first drive out of the county in more than a year. It took a day or two to recover.

I did have a reason to re-use this gif, however.

The guy on the left is a sports director at a television station in Illinois now. The guy on the right is a 2L at a Washington D.C. law school. (We’re all going to work for one of them one day, I’m sure.)

So a bit of everything on this day in the last decade.

adventures / Alabama / family / Friday / history / London / maps / memories — Comments Off on Rocks and washing machines
16
Jul 21

Rocks and washing machines

I was gripped, a few years ago, by an article that made the case for the washing machine as the most important invention of the 20th century. Sure, you say, there’s also the refrigerator and the computer and/or the microchip. Penicillin, a discovery rather than an invention, doesn’t count.

The argument has been spelled out in many other newspaper opinion columns, in historical research and even in one of the 20th century’s oddest inventions, TED Talks. Simply put, doing the laundry was once an all day exercise. It was hard, backbreaking labor. It was almost exclusively ‘a woman’s job.’ And when the first powered washing machines came along, they freed up people, almost all of them women, to do other things. Probably it helped with their hand care, too.

I asked my grandmother about this article at some point. She always called it The Wash. If you heard her say it, you heard the capital T and capital W. The Wash. Do you remember, I said, a time before you had a washer and dryer?

“Of course,” she said, in that not-dismissive-but-entirely-obvious way that your elders can use on you.

I asked her when she got her first washer. It was when they’d built and moved into that very house, the only one I’d ever known my grandparents in. It was the 1950s. She was a young woman still starting a new family. The washer and dryer lived on the covered back porch. (Where the laundry connections are is almost a tell. Back porch, that’s hedging your bets on this technology at best, an afterthought at worst. In the two houses I grew up in the connections were in the basement. Out of the way, but inherently inconvenient. In our house today the laundry is upstairs, very near the bedrooms.)

I asked how she did The Wash before she had a washer and dryer. She took it down to the creek. Soap, boards, stones, the old antiquated thing. That’s just what you did. This is the middle of the 20th century.

Which is where my story gets a little foggy. My grandparents’ house was surrounded by a creek. It’s just a small bit of water that breaks off a larger waterway which is itself a slough of a tributary of the Tennessee River — and we talked about that yesterday. If you saw it on a map, my grandparents’ road and the creek almost make a four-way intersection. I started wandering through their woods at a young and early age, when some of those creeks looked like wild, untamable testaments of God and nature. And to my young mind that water was everywhere.

The water was nice. It was always cool, and it always looked clean. But it was never the water that interested me the most, it was the rocks.

Where I grew up was far enough away from my grandparents that the soil was, in places, noticeably different. All of my family lived in this area, a place around a massive river, where the water was a dominant element of everyday life. Having different topographical features where I grew up meant I spent a lot of time playing in the little streams and on the rocky shores.

On a physiographic map this is on something called the Highland Rim, the southernmost section of the Interior Low Plateaus of the Appalachian Highlands Region. By name and almost everything else, it’s a series of contradictions. It’s messy and beautiful.

How the underlying rocks erode in different ways define the area. The rocks formed during the Mississippian period (353 to 323 million ago. Explain that to a kid taken in by the many colors and the smooth polished feel that ages in the water have created.

I lived in a different physiographic region, a bit to the south, in the Valley and Ridge province. Our soil was exclusively clay and, to me, the rocks didn’t have the same sort of interesting character. Has to be that river, I always thought when I was young. I told you yesterday, the river figures into everything, so why not the rocks?

It actually has to do with the mountains.

Kaiser Science tells us:

The mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia turn out to be made of the same kind of rock, and formed in the same historical era.

Evidence shows that in the past all of these were one mountain system, torn by the moving of the tectonic plates – continental drift.

Put another way, if you like the hypothesis of continental drift, you look at this as a broken mountain range, making these mountains older than the Atlantic Ocean.

A few years ago, longer after the Atlantic Ocean was formed, we visited London and caught a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

There’s a lot of standing around and waiting and jockeying for position and wondering who you’ll see and what the bands will play. It’s good fun if you are patient, and you don’t mind crowds.

We walked to the palace, from wherever we’d been before, through Green Park, and we returned that same way. At one point there in the park I looked down and picked up this rock. It looked familiar. Looked like home.

I brought it back with me, and later took it to my grandmother.

The queen has the same rocks you do!

As ever, my enthusiasm was what amused her most.

If you look at that map, you can see it. The rocks you saw when you were doing chores are the same sort of rocks the queen of the United Kingdom was used to. Their rocks, your rocks, same kinds of rocks.

I wonder when the queen got her first washing machine.

adventures / history / London / maps / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on The tank banks
16
Jul 15

The tank banks

I saw this piggy bank at Stonehenge. At the time I had no idea about the history behind it, which is, like most history, rather interesting.

It comes from a World War 1 British fund raising campaign. Six tanks toured the countryside promoting war bonds. You have to remember this is in the fall of 1917 and tanks were still the high end of war marvels. The public was fascinated to see in person what they were just starting to read about.

The tank rolled in with soldiers and artillery alongside. Airplanes dropped pamphlets, speeches were made. The tank was put through its paces before spending several days in the town with a table inside where people were giving money. They raised millions of pounds, nationally. Soon a competition emerged to see which place could raise the most money and “win” a tank. West Hartlepool would win and Egbert — they do know how to name things, don’t they? — stayed in the town until it was scrapped in 1937.

After the war was over, the government gave 264 tanks to towns and cities in 1919. Most just rusted out over time and sold for scrap. All but one was gone before the end of World War II. The town of Ashford still has their tank, the only one left. It is now a registered war memorial, though without its engine or gearbox and with replica armaments. You can see the tank here:

That tank, one of 1,200 Mark IVs the British built for that particular war, is thought to have never seen combat. Only eight remain. The Mark IV carried a crew of eight and traveled at seven miles per hour.

adventures / Friday / links / London / memories / photo — Comments Off on In Tower Bridge
10
Jul 15

In Tower Bridge

Here are a few photos from a terrific day in London. See more of it here.

Except for the pedestrian sidewalk, I did not know you could walk across the Tower Bridge. You can do it indoors, across the top. And there are places where you can stand on a window and look down at the bridge and the Thames:

She did a handstand there, but I don’t have a copy of those pictures.

We walked across the pedestrian part of the bridge, too. Got photobombed for our troubles:

And here’s the bridge in the background, as seen from London Tower:

← Older Entries