London Diary Day Six - Dons and Bards

It was another day of bus trips, which meant happy napping. Lots of snoring going on between the stops. The first stop was Cambridge, home of musty colleges that make American Ivy League schools look like communes. If it weren't for a student going back to her dorm in her bright red spiked hair and fur boots, I'd think I'd set onto the set of a Harry Potter movie, and I may have.

The second stop was Stratford-Upon-Avon where we saw Anne Hathaway's cottage. Anne was Shakespeare's wife who inherited his "second best bed." I went ahead and asked. His best bed went with the house to his daughter and son-in-law. In the town itself, we toured his boyhood home which is only a little more than five hundred years old.

Back in London, we finished off our must-do checklist with a nighttime ride on the world's biggest Tacky Tourist Attraction, the London Eye. The only thing I didn't get to do on this trip that I wanted to do was to have that pina colada at Trader Vic's. Gives me an excuse to go back and look for Lon Cheney Jr walking with the queen. AAAAH-OOOOOOOH!

London Diary Day Five - The Blitz

With time running short on our visit and with just one day left of unscheduled touring, we had to hit our list of must-do sites hard. The morning covered St. Paul's Cathedral, the Globe Theater, and Tate Modern.

In the afternoon we headed over to the British Museum and Harrods. While it may seem sacrilegious to mention both in the same sentence, they are similar in many ways. Both are over-the-top unimaginably vast archetypes of their respective niches. The British Museum proudly displays the fruits of centuries of imperial exploration and conquest. Harrods, on the other hand, is the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption marketing run amuck. My wife chided me for gasping in horror at a purse that was 985 pounds (price not weight).

The evening took us to The 39 Steps, a very British comedy. It had to be British because it included one guy playing multiple female roles. They've loved that cross-dressing thing since at least Shakespeare.

Since it was Saint Patrick's Day, I celebrated with a double shot of Bumiller and then a pint of cider. I did hear the bartender jokingly warn one of the female customers that no snogging was allowed at the bar. Good advice for life as well.

London Diary Day Four - Ancient History

The tour director kept telling us to take our minds back in time five thousand years as we approached Stonehenge. The gusty cold rain helped us get in that mood as we walked around the circular out cropping of rocks that had been standing there since the pyramids were built. While the Egyptians were putting those up, Bronze Age Celts were making giant pi signs aimed at the winter solstice. Modern day hippies and New Age nuts take over the site on Summer Solstice because the weather is better then. I don't blame them.

Then it was onto the Roman Baths at, duh, Bath. At the edge of the Roman Empire they had built a luxurious spa resort that fell into ruins when the Visigoths and Vandals drew all the legions back to Rome about 400 AD. The area lay in ruins for over a millennia (which is a long time to go without a bath) until the 1700s brought the area back into fashion.

And it's not a trip to Bath without walking the steps of the Jane Austen costume dramas set there. We had afternoon tea at the Jame Austen Center before napping on the bus ride back to London.

To bring ourselves back into the present, we went to the pub behind the hotel and one of us had a whiskey drink, my wife had a lager drink, and I had a cider drink. We all fell down but got up again.

London Diary Day Three - Rocking The Tower

So far the weather has lived down to all expectations. It has rained sometime every day. It stayed clear for our self-guided tour of Westminster Abbey, but after the afternoon romp through the Tower of London (most commonly heard phrase: "If I had known it was a full castle, I would have been more eager to see it.")

We walked across Tower Bridge without it falling down. The tale of London Bridge is too nerdy to go into.

There are two ways to get discount theater tickets in London. The have a half price TKTS booth just like New York and if the show doesn't have tickets there, there is a plethora of brokers surrounding the area. That is how we got tickets to We Will Rock You which is to Queen what Mamma Mia is to Abba and all that implies.

Looks like more rain for today. Ta-ta for now.

London Diary Day Two - The Queen And I

Day Two was the archetypal motor coach tour. We wheeled around London for the windscreen tour (Look Big Ben! Look Tower Bridge!) We did stretch our feet long enough for the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Horses and a band and lots of guys in silly uniforms marching down public streets.

Then it was off to Windsor Castle. Our Blue Badge (some sort of certification) tour guide gave us the 45 minute history of British royalty. Lots of guys named William and Charles and Henry. And many met a rather unpleasant end.

Windsor Castle exceeded expectations. It was both very castle-y and very royal. According to the flag pole, the queen was in residence. The paper says she spent the morning at nearby Heathrow dedicating a new terminal. I guess that' what queens do to earn their keep. If that keep includes astounding artwork, furnishings, and of course, real estate.

Back in London, after a long forced march with the kid portion of the tour group we saw Lord of the Rings: The Musical Comedy. The effects and costumes were fantastic, but even I'm getting jaded with the endless retelling of some sill guy with hairy toes that has a hard time getting rid of his jewelry. He should just give it to the queen, she has plenty and wouldn't mind a little more.

London Diary - Day One

We flew overnight int Heathrow Airport, leaving Dulles at 11 pm and arriving in London about 10 am. Which meant I got about five hours of sleep on the plane. England starts Daylight Savings Time (or British Summer Time as I'm told its called) for a few more weeks, so its a four hour difference right now.

We checked into our clean but tiny hotel room in the quaint neighborhood of Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames. Our tour guide is a big burly but friendly woman with a Phd in Medieval Studies. She sheparded us a on orientation ride through The Tube. From the Embankment Station we took a walking tour of Trafalger Square, Charing Cross, Chinatown and Covent Gardens.

In Chinatown I HAD to stop for a photo of at Lee Ho Fooks complete with Chinese menu in my hand. Those of us over 40 had to explain to the ones under 30 the mythological musical significance of this landmark. What are they teaching kids these days.

The evening meal was fish and chips and since we were all exhausted and turned in early. I watched several hours of really bad BBC. Just like I might have at home.

Time for breakfast. More updates to come.

Post 500

I don’t make a big deal of milestones on this blog because I just don’t pay that much attention. But when I noticed that I was approaching 500 posts, I took notice. Five hundred is a lot of anything. I don’t bicycle 500 miles in a summer. I own less than five hundred CDs (well maybe that many, I haven’t counted lately). Five hundred is two hundred more than the Spartans that stopped the Persians. Okay, those aren't good examples. Let's just say five hundred is a lot and leave it at that.

It’s taken me nearly three years to reach this milestone. Over the years I have waxed redundant on all sorts of pop cultural phenomena and strip mined my meager uneventful life for hopefully amusing anecdotes. My biggest fear is to start repeating myself. I often find myself putting together a particularly pithy phrase only to vaguely remember using it before. I'll use Google to check for prior art just to keep me from plagiarizing myself.

When you include the bon mots and vignettes I leave in the comments of other blogs or in the boodle of the Achenblog, I have a body of work that exceeds the ability of my rapidly declining memory to catalog. I fear that when I hit blogpost 5,000 sometime in the late fall of 2025, I will have become the doddering uncle that tells the same story at Thanksgiving dinner year after year.

I'm just daily astonished that the world is a big enough place that there exists a couple of dozen people willing to spend a couple of minutes a day just to check out what sort of disjointed ramblings I have most recently cobbled together.

And that is where it comes full circle. I never would have made it to 500 posts if I hadn't found my particular sad and demented but sociable niche of the blogging community. One of the odd virtues of the virtual world is that it can be an itimate and personal place. As those porchfront sages Ed and Frank used to say, "Thank you for your support."

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Am I deserving of kudos or am I just tooting my out of tune horn?

Welcome Achenblog Readers

Joel Achenbach was kind enough to link to my blog today, but he's not too savvy with the permalinks (bless his little old media heart). The articles he is referring to are:

Begging Forgiveness
and
Asking Permission
in that order. Just hit the back button after reading each and you will be returned here. If you want to read more of my intermittent ramblings on intellectual property, check out the plagiarism tag.

This post will self-destruct in 36 hours.