Leaving Belgium for the UK was a convoluted day of travel. First we had to drive the Opel Porridge (I think that was the name) to the city named after everyone’s least favourite Xmas lunch vegetable, where we boarded the Eurostar train to cross the channel. I was a little more cunning and happily volunteered the window seat to Jo on the assumption it would allow me to plead equity and get a window seat on the plane trip home. Yet to see if the plan worked, but here is the view from the Eurostar as it crosses the channel.
After the Eurostar we transferred from the St Pancreas Station (I couldn’t be bothered fighting autocorrect over the name) to Kings Cross to board the Tube to Heathrow where we caught a shuttle bus to an airport hotel. Why weren’t we living it up in some luxury digs in Mayfair? It seems there is some tennis match is coming up and all the hotels are full. So we spent 2 nights in 2 star crap hole out at the airport for 5 star prices. I can’t whine too much, we have had a good run so far by booking day to day on booking.com.
So the next day we tubed back into town to visit the sites we were too cheap to visit last time.
We started with Westminster. Now I am a guy who travels regularly to Jakarta, but I will admit I was twitchy the whole time we were around Westminster and not sheltered by some sort of substantial masonry. So it was with a little dismay that we stood out in the open at the end of a very long queue.
So after parting with a substantial wad of fun coupons (not for the last time that day either) we entered Westminster Abbey. While they do provide the full audio guide experience (not quite as sophisticated as the Monash Centre, but still very good), there are signs everywhere saying ‘no photo’s! Now prior to this trip I was under the impression it was some sort of church or cathedral, but in reality it is really a vertically integrated graveyard. As soon as we stepped in the door we found we were standing on greats:
‘
There was no way I was leaving without a photo of Darwin’s grave. I snuck these photo’s in, but they were soon onto me.
There is a form of discrimination at Westminster. All the physicists are behind a velvet rope (Newton, Rutherford, Hawking etc), while the Biologists like Darwin and Florey are our where the public walk all over them. No justice there! Yes it’s all very good we can fly to the moon and have TV to watch, but it would be all to no avail if you were dead from Sepsis.
So we wandered around for 2 hours keeping out of the rain and trying to pick the graves of the good and the great out from amongst all those people whose greatest achievement was brown nosing a King or being related to one. It was delightful.
But with St Paul’s you get the special bonus of being able to climb up through the dome (somewhere between 500 and 600 steps and rungs). Now this doesn’t sound like fun, and it isn’t, but it is very interesting seeing the way a cathedral is built. For avid viewers of documentaries on the ABC, the dome of St Paul’s is famously created as a double wall with a gap in between. The stairs make their way up through the gap and you see how the whole thing was built. Along the way I observed a surprising amount of Oak holding the whole thing up, some of which had seasoned with some rather large splits. I was expecting more stone and brick myself – in the photo you can see some big oak beams bracing the dome. I didn’t mention the splits to Jo as she wasn’t looking that comfortable with the vertical spiral staircases anyway.
But eventually you get to the tippy top. Here is Jo with what can best be described as a ‘rictus grin’ as she is not all that happy with heights. To illustrate the feat, there is a photo below of the dome from ground level and if you zoom in you can see people right up near the gold bit at the top. That was us.
Now Westminster, while full of the great and good, is also stocked full of the bodies of those aforementioned who simply happened to be related to, or good buddies with, the king of the day. St Paul’s is a little more discerning and has some of the big names like Wellington and Nelson. I put Nelson in for brother Chris because I know the Navy have their heroes too. We need the Navy, someone has to transport the Infantry.
But what was really fascinating about St Paul’s is that since it was built after the fire of London it is relatively new. All the bling is still bright and shiny and you get a real impression of what a cathedral should look like when you keep the maintenance up Note to Italy – lift your game. (Probably a little unfair, Italy is full of conservators cleaning cathedrals at an excruciatingly slow rate with a wet paintbrush – and I bet they need a PhD for that).
So the next day we hit the road in another rental It was a good Asian made Hyundai Santa Fe this time. It drove well but curiously was still a manual gearbox, they must make them specially for Europe.
I believe the English rural scenery is meant to be quite nice, but at the beginning of summer when all the hedgerows have had a few months of solid growth, mostly we were driving through a green ditch and couldn’t see a thing.
When I go anywhere new I do enjoy examining the Geology and the Botany, it’s a great filter to view the world through. In Europe the Botany is more a product of the Geology than in most places. Only 10,000 years ago, just about everything Jo and I travelled through was either glacial ice, gravel, or tundra at best. In Australia our bush looked pretty well the same is it does now, just sometimes in different places. So in the last 10,000 years most of Europe was a clean sheet that had to be repopulated from Asia and Africa and remnants down along the Mediterranean Sea. (Europe isn’t a real continent, it’s really just the western edge of Asia.) On top of this, Humans have been busy managing the landscape for the last couple of thousand years. So when we look at the English forest below, we are not seeing a mature ecology, but something still changing. There aren’t the big canopy trees and layered forests that we have, the English forests are mostly what we would think of as understory species, especially if you chop down and use the Oak trees to make a navy. So when convicts and settlers first landed somewhere like Tasmania and South Gippsland, it must have truly freaked them out. No experience of the English scrub could have prepared them for it. But it does growth thick and lush.
**********************************************
We managed to pick a nice gap in the weather when we took our turn to stop by and visit Bob out at Sutton Veny. As previously reported by others, everything was in pristine order and the locals have done an excellent job of looking after our boys. Warminster, the main town nearby is a long time Garrison town (even the Romans used it and the Army are still there) so there is no doubt they appreciate the need to care for our diggers. The church is surprisingly large and ornate for such a little village and is big enough to have a side chapel dedicated to the AIF. But a word of warning to those who like us may consider stopping in Warminster for breakfast or lunch – never eat a Wiltshire pastie. It’s like a real pastie but with the contents blended into a paste. Bleah!
Anyway, here is Bob’s grave under his tree. I did apologise for not dropping in last year for his centenary as originally planned, but stuff got in the way. The flag was from a previous visitor.
And then on to Bath to get our Jane Austen on. Our digs were rather nice, we were in the beige building.
Now my dearly beloved has some surprisingly strong opinions on town planning (strange for a woman with an orange house with blue trim). And Bath certainly fits her ‘somewhere on the spectrum’ world view of uniformity and order. Here you will see a couple of photos of Jo celebrating Bath’s endlessly variable architecture.
One of these 28 houses has a Yellow door! Splitters…….
Note to Melbourne – you can make Apple toe the line.
Thanks to Jane Austen (and more notably Colin Firth’s role as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice), it is now acceptable to stare out the window, focused on the middle distance, saying nothing and if you do it in a place like Bath, it is considered Romantic! This is a role I have a lifetime of training for and I think I pulled it off admirably. So after a suitably romantic dinner we retired to our ornately furnished room only to be woken by dawn streaming through the huge Georgian windows at 4:30. WTF? I’m in marketing, I didn’t even know there was a 4:30……
So after a lovely English breakfast we hit the main attraction – The Roman Baths. Unfortunately we were accompanied by about 4,000 Italian schoolchildren. Why you would take Italian schoolchildren to England to see Roman ruins, I really don’t know. Perhaps it is some sort of long term strategy to keep the EU together (if they really do Brexit, we can get them back in with a couple of Legions, we did it before).
Then off to Avebury – the ‘thinking mans Stonehenge’. Being exactly mid-summer, almost every flower child and wannabe Druid in Britain was heading for Stonehenge. So we snapped a photo from the road and moved on. It’s smaller than you think.
Along the way we saw a Horsey on a hill.
Now when we got to Avebury, which according to Wikipedia is Europe’s biggest Neolithic site with a full on ‘Henge’, they were getting ready for a big night of ‘communing with nature’ for the Summer Solstice. We happened to time it for the biggest night of the year for new age druids. The communing must be pretty full on because they had bussed cops in from everywhere.
Now we should put this achievement of our ancient forbears in some context. About 40,000 years after the Aboriginals were able to construct watercraft substantial enough to sail their families across open ocean over the horizon to cross the Wallace Gap separating Australia from Asia, our ancestors stood some rocks up in a ring and danced around naked. Makes you think.
Out amongst the rocks we could see lot’s of flower children and wood sprites connecting with their earth mothers (or some such). There was a lot of rock hugging going on, which made the Police presence looked a little heavy, but they had also fenced off the pub the same way they do the Dan O’Connell on St Patrick’s day, so it must liven up later. But looking at the amount of cheesecloth and crystal pendants in the crowd, I hope no one turns up with measles as resistance will be low here.
I gave rock hugging a try, but I’m not sure Jo put her heart into it.
With our 3 week Odyssey almost over and having communed with our ancient forbears, it was time to turn for home. But on the way to the airport we had time for one last really important site. Right under the flight path for Heathrow is Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed. Really strangely, it seems the Magna Carta memorial was installed by American lawyers. It certainly isn’t a local design.
so on signing off I would like to make a final note for those interested in our journey through the Western Front and the answer to a question that I know has bugged a lot of people. We checked the registry at Tyne Cot, the largest cemetery on the western Front and the registry at the Menin Gate where the bulk of those with unknown graves are memorialised. You will be pleased to know they we couldn’t find either Captain Blackadder nor Private Baldrick, so it looks like they survived.