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Hiya everyone, Here’s some more about the touristy things I’ve been doing in London the last few weeks. I went to the Tower of London and joined a guided tour. The Tower is at the heart of London’s history. The building of the stone structure standing today was originally started by William the Conqueror around 1078AD. It has been a prison, a palace, and a fort, the permanent location for the crown jewels, an army barracks, housing for staff and royalty, and a museum. Most of the Kings and Queens have added to, or altered, the premises during their reign. The tower’s history, like much of the Britain’s history, is rather gruesome and barbaric.  The tour guides are called Yeoman Warders or Beefeaters (don’t know why), and they have traditionally had a position at the castle dating back to the 14th Century, being involved in ceremonies and as guards. They live in the castle and are only offered the job if they have a perfect army service record of at least 22 years. They wear funny black and red uniforms and hats, and when conducting a tour, or talking to tourists about whatever section of the museum they are in charge of, you’d have no idea they have led such a regimented life. The ones I met seemed humorous, light hearted and fun. Outside the castle walls you can see what used to be the moat, but has now been drained and is a wide, grassy trench. There are raves pecking around the area, and there is a story that says that when the ravens go from the castle, the Monarchy will fall. So now they keep several ravens on the site at all times by clipping there wings and preventing them from flying away.  You can see the area, called the Traitors Gate, where Queen Anne Boleyn, one of the wives of Henry VIII was brought in by a small boat from the Thames. And you can see the scaffold site where, for the crime of not bearing the king a son, she was beheaded in a private ceremony in the castle grounds. The majority of people were beheaded in a public spectacle on the top of the nearby Tower Hill. The crown jewels are on display in the tower and they are very… sparkly. They would be very heavy, I imagine, as well. There’s more than crowns, there’s also orbs and sceptres. Each crown uses the precious stones from the crown of the preceding monarch, so old crowns just have hollows from where the stones have been removed. I really enjoyed the tour, and then having a more comprehensive look around by myself, but I knew I wouldn’t remember much of what I heard and read, so I just bought a small book about the Tower. so if you want to know any more details than I’ve included here… read the book. (Same goes for Buckingham Palace, which I wrote about in my last episode.) Two weekends ago, Nick and I went to the university town of Oxford. We met up with Anat, an Aussie/Israeli girl who I met in Chile the day that Nick left to go back to Australia. Her older brother Oren and his wife Rena live in Oxford, as he is studying law there. They are members of Magdalen College, the same college Oscar Wilde went to, and their residence is a newly converted office area, and borders on the inside of the Oxford Botanical Gardens. The big bay windows of their living area has a beautiful view, even though it was raining, the autumn colours looked beautiful and there was a little grey squirrel foraging under a big tree. The gardens were originally created in 1621 to grow herbs and other flora for scientific purposes. The original plan was for the five of us to go on a day trip to some castle, but we found out that it closed for the year a few days before hand, so Anat and family showed us around the streets of Oxford in the pouring rain, which was much appreciated. We roamed around, and unfortunately for us, we were very much out of luck, as most buildings of interest were closed. For example, I would have liked to go into the Bodleian Library… not all six buildings of it, but just one to have a peek. My reasoning her is because I recently finished the Bryce Courtney novel called Tandia, and in it, two of the main characters, Peekay and Hymie, set up a club called the Odd Bodleian Society. It’s a club for people who aren’t interested in clubs. Basically set up for Oxford students who are so engrossed in their studies and work and have no social life or extra-curricular activities through which they can meet other people. I thought this was funny at the time, ‘cause of the name Odd Bodleians, for odd bods, and I hadn’t even heard of the Bodleian Library. Now that I have found out about it, it turns out the joke is on me… the name isn’t really funny at all without knowing that Bodleians is the name of the Oxford library. Anyway, we wandered around, and saw the infamous Sheldonian Theatre, constructed in 1664, based on a design by Christopher Wren, who also designed London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. We spent a bit of time in a small science museum, and walked past Halley’s (as in discoverer of Halley’s Comet) house. We meandered through very narrow passage ways and through very low doorways and past very old and tiny pubs. Oren gave us a tour of his college, and we watched the resident deers in their field. And we were shown a beautiful little scene, a weeping willow on the bank of the River Cherwell, and a small brick, double arched pedestrian bridge in the background. There was a plaque nearby with a poem by C.S. Lewis, author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who also was a member of Magdalen. We were told that this was the willow and the scene that inspired Carol to write Wind in the Willows… which made sense, it looked exactly like the spot where Mole and Ratty had their picnic. But with a little bit or research on the internet, I was very unsubtly reminded that Wind in the Willows was written by Kenneth Graeme. Oh well, it was a beautiful spot anyway. That night we dined in the Magdalen Dining Hall. It was not as fancy as the Hogwarts Dining Hall, where the sorting ceremony in Harry Potter takes place, but neither was it as plain as the Basser College Dining Hall at UNSW, where I would occasionally have dinner or breakfast with Neen during our uni days. It was dimly lit, and there were portraits of people long gone hung on the walls. I suppose the funny thing about it was the price. The food was very edible, and it only cost a couple of quid. I suppose once students have paid the fees for an Oxford education, they don’t have much to spare for everyday sustenance. The other thing I thought was mildly amusing about our trip to Oxford was that although they didn’t speak, Nick bumped into someone he went to school with. He also got the phone number of one of Tobs’ (his younger brother) friends who studies at Oxford, but didn’t manage to catch up. A few weeks prior, we had Andrew, another school mate of Nick’s, stay at our place when he came to London to use the library for some research he’s doing for his PhD at Cambridge. And then of course, sometimes Nick is on the phone to Dan, a uni friend of ours studying at Harvard. Ahhh, those Brennans… they just mix with a different crowd to us mere academic mortals. The next day, the five of us had planned to go on a day trip to Stradford-Upon-Avon, but Anat, Oren and Rena had to be back for a formal dinner, and it was not possible to do so, so we decided to go to Windsor Castle instead. I won’t write much about it’s interior, ‘cause it’s very much like Buckingham Palace (ugly), and I wrote about that before. But the exterior is very spectacular. You get off the train and are confronted with this awesome stone structure. And in today’s day and age, monstrous buildings aren’t far and few between, but to imagine how imposing this immense structure would have appeared to the local towns-folk who would’ve lived in small wooden houses. Apart from the outside looks, the other thing I enjoyed and was looking forward to seeing at Windsor Castle was Queen Mary’s doll’s house. It was completed in 1924, having taken 4 years. I’ve seen the doll’s house before on TV and in a book we have at home, and I’m glad I had ‘cause the crowds in the dimmed room surrounding the glass cabinet were about 3 deep. It was an amazing site though. The thing is huge, dimensions being roughly 2.5 metres x 1.5 metres, and 1.5 metres tall. It has electric lighting in the rooms and even running hot and cold water in the bathroom. Proper artists were commissioned to paint the tiny paintings. Apparently there’s a miniature book in there with a miniature story in it. The books are bound in leather, the tablecloths have been stitched to the same patterns of the real tablecloths presented to the seamstress to copy. The house was designed by an architect and everything in it has been made to absolute perfection. The bathroom floor tiles are apparently made of mother of pearl, and, well, it’s just phenomenal. Whilst Nick was at work the following week, I did some walking and exploring around London. I went to the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a mere 800 metres away from where the original stood. I always thought it was made of stone, like a big Greek type amphitheatre, but it’s actually a lot smaller and made of wood. It’s open air, and round, and can fit a lot more people in it than it looks. The bottom floor is standing room, and the surrounding edges are lined with uncomfortable wooden benches. But like in the old days, you can pay extra to hire a cushion. There aren’t any shows staged at this time of the year, ‘cause the weather is too risky, but there are tours run, and a museum open, and classes can hire the place out to practice or hold workshops. The entire building has been constructed using materials and construction techniques that would have been used in the 16th Century. The standing area in front of the stage, although it has been subsequently covered in concrete for safety purposes, was made using straw and hazel (?) nut shells and something to bind them together. The majority of the building has been built in Green Oak, so is a bit creaky and cracked at the moment, but will dry out into a very strong structure. The stage area is quite ornate, with a big painting on the roof of the horoscope characters, and there is a hatch in the stage floor where actors can rise up from hell, and there’s a hatch in the ceiling so characters can descend from the heavens. And above the stage ceiling is a small triangular roof where the mechanical winch is operated from. After spending a bit of time in the Shakespeare museum, I wandered over the ugly pedestrian Millennium Bridge, designed by Sir Norman Foster. He’s the guy that’s currently designing all the modern glass buildings in London. They all look oddly out of place, these huge reflective glass structures piercing the old low rise skyline of drab stone and brick. I’ve heard two of his three building have nicknames… The Big Gherkin (offices currently being built) and The Lonely Testicle (the mayors offices). The bridge is called The Wobbly Bridge ‘cause when it was first built it, it swayed severely from side to side due when lots of people walked over it at the same time. Anyway, it’s fixed now, and I walked across it towards St Paul’s Cathedral snugly wrapped in all its scaffolding on the other side of the river. I found a tourist information centre, and on Mum’s advice found some walking tours to do. An historical London tour started not too far away, so I joined it that afternoon. There were 20 people on the tour, and we didn’t go in any place, but it started outside the Tower of London, walked around that area a bit, got on a ferry boat ride down the Thames, and the boat conductor pointed things out along the way, and then after the boat ride we finished off walking around Westminster area where the tour ended. I met a Pilipino born American woman named Villa (pronounced Vilia) at the beginning of the tour, and we chatted away the whole time, and on the ferry boat we stood outside on the top deck so we could get a good view of Tower Bridge, but outside we couldn’t hear any of the commentary. After the tour, which ended at about 4, it was getting dark and cold, so we found a pub and had a drink and a snack, and stayed there for a few hours. Then, Villa wanted to head towards Covent Gardens, where all the musicals are on, ‘cause she wanted to see an African style musical called Umoja. On the way, we walked past a small art exhibition opening, so we went in, looking totally out of place in our touristy clothes and backpacks, smiled and wriggled to the back of the gallery to get a glass of wine, and then wriggled back through the gallery observing all the art works. We both quite liked the art, they were watercolour paintings, and the theme was jazz. Some were jazz playing scenes, others were portraits of jazz players, and there were a couple where the artist had kind of painted what he heard in certain pieces. We had a brief chat to the artist who told us about some of the paintings, and then we left. We found the theatre where Umoja was playing, and Villa offered to pay for my ticket if I wanted to see the show with her. She ended up paying for half my ticket, and then, whilst we waited for the show to start, we went to the souvenir store, and she bought 3 wooden and animal skin drums, a t-shirt, a CD, and a shaker instrument. She said she has a collection of drums back at home, that she’s collected on various holiday locations.  If I were to guess Villa’s age I would have said around early to mid thirties. She told me she was 50. She was married for 20 something years, has 3 boys in college or working and who all live near their father in California. Her ex-husband is a lawyer who works very hard and is very serious and never wants to go out and have fun. So she divorced him and moved to Washington D.C., is pretty much retired, and travels and has heaps of fun doing whatever she wants to do and whenever. She’s just spent some time with a friend in Costa Rica, then travelled around Italy with one of her boys, and was just spending a few days in London before heading back home. She has dogs and cats and said if ever I want to come and housesit for her, she’ll be happy to find somewhere to go on holidays for a couple of months. Anyway, Umoja “The Spirit of Togetherness” was a fantastic musical, we both enjoyed it. It starts of with traditional tribal sorts of music and instruments, and passes through time where African music gets influenced by other sources, and then goes back to the tribal style. The whole thing has little pockets of narration by an elderly guy, whose sort of telling his story of how he remembers the music in his life time. Villa and I arranged to go on another walking tour the next day, retracing the area where Charles Dickens used to hang out. Then she was going to come over for dinner. The next morning I got a call from Anat, who had come down to London for a few days on her way to France, and I invited her to come over for dinner too. There were tube problems the next day and I got to the meeting place of the Charles Dickens tour almost half an hour late. As it happens, my being late had absolutely nothing to do with the tube problems. When I got there no one else was there, so I figured Villa had just gone on the tour without me. Absolutely amazingly, I wandered around a few streets, and asked in one shop, and I actually caught up with the tour group, but Villa wasn’t there. The entire group was a drama class doing some research for a production of Nicholas Nickleby they were going to be putting on, and I was the only other person. There was an Aussie and one of the Pomms that I hung out with and chatted to on the tour. We walked down a small section of Fleet Street, and our tour guide showed us a drawing of the same portion of the street from Charles Dickens’ time, and it had hardly changed a bit.  We passed a monument on the street and some markers here and there that divided the area into London and Westminster, and we passed the much loved pub, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, highly recommended by Mick Bull. The pub has been there since 1538, although it had to be rebuilt in 1667 after the great fire of 1666 destroyed it, along with most of the wooden built city of London. It’s been there for so long, that 16 Kings and Queens have reigned in England during its time. Just where the pub is, is a tiny little narrow corridor, and we passed through it and into a square. In the building on the farthest side of the square is the old house of Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary in the late 1700s. Also, to my utter disagreement, Dr Samuel Johnson is the speaker of that fairly famous and utterly wrong quote “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”. Obviously, Dr Samuel Johnson has never been anywhere else. Also in the square is bronze sculpture of Dr Johnson’s cat, Hodge, with some oysters. Walking down small cobbled streets and through a couple of other squares and gardens, our guide pointed out how black all the stones of the houses were. This was due to all the soot that would come out of the numerous chimneys protruding from the top of each multi-storied residence. Open fires in homes, I believe, are now banned. The tour ended up at the last remaining house that Charles Dickens lived in, but it’s now a museum. I didn’t have time to go in because I had guests to cook for and had to get home to prepare. I couldn’t get in touch with Villa, all I had was the name of the hotel she was staying in and she wasn’t in when I tried to call, so I just left messages. She’d gone to Stone Henge, and then to see Lion King so didn’t get back till late, and returned my call the next day. Kind of strange ‘cause I thought we’d made arrangements. Oh well. Anat came over for dinner and my vegetarian lasagne was very successful. Which is kind of unfortunate, ‘cause it left us with nothing for breakfast the next morning. The only thing I had planned for the next day was to go to the Natural History Museum in the late afternoon because David Attenborough, my favourite famous person, was there signing copies of his new books, his autobiography, called Life on Air, and a book that I’d already purchased when I was at Kew Gardens, called The Life of Mammals. The signings started at 4:30 in the Great Hall of the museum. I got there at 3:45, but thought he was going to be in the bookshop. I was wondering why people kept on buying his books and leaving, but I quite happily kept on flipping through books of the winners of the latest nature photography competitions. Finally I decided to follow someone who’d just bought a David Attenborough book, and of course they went straight to the Great Hall, and as did I, joined the end of a tremendously long queue. An hour and a half later it was my turn, an hour and thirty one minutes later, it was someone else’s turn. Now seems as appropriate time as ever to mention something that probably only I would ever do, and it is indeed something that I did. I’ve always wanted to meet David Attenborough, and before I knew about this book signing event I decided I’d write him a letter and invite him over for dinner. I’ll forward the letter as a separate email. Anyway, I found his address in the white pages on the internet, and sent this letter by snail mail, because I couldn’t find an email address, and the BBC weren’t allowed to tell me what it was. When it was my turn to get my book signed, I told him my name and asked if it rung a bell… and prompted him by saying that I hoped it did. And he said, “Oh yes, you wrote me a letter. It was a very long letter I recall, but I haven’t replied to it yet.” And I said “Oh, that’s okay, but it’s inviting you over to my home for dinner.” And he replied “Well, I don’t know if I can manage that, but I will reply”. And that was the end of my meeting with David Attenborough. Nick and I had been invited to Marcia’s (a grad from Macquarie Bank) that night, and I was heading home to get changed and call Marcia to find out where she lives. I know it’s not far from us, but I didn’t know the exact address, and I don’t have her phone number in my phone, only in an email on the computer. I was at Canary Wharf where I catch the bus home from, and my mobile rings, but I can’t hear who the person is, and then it hangs up. I take a couple more steps around one of the big pillars holding up the building outside my bus stop, and there is Marcia trying to call me to give me her address. Weird. Anyway, I just went straight back to her place on the bus with her, and Nick came over shortly after. There was another Aussie couple there, and Darren (also an ex-Macquarie Bank person), her flatmate. Darren cooked us a good old meal of bangers and mash. Unfortunately Nick and I had to leave fairly early ‘cause I had a really early flight the next day, but more about that in my next episode. Here are some personal bits. Thank you so much to Anat and her brother Oren and wife Rena, for showing us around Oxford. Thanks also to Villa for paying for half my ticket to Umoja, and to Marcia and Darren for dinner. But even more than that, thank you to Marcia for bringing me back Tim Tams when she went home to Australia. I tried Penguins, which are the British version of Tim Tams, but they’re not nearly as nice… humph, as if they could be. See ya’ll, Nique