Mind the Gap

When I began my UK sojourn, I thought I'd be posting every day, but that wasn't to be. Too hard to find a quiet space at a time when I wasn't too tired to write. At this moment I'm sitting in the Euston London train station, awaiting our train to Liverpool, scheduled to depart about an hour from now. So here's a brief chance.

London, I found, seemed to have subtly changed in the 50 years since I was last here (or maybe it's me); it seemed more commercialized in little ways, the way that the Catholic Cathedral in Vienna has sold advertising space on its tallest spiral. In any event, all the tourist things, with one exception, seem to have gotten quite pricey --The Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster in particular, cost a pretty penny (or pence) to visit. But they were worth it. The one exception is the British Museum, which remains free of charge, though asking for a five-pound donation. The Museum especially was a like a black hole of time, we could have stayed there for a week and not quite seen it all. We mostly hung out with the mummies and the Romans in Britain.

Mentioning the mummies reminds me of an old Mark Twain comment, somewhere in his Innocents Abroad: that at his age he found himself more and more wanting to hang around and swap stories with them. I'm starting to share that feeling. It was enforced by the crypts at St. Paul's and the graves at Westminster, all of which gave me a great sense of mortality; all these were once living, breathing people, now reduced to memories and mausoleums and memorials if, as the St. Paul's guide said, they met one of the Three Rs: they were revered, respectable, or rich. Their contemporaries, if lucky, lived on for awhile in memory, now mostly gone now. Then there was the dead Egyptian soldier found in shallow desert grave and naturally mummified, and the so-called Leather Man, found in a bog. Makes me understand and appreciate life.

And sometimes I think I may be swapping stories sooner rather than later, if I don't keep forgetting that people here drive on the wrong side of the road and don't much like pedestrians, apparently.

So much of London seems so ancient and almost irrelevant to the modern world -- majestic old buildings that no longer serve their initial purpose, memorials to forgotten people, ostentatiously-displayed soldiers in anachronistic costume (though some with real and working modern weapons, as at the Crown Jewels). And it reminds me of Vienna, the one-time center of a long-gone empire, with so many memorials to people who died in campaigns to suppress restless reluctant members of the empire, and one can sense how much imperial wealth went into building the aforementioned memorials -- and how many purloined local treasures make up the displays at the Museum.


Still, all in all, I've found British people to be friendly ("no worries") and helpful ("let's get it sorted out"), with a delightful sense of humor.

More, I hope, soon. For now, I've got a train to catch.