Pt3 - 8: 

ENGLAND

19^th July – 29^th August

LONDON the FIRST

Day 150: Le Shuttle terminal at Calais is a spaceport. We joined the queue of cars under overcast skies at 12:40pm, were directed down the ramp onto the long train, all polished steel and gleaming glass, and at 12:52 descended soundlessly into the Chunnel. Thirty-five minutes later we emerged into bright sunshine at Folkestone and were funnelled smoothly onto the M20 to London. The immediate challenge was to focus on the novelty of driving a left-hand drive vehicle on the left side of the road, but we managed to negotiate the first two hours without mishap.

Hungry and needing some Sterling we swerved off the ramp at Ashford, visited a hole in the wall and hit our first English pub. It was both familiar and strange: familiar because the ambience was very similar to a comfy pub back home, only with period décor, strange because for the first time in a long while the menu was in English and so was the conversation. Ordering didn’t require several levels of translation, it was all too blissfully easy.

We took the scenic route from Ashford to link up with the M2 into the capital. High hedges walled the narrow country lanes so we didn’t actually see much of the countryside. Once on the M2 it was freeway all the way to the outskirts of London. The Saturday traffic was heavier than I’d expected. Given we were back in the English speaking universe, navigating our way through the maze of suburban roads tested us more than it should have. Extensive roadworks forced us into random detours with no indication what suburb or district we were in, and we needed ten pairs of eyes to find the road names. We had to ask the locals a couple of times but at least I could understand the directions clearly.

It was 5 when we drew up outside John and Dee’s house in St Philip’s Road, Hackney, by which time we’d been on the road eight and a half hours, travelled nearly 500kms through three countries and gained an hour under the English Channel in the process, made the switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left, negotiated teeming London traffic in a left-hand drive and successfully massaged our way through an obstacle course of urban roadworks to our destination. I know I’ve said it before, but back home I could drive that far without changing gear! I was comprehensively proverbialled.

John and Dee were friends of Tess’s late uncle John, he of the villa in Antogny about whom you'll learn more on our return to London in a few weeks, and had kindly offered to put us up for a week. Our room was charming, on the second floor with a view out over their back garden. I could happily have crawled between the soft clean sheets. Instead, we threw our packs on the bed and joined our hosts for a stroll round the corner to their local pub, The Prince George (where, incidentally, your takeaway ales are pulled straight from the tap into a 2 pint milk carton…cute). We scored a table in the courtyard on the surprisingly warm evening, took the edge off with a couple of tasty ales, a meal and good conversation and finally called time on what’s been a bloody long and demanding day at 11:30.

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I’ll spare you the day by day itineraries, but we spent the first couple of weeks pounding the London pavements doing a bunch of touristy things. The number 38 bus from Hackney ran us through suburbs reminiscent of inner city Sydney to the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, from where we wandered a different route every day to take in the sights. The sheer volume of people initially overwhelmed us. Each morning we stepped off the bus into a crowd scene; bodies ebbed and flowed in all directions in a restless tide. The term “London traffic” is some kind of oxymoron, the streets a still life of gridlocked red double-decker buses surrounded by a seething mass of worker ants. At one stage we hopped a double-decker for fun. The fun lasted about ninety seconds. From our perch on the top deck we counted twenty buses lined up along Oxford Street. Maybe we should come back in the 15^th century when everyone’s gone home…

The real problem dealing with the crush was the intense post-Gaasperplas paranoia. The first day I was like some cornered beast; hyper-vigilant, hyper-ventilating and struggling to refrain from lashing out at the people brushing past. I’m not exaggerating when I say bodies literally bounced off me in their rush to get wherever they were going. My eyes swivelled in their sockets, I broke into a sweat. I switched my backpack around to the front and manoeuvred Tess across the footpath to the inside. She was more stressed than I was. At the first opportunity we steered off into a café to collect ourselves. We’d have to put this ugly genie back in its bottle or we’d end up nervous wrecks. As we sat down with coffees I went for humour to defuse our anxiety. I held up my hands in a karate pose, “Don’t fuck with me, I know Tai Chi!”

While there were always too many people for our liking, negotiating London became easier as the week progressed. What gradually impressed itself on me was the air of optimism and energy on the streets inspired by the recent election of Tony Blair and the first Labour government in 18 years. There was a sense of hope that perhaps the bitter legacy of Thatcherism might finally be put to rest. This was balanced by the surprising number of beggars, and I don't mean buskers, at every tube station; was this the human cost of Economic Rationalism?

We visited the Old Bailey, where the public galleries were unfortunately full so we missed out on watching the theatrical course of British justice play out in the courtroom. There was the Tower Bridge, which looked like it’d just had a sparkling makeover. On the southern bank of the muddy Thames we strolled along the riverside walk, past the maritime museum ship HMS Belfast at anchor in the middle of the river, and back across London Bridge to the north bank.

Towards the end of the first week we moved across to Rod and Rosie’s in Chiswick and took in St Paul’s Cathedral. I’m not sure whether I was cathedralled out or the anticipation just exceeded the reality, but it was all a bit underwhelming. The highlight was the Whispering Gallery where you can literally hear someone whispering on the other side of the gallery as their voice travels through the wall. The views of the city from the dome were pretty speccy.

On the other hand, we completely underestimated the Natural History Museum. I don’t know why, but we imagined a musty little place we could knock over in a couple of hours. On the contrary, it is a vast building jam-packed with diverse and fascinating exhibits. In two and half hours we saw only three displays: the Dinosaurs brought to life through the wonders of Animatronics, Human Biology and the Origin of Species.

We moved into a black belt drinking culture at Chiswick. Rod is a sub-editor at the Times, a position which was soon to demand eighteen hours a day as a sudden tragic event with devastating domestic impact unleashed a global wave of grief. Rosie is in the theatre, currently in rehearsals for a show to open shortly. We left the Natural History Museum prematurely because we’d arranged to meet Rod and a few of his colleagues at the Founder’s Arms off the south end of Blackfriars Bridge. The mood was festive and several pints consumed. Afterwards, Rod hailed our first London cab for a ride to Leicester Square. Here we cut a path through the revellers to Chinatown and installed ourselves in the Royal Dragon. Too much food and too much booze and who knows how many hours later we wound up back in Chiswick.

The Tower of London isn’t actually a tower, but a squat fortress fronting the Thames next to Tower Bridge. It was a mixed bag, but interesting enough. It was so crowded it was a matter of choosing which queue to join. The White Tower was breathlessly billed as a display of extreme torture hardware. Sorry, but after the continent the devices in here are amateur hour; there wasn’t even a working rack. Loches and Salzburg take the Thumbscrew Trophy for terror, the English were just teasing. The display of royal armour was notable only for Henry VIII’s steroidal codpiece. Almost as an afterthought there was a beheading block and axe on the way out to the yard where Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard lost their heads.

We queued next for the Crown Jewels. A montage of coronation pictures and arty footage of the jewels rolled by on the wall to entertain us as we waited and just as I was wondering if this was it we were ushered through a strongroom door into a series of galleries displaying the actual jewels themselves. Dazzling comes to mind; the diamonds sparkled, the gold glowed and the silver shone under expert lighting. We emerged near the east wall and the Bloody Tower where Walter Raleigh was imprisoned from 1603 to 1616 for pissing off James I.

And here endeth our first foray in London. We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time recovering from overhangs but we’ve still managed to do some tourist stuff and get things done. We’ll be back here soon, but in the meantime it’s on the literary trail with Jane, Thomas and Will.

Coming up: Down South...