Hampton Court Palace

Traveled by boat to Hampton Court Palace today, the home of Henry VIII and several other royal people of note.

While it's pretty and a unique way of seeing London, I don't recommend traveling by boat. It took about 4 hours to get the 15 miles or so upriver, and we often were moving slower than the joggers along the banks. Still, it affords views you would not see otherwise, so if a relaxing boat ride is your thing, go ahead. They serve alcohol, not that I would partake, but there you go.

HCP is as advertised, and worth the admission. I was struck by its scale right away; it dwarfs many of the older structures I've seen in the UK, and its caretakers have struck a good balance between preserving the authenticity of the site vs. making it accessible to tourists. The clock in the Clock Court was boffo, and while I'm not a garden guy, I couldn't help but to be impressed by the magnificent Privy Gardens and the Ponds Gardens on the grounds. The hedge maze did not live up to its hype, I'm afraid, but the great halls inside gave me pause.

However, the highlight of my tour came when Henry VIII and one of his wives were posing for a picture with a family, and a teenager attempted to stand next to him. Fake Henry VIII yelled at this kid.

"On your knees, boy!"

The kid turned red immediately; Fake Henry VIII seemed genuinely angry. (I'm sure he wasn't, but this kid believed he was.) I laughed for a good 15 minutes afterwards. I followed the family to see what would happen next, and sure enough, the little sister ratted out her older brother, telling them, "Jeff said the F-word!"

Thank you, Hampton Court Palace. You were marvelous.

Idler's Academy

Sorry, guys...no pictures today, but I wanted to post anyway. It's not that I haven't taken any recently, but the computers at the hostel I'm staying at don't allow me to transfer stuff via jump drive, so...just text. That being said, I'll keep it short.

Went to the Idler's Academy in West Kensington today. It's a bookstore/tea house that has some amazing books in it, and it has the kind of "here we are, the last bastion of civilization standing against the creep of Phillistinism" feel to it. Perfect for a grammatical, literature-oriented, writerly snob like me.

They have a tea towel with all the Latin conjugations and declensions on it, for cripe's sake! They have a great all-around selection, which included titles like The Idler: Smash the System, Roland Barthe's Mourning Diary, and a book I hope I can find on my Kindle, Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. The idea is that the internet is becoming more and more personalized which, like 24-hour cable news fragmentation, actually prevents us from getting a clearer, broader picture of the cyberworld. Apps like Facebook and Google tend to reinforce this.

Anyway, great place. But don't take my word for it.

I stayed for a few hours this afternoon, sitting by the window, drinking five (!) cups of Earl Grey, and typing out some notes on Ghosty 3.

By the way, it has a title now.

Ghosty: Trip No Further. It's a reference to a line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:

Trip no further, pretty sweeting
Journeys end in lovers meeting
This every wise man's son doth know.

What's the significance? That would be telling, as Number Two would say.

(By the way, Portmeirion is still on. If I cancelled, I'd eat the cost of the lodging, so I guess I'm going after all!)

Staffa

Staffa Island, population zero. Long ago, it was formed by a volcano, which exploded a couple more times, which led to its interesting tripartite structure. It's a little hard to get to; you have to charter a boat or get into a tour group chartering a boat. There's a good one that includes the islands of Mull, Iona, and of course, Staffa.

It rained the whole time. It was fairly cold. The sea spray was wet. The rocks were slick. I cracked my elbow when I slipped on one. I turned my ankle when I stepped in a hole hidden by some brush. I kept having to pull up my pants because my pantlegs had absorbed so much water. I nearly tumbled into the ocean at one point. The boat nearly left without me.

All that being said, totally worth it. Dream come true. You can totally see why Queen Victoria, Mendelsson, and Tennyson went potty over it.

By the way, if someone gets seriously hurt on the island (or near it, in the case of Miss Thammavongsa), he'd be airlifted to Glasgow, not Castlebay. Oops.

Lessons About Getting From Here to There

Rough day. I got up at three a.m., thinking that was plenty of time to get to Euston Station for a six o'clock train. I even prepared for it by riding the route the day before.

Lesson #1: The Underground in London is not 24/7. Before 6 a.m., you need to take the night bus. This isn't posted anywhere. You just need to know it.

Lesson #2: Trying to figure out bus schedules on the fly at 4 a.m. is very difficult. You stare at the local map, and all these individual bus stops dot the map like acne on a teenager's face. At some point in the future I will describe this in more detail, because it's actually a lot more complicated than I'm letting on.

Lesson #3: When you go to London, or anywhere in England for that matter, do be careful when you're looking at posted maps. Even when they have a "you are here" indication on them. I keep forgetting that they are never lined up with what is in front of you, as is typically the case in the US. It's a small difference, but a maddening one, when you realize you've wasted 20 minutes or more walking in the wrong direction.

Lesson #4: Remember that London doesn't have street signs per se. Usually, street signs are located on the buildings themselves. Usually. Sometimes they aren't. Of course, it gets really interesting when street names change on you. This usually only happens every few blocks, though.

So I missed my train by a half-hour. But, keep calm and carry on, I'm here now. I booked a boat tour of the Inner Hebrides, and tomorrow...Staffa Island. Hooray!

Comic Book Crawl in Camden Town

Tomorrow, I leave Ilford for good and head to Scotland for a couple of days. So today was a light day...laundry, getting organized, and a comic book crawl.

Oh, yes. A comic book crawl.

In central London there are a handful of different comic book stores, and I've noticed that each one is situatated within a 5-minute walk of their respective tube stations. How cool is that? Mega City Comics for instance, is located in Camden Town near Regent's Park. Now CT is one of the cooler markets I've seen, and it's easy to find a Sex Pistols t-shirt, or a floor-length leather coat, or a tattoo of a goat-devil.

Also, while you're eating your lunch, why not watch one of the narrow boats go through the locks? I knew how it worked, but I've never seen it before. Pretty cool.

What comics did I get? Mark Waid and Mirco Pierfederici's Ruse, a copy of The Simpsons, and a Dark Horse title called Silke. Something for the train ride tomorrow.

Avebury, Where the Demons Do NOT Dwell

Everybody knows Stonehenge. Stonehenge is iconic. Stonehenge inspired Spinal Tap, dash it. So why did I elect to go see Avebury instead?

In a word, access.

The stones are not as big, and they're not piled on top of each other as at Stonehenge (trilithons), but there are more stones at Avebury, it's older (about 2500-2200 BC), and you get to touch them. Some archaeologists suggest that Avebury may have been a more important site, based on its size, the number of stones, barrows, and circles. And they're still fairly large, ranging from a ton to Swindon Stone, 65 tons (one of the few never to have been toppled here).

The site is about 350m in diameter, and is surrounded by a ditch about 6-9m deep, and an outer circle consisting of a high earthen bank. The village of Avebury with its roads divide the site into 4 quadrants. You have to be careful where you step, however, because goats graze among the ruins. Goat poop is just another thing Avebury has over Stonehenge.

One of the problems with Avebury is that many of the stones are missing, due to medieval Britain's embarrassment over her pagan past. In 1934, the site was restored, and markers were put down to indicate where the missing ones were.

Also, the site extends way beyond the circle itself. Walk through the Wiltshire fields for about a mile and a half, through a cow pasture and up a flipping large hill, and revealed to you will be the 4500 year-old Silbury Hill, Europe's largest constructed burial mound. You can't go on it, but you can see it from a long ways off, and at 40m high, it's still very impressive. Worth the walk, and if I had had the heart attack I thought I was going to have, the World Heritage people could have just thrown me on top of it.

What was the purpose of Avebury? Well...like Stonehenge, experts are not 100% certain.

0° 0' 0"

Went to the Royal Observatory today. You know, the place where they store the Prime Meridian? Right now, I'm 6 hours ahead of my home town, which translates to roughly 90° of longitude (at 15° per hour). It's in Greenwich, as in Greenwich Mean Time, at the top of a very, very, very steep hill. About halfway up, I was beginning to think that John Flamsteed, the first Royal Astronomer, was just a jerk that the King wanted out of the way.



Now, I have to admit that this was one of the big things I wanted to do upon coming to London; it's a touristy thing, sure, but there is a reason why these things become touristy things. That being said, I perfectly understand why someone would say, "Why the hell are you paying 7 pounds (!) so you can climb up a big hill and have your picture taken standing on a line?" There were fifty-some people, most of whom were high schoolers from Spain, irritating the bejeesuz out of me, the first time I've really been irritated by fellow tourists since I've been here. I asked the kid behind to take my picture on the prime meridian, and he proceeded to zoom in on my face. I could have been sitting in my living room, for all anyone knew. But then again, I guess I wasn't specific.



I also hit the National Maritime Museum, the highlight of which is the gallery of Admiral Nelson memorabilia. The uniform in which he died at Trafalgar is located there. Pretty darn cool, that one was. Nearby Greenwich Market was this store called...wait for it...Meet Bernard, which is a men's shop for casual wear. I really wanted to get a shirt from there, but short-sleeved shirts there were running 75 pounds ($120). Yikes. The ones on sale were 25. Yikes x 2. MEET BERNARD!