Weekly Dispatch #9In Which We Soar Above London, Meet Up With Olde Friends, See The Queen, Travel Back to Neolithic Britain & Begin To Grow Suspicious…

Our trip into London last Tuesday, I figured, was going to be a pretty low-key affair. The plan was to take the train to the city, switch to the Underground briefly and pop up near the Westminster/Whitehall area for some sightseeing. On the train going in, however, I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive because our tour was going to begin with a ride on the London Eye, which, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a 440-foot “observation wheel” next to the Thames. I have mentioned in earlier dispatches my anxiety about high places—thus the apprehension—but I have never, for some reason, had trouble with ferris wheels. Maybe it’s because I grew up near an amusement park and rode the wheel there many times every summer. Still, neither that one nor the Navy Pier wheel in Chicago rose as high into the sky as London’s, and I was hoping I would either not be bothered or would be able to cover up any anxiety (screaming, swooning) I might be feeling.

This trip also marked the first time that our guests, Terri and Gary Sible, would be seeing London, even though they had been in the city on three other days during their stay with us. On each of those days, though, they had been zipping around on the tube and had not gotten above ground. As we climbed up the stairs into the very bright and warm day, Gary asked, “Now, where are we?” Before either Beth or I could say anything, he looked up and over his shoulder. “Oh my god!” he said and grabbed his camera to take a photo of Big Ben, which towered glittering and golden above us on the corner across from where we stood. (Actually, Big Ben is not the tower but the 14-ton bell inside which has kept time in London almost continuously since 1859.) While he and Terri—with Beth’s help—located and snapped pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, my eyes were fixed on the big white wheel across the river.

After a few minutes of photo-taking, we made our way to the other side of the river, bought tickets and climbed aboard the Eye. Immediately, a soothing voice welcomed us to our “flight,” and our car began its very, very slow ascent. Each car can hold up to 25 people, but we had only 10 on ours, so there was plenty of room to move around and see the city sprawling below us. London is a low-rise city, so we were able to see all of the landmarks—Wembley Stadium, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, to name just a few—and get a sense of the size of the city as well; it has the same population as New York City, but is twice as large in area. As we made our circuit, we met a couple who had lived in London but now owned a home and a holiday cottage in Wales. They were very willing to point out the architectural highlights, along with reminiscences of their life in the city and how much it had changed. They also gave us information about renting their cottage, so, before we leave this island, we may spend a night at their place. We also met a man who runs an antiquarian book shop in London, but I doubt that we could afford his wares, so, if we stop, it will be to browse not buy. The 30 minutes we spent revolving were, happily, anxiety-free. The only moment when I felt any vertigo was when we reached the top of the wheel’s circle, and I could look directly into the car just ahead of us. It was, in retrospect, a great experience, one I hope to repeat when our kids come to visit next week.

Because I had been so transfixed on the Eye when we crossed the river, I hadn’t noticed that both ends of Westminster Bridge were blocked by huge concrete barricades and guarded by police. We got to the other side, where we had planned to walk along Parliament and on to Westminster Abbey, but we were told by a bobby that we would have to go in a more roundabout fashion, skirting all of the barricades along the streets, because the Queen was opening Parliament.

“In fact,” he said, checking his watch, “she’s addressing the MPs right now.” He said that she would probably give a 45-minute speech and then would process back to Buckingham Palace about 1:30.” It was just a few minutes before noon, and, after a bit of discussion, we decided standing on the sidewalk for an hour-and-a-half wasn’t worth it. So, we made our way along Bridge Street to Parliament Street to the Underground stop where we’d emerged an hour earlier and were waiting at that corner for the light to change when we heard behind us, “I don’t believe it!” We all four turned, and there, having themselves just come up from the tube, were Clyde and Chris, our pals from the Newmarket railroad stop. What are the odds, we wondered, of meeting up in a city of six million people? Apparently better than one might think. At any rate, we talked for a few minutes—this time remembering to exchange email addresses, etc.—when I heard the distinct clopping of a horse’s hooves on the street. A single bobby on a white horse trotted past, so I held my camera up over the heads of the crowd in front of us and took a picture. I had no more brought the camera down than there was a more thunderous clatter of horses’ hooves and a whole cavalry troop—red jackets, white trousers, black boots, silver helmets with white plumes, silver swords held at the ready—trotted past on matched black horses. As soon as they passed, another identical cadre came into view, and we realized that something was happening. A loud cheer started to our left and swept toward us and, suddenly, right in front of us, in the Irish Parliament Coach she takes from the palace to Parliament, was the Queen herself!

Despite the fact that my photographic evidence merely shows a blur behind the coach’s glass, it was unmistakably the Queen of England in one of her trademark pastel hats. She was out of sight in a few seconds, but I am certain that she looked right at me and mouthed the words, “Call me.” Of course, none of the others believed me, but I was beginning to wonder about the coincidence of her showing up when I was at Windsor last week and then again here in London. Especially curious was the fact that the speech she gave was not 45 minutes—which would have meant that we would not have been on the parade route—but a mere three minutes. Still doubt me? Wait: there’s more to come!

Following the Queen’s coach were another four or five carrying various royals and dignitaries to the Mall and up to Buckingham Palace, and I took poor pictures of all of them, too (in my defense, I had my arms stretched as high as I could stretch them and was snapping pretty much blindly), many of them featuring the balding head of a man in front of me and several other upraised cameras. More cavalry passed, along with a coach that carried only the Crown of England and another that carried two golden maces, both of which were so large that they stuck out of the windows.

When the procession had passed, the six of us—already amazed at our improbable reunion—were even more stunned that we met at that spot and, delayed by our conversation, were there to see the Queen. Terri was perhaps more excited than the rest because her sister is a huge royalist and was going to be jealous beyond measure; something Terri said she would have fun exploiting at Christmas when the family gets together.

Chris and Clyde were heading in a different direction than we were going to take, so we said goodbye again—after inviting them to visit us in Canterbury—and walked to Westminster Abbey. We had to stop once more because the Royal Band and a number of other military groups were lining up for their march to the palace. While we were there, Beth asked one of the bobbies if he guarded the Queen regularly.

“No,” he said, “I’m just up from Greenwich for the day.” He was a burly man with a cauliflower ear and a build that we guessed later marked him as a rugby player, but when Beth then asked if this was as big a deal for him as it was for us, he got wide-eyed and gushed, “Oh my God, yes!” The rarity of our getting to see the British monarch became more apparent as, over the next few days, we asked people—including a number of Brits—whether they had seen her and were told by most that they had not.

We finally, after the last of the marchers went past, crossed over to Westminster Abbey where, on the lawn in front of the main entrance, a dozen or more people were preparing a Remembrance Day display. The whole lawn—perhaps 100 yards or so long—was divided into squares identified by military regiments. In each of those squares, the volunteers were driving into the ground six-inch crosses adorned with a poppy and the name of a soldier who had died. There were thousands and thousands of the crosses already placed and, according to a man we spoke with, there would be thousands more by Thursday, when the exhibit would be officially opened, and people could walk among the crosses.

Because of its proximity to Buckingham Palace and Parliament, Westminster Abbey, which is a working church with daily services, is known as the Coronation church. In fact, since 1066, when William the Conqueror was crowned, this is where the country’s monarchs have received the vestments of their office. In addition, this magnificent church is also the resting place for many famous historical figures from the last thousand years of British history, including Queen Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. In the south nave of the church is Poets’ Corner, where the dead buried there reads like the table of contents of my British Literature textbook: Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Jane Austen, Wordsworth, the Bronte sisters, and on and on. Unlike Canterbury Cathedral, where you can take photographs, the interior of Westminster is off limits to any kind of cameras, so I can’t show you what the place looks like, but I can say that the abbot who was in charge way back when was very good at convincing the government and the royal family to give him money because this is a much more ornate—lots of gold and polished stone—church than Canterbury’s. Still, I think I prefer the one we can see from our windows every day.

Our plans for our London day trip had also included Terri and Gary’s going to the War Cabinet Rooms while Beth and I took in the National Portrait Gallery, but after we had toured Westminster—and because of the Queen—it was later than we’d expected, so we stopped in St. James’ Park, ate a brown bag lunch, and then walked to Buckingham Palace. It was while we were walking that I became conscious of Gary and his prowess with his wheeled suitcase. I was carrying a backpack that day, but because he and Terri were staying the night—they had an appointment with the company that bought the firm where she works in Geneva—Gary was dragging a little brown suitcase. He pulled the same bag during our weekend to Newmarket and had apparently honed his skills at maneuvering through crowds and, more importantly, at manipulating the telescoping handle. If we came to a stairway, he collapsed the handle with one quick motion, and when we reached the top or bottom, he snapped the handle back into place and was rolling again. It got so that Beth and Terri and I would start laughing when we heard the metallic slide and pop, and we compared it to the sound Luke Skywalker’s light saber in Star Wars. Gary said he figured he had pulled it far enough that it was time to rotate the tires.

The Queen, of course, was still at Buckingham Palace (we guessed in the room with a lamp in the window), but we were too late for a tour, so we took some pictures from beyond the locked gates and then started off in the direction of Terri and Gary’s hotel—past the Royal Mews, the Queen’s stable and coach house, which was also closed for the day—in Grosvenor Place, a large area where most of the foreign embassies are located. After we left them there, we took a slow commuter train back home and talked about the day’s strange coincidences and the trip we had planned for the upcoming weekend.

Originally, we had talked with the Sibles about going to Paris over the weekend, but the logistics of the trip—not to mention the cost (the dollar is faring very poorly these days)—we decided, instead, to rent a car and head into the West Country. Because I was the only one with any experience driving on the “correct” side of the road—as opposed to the “right” side—I was given the job of piloting us safely to and from our destination. This time, when I reserved the car, I made it clear that I not only wanted a car with an automatic transmission but a small car as well. Beth talked me out of a Nissan Micra, which was wonderfully tiny but, as a result, lacked any back seat legroom, so we settled on a slightly larger small car. But, like last time when I thought I’d be driving a Ford Focus and ended up with a Mercedes, the car we rented was not the one I thought I’d be driving. Rather than a smallish vehicle, we were given a Toyota Prius, and I had visions of tire-rubbing and cursing and gasping from the seat next to me. But after a quick tutorial on how to make the car go, I got behind the wheel and headed out on the highway, looking for adventure.

Now that I have successfully completed the 450 miles we spent on the road and have returned the car intact and won’t curse my luck, I can say with confidence that I drove marvelously well. Only once did I scrape a curb—and that was early on—and only a few times did Beth feel compelled to let me know that I was a bit too close on her side to a car or a hedgerow or a pedestrian or livestock. I handled everything from an M road (major motorway) to the narrow B roads. And, I fell in love with the car. Not only was the mileage incredible (52 mpg), but the car also had great pickup and was as smooth a ride as in any car I’ve ridden in, including the Mercedes we rented last time out.

In order to beat traffic, which we were told would be heavy around London, even though it was a weekend, we left early and reached out first stop—Avebury—around 11 a.m..

Avebury is, like Stonehenge, a prehistoric site marked by rings of stones standing on end. At Avebury, though, it is possible to walk up and around the stones, which may account for the fact that a good number of them have, over the years, been removed or knocked over. Still, anyone wandering the 28 acres, through deep defensive ditches and around grazing sheep, comes away with a sense of wonder at how and why all of this was done. The stones themselves—100 in all and weighing up to 50 tons each—are a kind of sandstone native to the county and are more than 20 feet in length, but only about half of that is above ground. That means that the Neolithic engineers who put them in place had to dig deep holes and wrangle each stone into place, all the while keeping in mind the shape of the arrangement as a whole. Like Stonehenge, the purpose of the site is unknown, but its age and popular folklore suggests to some that it has something to do with pagan rituals, which explains why, in a local pub, there is a sign inviting anyone interested in paganism to attend a meeting at the “Avebury pagan moot” on the third Sunday of each month. Sadly, we were there on the second Saturday.

Once we were back in the car, we needed to make a choice. Either we could go into Bath for an abbreviated visit of that historic Roman city, or we could go to Lacock, which was just a few miles away, for a more leisurely stop. We opted for the second and were off. On the way there, we saw, scraped into a chalky hillside, a large white horse believed to have been created about the time that the Avebury site was being constructed.

Lacock is, simply put, a lovely little English village. The whole village, in fact, is a National Trust site and has remained largely unchanged since the 18th century. Lacock is so pristine that a number of films—Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders, Emma, and the next Harry Potter—have been filmed at least in part there. Wandering the cobblestone streets and admiring the architecture was a good way to spend the afternoon. As the sun started to get lower, we drove the last couple of hours to our hotel on the edge of the New Forest. We went through Salisbury on the way and could see the cathedral—its spire is the tallest in England—where one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta is kept. We had talked about going there the next morning, but after seeing signs indicating that anyone wanting to get to the cathedral would have to leave his car at a remote parking site and take a bus into the city centre, we decided to take a pass. We got to our hotel shortly after sunset and ended the day with a great meal at an Indian restaurant next door.

Sunday started clear and chilly, and as we drove into the New Forest for an early morning hike, it looked like the weather was not going to be a concern. But after we had walked for an hour or so among the wild ponies that live there and looked from hillsides over the 92,000 acres of woodland that William the Conqueror had set aside as a private hunting ground, the sky had begun to darken. It continued to get more blustery and threatening as we made our way to the last planned stop of the weekend: Stonehenge.

Ever since we had talked about spending this time in England, Stonehenge was a place I had hoped we would visit. It is a place of mystery and magic, an inexplicable prehistoric formation that continues to draw visitors and to puzzle historians, and I wanted to see it. My anticipation on the final few miles to the site was matched by that of everyone else in the car, and as we topped a hill and could see it below us on a broad grassy plain, there was a collective gasp.

Some people have said that visitors to Stonehenge are disappointed, that it is smaller than they thought or not as grand in some other way, but none of us felt anything but excitement as we walked up to the rope fence that marked the walkway around the circle of stones. We were given audio guides to accompany the tour, but it was so windy by that time that I could only hear about half of the commentary, and I finally gave up and just looked and took photo after photo. (None of those photos accompany this dispatch, however. If you’d like to see what it looks like, go to Start on your computer, click on Control Panel and then click on Appearances and Themes; click on Change Desktop Appearance and then scroll down the menu beneath this little display to Stonehenge; click on it and then on the button marked OK, minimize this screen and, voila, you can see what we saw.) What I learned from the audio guide before I stopped listening was that the engineering it took to make this ring of tall stones was even more impressive than that of Avebury because not only did the creators plant the rocks, they also carved them so that they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and had dragged some of the blue stone from as the mystical Pressli Mountains in Wales, 240 miles away. By the time we had gone all the way around, the crowd was getting larger, and a stinging mist was blowing in our faces. We stopped briefly in the gift shop and then had to run through a downpour to the car.

As we headed back toward London in the rain, Terri and Gary began to doze off. Fortunately, Beth stayed awake and continued to read the map and navigate. At some point in the journey, it dawned on me that we were going to be within a few miles of Windsor Castle. Earlier that day, Gary had said that the only thing they would not be seeing on the trip was Windsor, so I suggested to Beth that we take a detour and let them get the full English experience before heading back to the States on Monday. Terri and Gary were up for the idea, too, so we left the M3, passed by Ascot racetrack—which is enormous—and on into Windsor. When we drove into town, I drew attention to the flag flying over the Round Tower (see last week’s Dispatch); it was the Union Jack, which meant the Queen was not there.

Beth is going to take our kids to Windsor next week, and I’ve already been there, so after a Sunday roast at the Carpenter’s Arms (Sunday roasts are a tradition and very filling), Terri and Gary headed into the castle, while Beth and I wandered around the High Street. When we met up again, I happened to look at the flag flying above the tower. It was the Royal Standard! The Queen! She hadn’t been there when we arrived in town, but now—just like the last time I was in Windsor—she was!

This was the third time in a little more than a week that the Queen just “happened” to be in the same place I was. Once may be coincidence; twice, perhaps. But three times? As much as I hate to believe it’s true, the evidence seems to point to only one thing: I am being followed by a royal stalker!

Stay tuned…