Ben Crowder

Monday, 2.23.09

Even with going to bed early, I spent the first hours of the night in hell. Not literally, of course, but you know that awful, icky feeling when you’re asleep but not, stuck in this kind of limbo where you can sense the dread passage of time and the night just drags on? That. And to top it off, I woke up all the way at three in the morning and couldn’t fall back asleep again. Ended up reading some short stories on my iPhone and doing some writing. At 5:15 I finally and mercifully fell asleep.

And naturally slept in till ten. I’d hoped to wake up earlier than that, since I was in London for crying out loud and I sure didn’t want to spend my whole trip sleeping, but my body vetoed that idea. Getting out of the hostel so late infused the first few hours of the day with a weird feeling, like I was still wandering about in a dream.

I’m a book person. I’d heard of Charing Cross Road. That’s where I went next — Foyles Bookshop, just a short walk from my hostel. At first I thought, “Goodness…it’s smaller than I thought.” But that was from the outside; once I went inside, I realized how huge it really was, and my little heart went pit-a-pat. Five (or so — I can’t quite remember) floors of book goodness, with shelves all over the place and books galore. (I am convinced that heaven is nothing but bookstores and libraries.) A short time later, I came out with a U.K. Bloomsbury children’s edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and a German edition of Goethe’s Faust.

Next, of course, I went to Blackwell’s, which was pretty much right across the street. More books! And this one had a luscious little section on medieval lit, even. I pinched myself. Yes, it was real. I ended up getting Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the original Middle English. Mmm.

About this time I started feeling sick (a continuation of the night’s ickiness), but I forged on. (The sickness luckily never ballooned into anything more than a vague feeling, thankfully.)

On to Westminster Abbey. When I came out of the Tube, I saw this huge building in front of me. “Oh, that’s definitely Westminster,” I thought to myself as I pulled out my phone to take some photos. Huge clock tower, massive architecture, hordes of people all around. I wandered along the bridge for a bit, taking some nice photos of the Thames (the Thames! Ever since reading Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, I’ve wanted to see the Thames). Then I figured I’d pop in and take a tour. Well, I rounded the corner looking for an entrance, but all I could see were guards and closed gates. On the other side of the street sat a smaller, nice looking church, so I snapped some pictures of it as well.

Finding a guard, I asked him how I could get in for a tour. “Down there,” he said, pointing. The sign said something about tickets, but it didn’t look like there was a ticket booth there. Hmm. I pulled out my map…and realized that I was not in fact looking at Westminster Abbey but at the Houses of Parliament instead. Whoops. :)

Since I didn’t really plan to hit up Parliament, I crossed the street to that nice, smallish church which wasn’t quite as small as I’d thought it was. (Trees hid its true height.) After poking my head in at St. Margaret’s Church next door to the Abbey, I found the credit card entrance to Westminster, paid my dues, and found that for an extra three pounds, I could join the tour that had just started. I coughed up three quid and followed the lady to the group standing under the organ area.

The tour — led by a fellow Ben, who was a verger at the Abbey — lasted ninety minutes and included some cool areas that were off-limits to normal visitors (like the area where George (I think? Blast, my memory’s failing me) was entombed). Standing above Dickens’ grave was a new sensation for my imagination. (Actually, I wanted to go down into the catacombs and see some bones, but they didn’t seem to offer that tour. I’m not sure, they might have even had to pry up the floor tiles to get down there. Must research.) I also saw Browning’s, Tennyson’s, Newton’s, and Darwin’s “graves.” And of course those belonging to Elizabeth I and both Marys. And the coronation chair. (They fit 8,000 people in the Abbey for the last coronation. It’s not that big, so they build special platforms. Very impressive.) The coolest part of Westminster, though, was just the grandeur — it’s so tall, and the stained glass is awesome, and the lack of heating keeps you on your toes. ;)

After Westminster Abbey, I crossed the bridge and walked over to the London Eye (a huge ferris wheel of sorts, though you’re inside a bubble instead of in a chair, and if you’re confused, just google it :)). The ride was cool, but I was bored after a few minutes — there are only so many pictures you can take from up there, unless you’ve got one heck of a zoom lens.

I had some free time to kill, so I decided to walk back instead of taking the Tube. (This was a choice I ended up making more often than I thought I would.) St. James’ Park is rather nice. I absolutely love English parks.

The books in my backpack were getting dreadfully heavy and making my arms sore, so I found the Thai restaurant I’d noticed on Charing Cross Road (or whatever it’s called just off Leicester Square) and ate a great dinner of panang curry and namtok (beef waterfall, น้ำตก). You know, English food really isn’t all that great. I’d heard that before, but eating Thai was like vaulting from one of the nine circles all the way up to the pearly gates. At this point I decided to eat Thai as often as possible from then on. :)

Finished off the night by watching Ian McDiarmid’s play Be Near Me (an adaptation of the book) at the Donmar Warehouse. The theater is very cool — a smaller blackbox in the round, with only four or five rows of seats on each side. (There’s a balcony, too.) Ian McDiarmid, by the way, is the guy who plays Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies. It was a little weird at first being fifteen feet away from the guy who tried to blue-lightning Luke out of existence, but the character he played was different enough that the weirdness evaporated before long. As for the play itself, I didn’t really like it. I tried. Honest, I did, but it didn’t really hook me. I found myself edgy, waiting for the show to get interesting…and it never really did. (Even though the priest does drugs and kisses a fifteen-year-old boy and stuff.) The barrage of gratuitous f-bombs didn’t help, either. (But I do have to say that the Scottish accents were like perfume on the profanity. Not enough to mask it, but they did help a little. :P)

To be continued…