Travelling Hopefully

I am in a house guarded by a lion.  Its a stone lion but that's ok because its a stone house.  Edward and Britt (plus their two delightful daughters Audrey & Evelyn) are perfect hosts and seem to be taking the presence of a wild eyed, travel stained interloper in their stride.  The house seems to have been designed by Enid Blyton with a full catalogue of twisting staircases, multiple stories, big old wooden doors and foxes in the garden.  Just to prove that last point a fox sauntered up the garden path and paraded itself before me just as I was looking out into the garden for foxes.  I haven't found the secret passage or the group of annoying adolescents (plus pet) looking for hidden treasure but it surely must be a matter of time.

Over the course of the next few days I managed to explore bits of London.  I toddled along to St Paul's cathedral where I wandered around guided by a magic talky box in my ear.  I can't say St Paul's filled me with a sense of the majesty of God but if anybody wanted to start a cult worshipping Sir Christopher Wren I might be persuaded to sacrifice a goat or two.  The interior of the cathedral is amazing; a vast, still space surrounded by paintings, mosaics and stained glass.  All very nice but to cap it off I wandered down to the crypt where a bunch of famous people are buried, or at least memorialised.  Wellington is certainly there although how they got his coffin in without a backhoe I don't know.  There was a cafe in the crypt as well because nothing makes me hungrier than being stuck underground in the company of corpse.

I had scones with jam and cream and was reintroduced to the British inability to provide a cafe at a tourist attraction that can provide anything like service.  I suspect the organisers thought something along the lines of "look you came here to see the damn cathedral, who cares if the service in the cafe is dreadful?".  Some people might think that the French provide worse service than the British but they're missing the point.  The French are trying to be unhelpful.  When the British girl at the cafe in the crypt tossed a scone in my general direction you could see that she honestly had no idea that scones could be served in some other way.  I asked for butter and she looked at me with such sincere perplexity that I started to think I would have to explain what butter was.  Another question I have to ask is, who has stolen all of Britain's teaspoons?  I will admit there are reasons why someone in a cafe might hesitate before handing me anything with an edge but I simply fail to understand the reasoning behind replacing teaspoons with a thin strip of plywood.  They're lousy at stirring and you can't fit as much sugar on them.

I had dinner in Kew with my beautiful and charming sister in law before wandering down to Hampton Court the next day to see how the other half lived.  The other half in question being Henry VIII and his court and how they lived was apparently, nervously.  They say that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown but that is nothing like the unease of the heads who lived near the crown wearer.  In some cases the head was lying some considerable distance from its body, a silent testimony to the fact that the concept of no fault divorce was still in its infancy.

Still to come; Rain, Covent Garden, London Transport Museum and Hampshire.