Strange Notations From a Laborious Life

“Now is the winter of our discontent”, wrote Shakespeare in his play, Richard III and one could say, “Now is a dark and rainy Autumn”, for it is so in the great city of London.
Yes, I am in the English capital on the first leg of my six week European sojourn so I am merely checking in to let all know I am alive and well.

It has been quite bleak, rain nearly everyday. Not heavy and there are long periods of dry in between the showers but today it must be said is very poor.

I have been to the Tower of London this morning, trawling through 900 years of British history and enjoying it. The Tower is certainly worth the price of admission and as it is just around the corner from where we are staying, a very convenient attraction to visit.

 We are quite tired and footsore. London is a huge metropolis and we have been walking quite a bit. We hiked from Tower Hill along the Thames to Westminster a few days ago and I don’t think either Linda or I have quite recovered from that yet.

We have done plenty of the tourist stuff. We visited Westminster Abbey and have done tours of Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace, ridden the Tube, done the London Dungeons tour, seen the changing of the Guard, walked through Hyde Park, seen a show on the West End, The Phantom of the Opera no less, and taken the tourist bus ride through the streets made famous to our antipodean ears through the game of Monopoly.

I have been to London before but the scale of the city has to be seen to be believed. So many places to go and things to do, people crawling the streets in large numbers, a city area which dwarfs the likes of Sydney and Melbourne, no small satellites themselves.

Certainly a global capital with a myriad of languages and faces of all colours to be seen as we wander this striking mass of steel and concrete which is probably the greatest city in the world.

I must say it is a little sad and perhaps even a little pathetic to tour the Abbey and ponder over the tombs of some of the greatest monarchs of English history as tourists in the heart of this very commercial hub traipse through the church with their audio tours ablaze in their ears, catching for a brief moment the power and gravitas of these noble lords who ruled with fists of iron, before slinking back into their own lives with barely any comprehension of what they have just seen. The Kings and Queens of England who bent fortune to their own will surely deserve better. Laying forever in the heart of a nation they once ruled but could now not possibly understand, their final resting places gawked at by those to whom they would not have given the time of day was surely not what they planned.

But tonight my own adventure moves on and I will wander the streets of Whitehall in the rain and dark on the trail of Jack the Ripper. Our tour starts just up the road and runs for two hours and I look forward to it.
So, until I have time for another small update I will bid you adieu and all the best and will try to update you again soon. Have a nice day.