9 May: Quoth the raven, “How about some of that croque monsieur?”
Up betimes for my last day in London. Creakily got myself to Tower Hill for the Tower of London. I have to say, I was impressed in spite of myself – I expected it to be pretty cheesy, but it would have been quite the quite if there hadn’t been so many tourists and so many ways of hurrying you along through the exhibits. The medieval palace was mighty fine, then over to the jewel house. Lord have mercy. I’m usually not much a one for big glittery jewels, but the Crown Jewels are indescribably magnificent. I mean, nobody but the British could pull it off. I was agog... but again, they hurried you through so. Outside, it was time to say hello to the ravens, who shamble around monkey-like and saucy. “Hey, we uphold the monarchy! Give us snacks!” Of course, there’s always the person who doesn’t believe the “ravens bite!” sign (or the more mellifluous, “Les corbeaux peuvent mordre”). While I was still fiddling with my camera, four ravens massed on me – by their leg-rings, it was Gwylum, Hugine II, Hardey and Odin. Before I could get the camera working, they had moved on to some other sucker.
Hung around the scaffold spot looking around to see what Anne Boleyn et al saw as their last vision of this world. Went up into the Bloody Tower and got involved in the first stairs-driven panic of the trip. I’ve solved one of the great historical mysteries – the little princes weren’t murdered, they broke their necks on that hideous little spiral staircase in the Bloody Tower. Sir Walter Raleigh’s rooms were fixed up in there – well, I could see lots of worse places for writing, but I suppose a world explorer would have seen it differently. After an ice cream, I was ready to head to Bunhill Fields.
…Which turned out to be a big city park where instead of lawn, there were higgledy piggledy rows of Nonconformist tombstones. While the monuments weren’t as elaborate as the Established boneyards, the epitaphs (when you could read ‘em) were great – one guy was still complaining about Judge Jeffries, another headstone informed us that 240 gallons of fluid had been taken out of Mary Pace. Meanwhile, folks are sitting on benches by John Milton and Daniel Defoe – there’s a little jam jar of posies on Blake’s monument – while eating their sandwiches and talking on cell phones.
The TV that evening was pretty cool – a documentary on Winnie the Pooh that included the information that Brian Jones drowned in Christopher Robin’s pool. (The current tenants of the house say it’s pretty easy to differentiate between the two sets of pilgrims they get.) Then another documentary on animal psychopharmacokinetics – lemurs annoying poisonous millipedes to get them to squirt mind-altering chemicals (I can only hope that some young musician somewhere leapt up and screamed, “That’s it! We’ll call the band ‘Junkie Lemurs.’”). Reindeers swirling around in a Lapp rave after eating magic mushrooms, drunken monkeys stealing colorful tropical drinks from unwitting beach patrons on St. Kitts – you haven’t seen horror until you’ve watched a macaque lolloping along the sands with a daiquiri clutched to its chest. A bad idea before bed.