London Daze

. . . What better way to highlight the tranquil quietude of Dorset than to board a train in Axminster and disembark two hours later at London’s enormous Waterloo Station. Waterloo confirms that I am well and truly a country mouse. The aggregations of fellow humans must reach well into the thousands. 

We have arranged a modest B & B at Fulham in one of London’s far reaches for a measly ninety-five pounds a night, no en suite toilet, no shower. The B & B is under one of the aircraft approaches to Heathrow. Every minute a big jet descends toward the vast airport.

We buy three days worth of passes for the London Underground—a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. How benighted of me to imagine that the Tube might be quieter on a weekend day. At one point—how many storeys underground I cannot say—we find ourselves in human gridlock, an Amazon of people jammed in front of us, another immediately behind. I manage to squelch claustrophobic hysteria. Eventually we move.

Our principal Saturday objective is the Imperial War Museum. IWM boasts a newly reorganized Great War exhibit. The museum charges no admission. We arrive at opening time, 10 a.m., to find a long queue of people eager to see the fresh exhibit. We are surprised and pleased to be included among the 10:15 admitted flock. Despite the masses elbowing for space I somehow manage both to keep panic at bay and feel much moved by the fruits of the curators’ labours.

Sunday delivers another museum—the mother of all reliquaries say I—the British Museum. Crowds of people—what else—swarm around us. This amazing museum features free admission too. We escape the masses by paying sixteen pounds each to get into a special exhibit, ‘Ming: 50 Years That Changed China’. Beholding the Ming treasures from the years 1400 to 1450 we are thus able to see, I do not feel robbed.

After several hours at the museum we walk the streets of London: Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly. On a bright Sunday afternoon the sidewalks are choked with fellow humans, none of whom seem nonplussed by the hordes. 

Jan seeks a visit to a long-established department store, Liberty of London, which offers arrays of house-brand fabric highly regarded by quilters. She finds nothing to her taste, but I do. On the way up a stairwell I spot a memorial tablet to those of the store’s employees who died in the Second World War. Is there an analogous one to those who fell in 1914-18? I ask one employee. Then another, a 20-year veteran. Neither has any idea. I go searching on my own and find the WWI memorial: a beautifully crafted wooden tablet evidently invisible not just to the store’s current-day employees but likely to almost every shopper who hurries past.

We form the impression that all the world comes to London. Multi-ethnicity abounds. Along the sidewalks people conversing in our own language seem outnumbered by those speaking a host of unfamiliar tongues. In restaurants we are served by charming young women who are not English lasses. They tell us they come from Lithuania, Poland or Rumania.

We join the throngs at Whitehall, Westminster and sealed-off Downing Street, then cross the Horse Guards Parade to meld into the madding crowds at St. James Park. Fortuitously, St. James is big: we have room to turn around. We are surprised to find abundant birds at the large St. James lake—ducks and geese, some native to the UK, many not: barnacle goose, bar-headed goose, red-breasted goose; mandarin duck, red-crested pochard, tufted duck. The birds swim freely about, they are not caged. Why do they stay? I deduce they are well and properly fed by the park operators and have come to prefer a deadbeat’s life of to that of a free flier. Why should it be otherwise?

On Monday morning we allow ourselves several hours to get from Fulham to Heathrow, check in for our flight and clear security. Heathrow is enormous; it has five terminals, of which Air Canada’s, Terminal 2, is brand new. Despite its world-class museums and myriad amenities 72 hours in London seems just about enough. I nod goodbye to the great city; seven hours later the uninterrupted forest surrounding Halifax’s Stanfield International Airport looks more beautiful than ever.