Ten or so days in London

I was slightly disappointed by how easily I got out of the Netherlands. My Schengen-busting schemes were about to be put to the test. I had email confirmation from the various embassies to tell me what I’d done was legal… or rather, they’d told me that what I told them I was doing was legal. My imagination was filled with things I might have overlooked, loopholes that had closed before I tried to squeeze through them, i’s I had failed to dot, t’s that had gone uncrossed. I had intended to save copies of all my hostel booking confirmations on my iPad, but – disaster – the Booking.com app only saved the ones for the past couple of months. So I spent two hours painstakingly going through my emails and collating the dozens of email confirmations instead. And I went through and retrieved all my train tickets for good measure, too.

 

I was prepared for this to take some time, and that I might have some convincing to do, so I headed to the ferry terminal a good two hours early. With no small amount of apprehension I approached the immigration desk. “Ah, hi guys. This might be a little complicated. You’ll be able to see in my passport that I’ve actually been in the Schengen zone for 135 days, not 90, but it’s legal, because I’m Australian.”

 

Silence for several very long seconds, then a very neutral-sounding question. “So why have you over-stayed your visa?”

 

“No, um, I haven’t over-stayed…” I explained, just a little shakily, that I have an email from the Dutch embassy in Australia. “Here, let me show you! There’s an exemption that applies to Denmark and Germany too, so I crossed into Denmark on day 90, and…”

 

By this time he’d finished reading the email. “That’s ok”, was all he said, and he stamped my passport.

 

Talk about an anti-climax. You don’t want to see my train tickets? Go through, day by day, to work out where I was at what time? I spent two hours finding these hostel bookings, don’t you want to see them? We’re not going to take this to an interview room, where I would have two hours to convince you to let me on the boat? Do you realise I have a blog to write and need some drama?

 

*

 

I had a strange, vaguely unsettling experience when I visited America two years ago. There I was, on the other side of the world, in a place that was instantly familiar, but didn’t quite feel real, because the things about it that were familiar had *never* been real. And I’m not talking about the instantly familiar landmarks, like the White House, though I’ve written before that they didn’t ‘become’ real until I’d seen them for myself. I mean the little details in the background of those famous scenes.

 

School buses were the most obvious one. Australian school buses typically look like ordinary buses, but movie and TV school buses are yellow, have slightly rounded roofs and either a kindly old driver or a wise-cracking mean one, depending on the type of movie. Traffic lights are different in the movies too: they’re not on poles at the side of the road, like real-world traffic lights, but instead dangle from wires over the road. Then I got to America, where school buses are yellow and have slightly rounded roofs (I didn’t speak to any drivers), and traffic lights dangle from wires over the road. I’d stepped onto a movie set, and the nagging sensation that I was in a not quite real place, with not quite real buses and not quite real traffic lights, didn’t go away. Arriving in London for the first time is much the same experience. Grey skies. Black cabs. Red mail boxes, phone boxes and double decker buses. Police officers with funny hats. I’ve seen this show on the BBC.

 

But it was good to be home, after six months away. Or not quite back home, but clearly somewhere closer to it, even if I’m geographically further away than I’ve been for most of those six months. The cabs and buses might be the wrong colour, and I don’t know why they still have the phone boxes at all, but the cheap chocolate in the supermarket is Cadbury Dairy Milk, not Milka, and the supermarket has self-service checkouts again. Yes, I feel guilty about using them, but you have no idea how many hours I spent lining up in European supermarkets. Cars drive on the left side of the road, which I had been worried about, but the crossings have ‘look left’ signs painted on the road to help travellers from Europe (like me) to survive. I did stand on the right side of an escalator by mistake – force of habit – but I’m just relieved I remembered not to speak slowly and ask people if they speak English.

 

Adding to the sense of an almost homecoming was the fact that, apart from a walk, the first thing I did was something I haven’t done for six months: greet a familiar face. I crossed paths with Lindy only briefly – she was leaving London the morning after I arrived – but it was a delight, after so long, to begin a conversation with something other than ‘hi, I’m Charlie. I’m from Australia. You?’ And Lindy managed to avoid asking the question I have no idea how to answer. For future reference, if I see you at home and you ask ‘how was your trip?’, I’m going to stare at you blankly for a while. It’s been so many things, for so long, that there’s simply no way to answer. ‘Umm… good’ probably won’t cut it.

 

I didn’t have time for much more than a brief walk before my catch up with Lindy, so I headed from my hostel – surprisingly good, apart from tiny beds that even I wouldn’t have fitted into if I were any more elongated – across Hyde Park, starting near Kensington Palace. I ignored the Palace – Lindy and I might have been the only two people in London who didn’t care that Prince George had started school that day – and instead turned east, towards Westminster, which was a good three kilometres of park away. I went past the ‘Round Pond’ and… well, I know the English are fond of euphemisms, but it has straight sides. These people can’t even name a straight-edged pond in a straight-edged fashion. 

My path did eventually take me to another palace, but let’s be honest: Buckingham is an ugly grey slab of a building. I tried to remember whether the flags meant the Queen was or wasn’t in residence, before I remembered that I really didn’t give a toss either way. It was only when I saw my third palace in less than an hour - the Palace of Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, with Big Ben visible between the trees from St James’ Park, that I admit I got a little bit excited. I’m a democrat.

 

I lingered back at the hostel for much of the next day, watching Richmond beat Geelong in the final that would determine who the Swans would play when – err, ‘if’ – we beat Essendon the next morning. Richmond won, surprisingly, postponing their inevitable finals humiliation by a fortnight. To avoid making too little of the day, afterwards I headed to the British Museum, which was open late on a Friday. 

The Museum is where the British ruling class stores the spoils of three centuries of empire: it has most of the Parthenon Marbles, whose absence from the Acropolis Museum I railed against in my blog post about Athens. It also has the Rosetta Stone, which Egypt wants back, an enormous collection of brass plaques, the Benin Bronzes, sought by Nigeria and Benin, and who knows how many more contentious pieces claimed by how many former colonies. The Museum’s response has typically been to shrug their shoulders and say ‘finders keepers’, but apparently they’re at least discussing sending the Benin Bronzes back to Africa, so maybe the Greeks have a snowflake’s chance in hell after all. A very small snowflake.

 

As much as I’ve wrestled with the ethical dilemma of what to do with such treasures – I won’t labour the point here – I have to admit the Museum was a guilty pleasure. I had arrived shortly before four o’clock, and with the late closing time I thought I might get through it all, but then the first room proved to be carved straight from the pages of a Victorian novel, lined with wooden bookcases, stacked with leather-bound books, surrounding cases and cabinets of curiosities. I spent more than an hour in there.

 

Luckily the Museum is free (though you’re forced to stop and decline to pay a ‘suggested donation’ on the way in), because I had to come back later in the week to finish it. And I had to do the same at the Imperial War Museum, which is similarly free (minus the suggested donation). I was surprised to discover that the latter only really begins with World War I (conveniently skipping over most of the ‘imperial’ wars Britain fought along the way). It’s also been done up very recently, and it’s mostly too modern in a city whose museums ought to be a little stuffy. It made up for it by having an exhibit called the ‘Bureau of Alternative Facts’, where visitors were invited to write their own explanations for various objects and events. Of all the many institutions I’ve visited in Europe, the Imperial War Museum is pretty much the last one I would have expected to be throwing shade towards Donald Trump.

 

I had another catch up planned for my first Saturday evening in London. I hadn’t seen Lindy in seven months, but I hadn’t seen Tilly in seven *years*, with a couple of near misses during her visits to Melbourne along the way, so catching up again was one of the highlights of a city that was, itself, one of the highlights of the trip. Tilly and I share a love for Paul Kelly (the singer: I’m not sure if Tilly shares my love for Paul Kelly the Swans legend, but I’m quite positive we hold Paul Kelly the journalist in equally low regard), so when I saw he was playing in Shepherd’s Bush – the London suburb that’s ground zero for Aussie expats and backpackers alike – it was the perfect occasion.

 

The crowd was almost exclusively Australians, I think. I spotted a Richmond beanie – surely the furthest into September that beanie had ever been worn – and the bloke next to me had flown all the way from Stockholm just for the concert. His enthusiasm for singing along was inversely proportional to the quality of his singing voice: imagine a sea lion with a sore throat, roaring out How to Make Gravy as if his is the only recipe anybody in the theatre should ever hear. I took to holding my water bottle, a little awkwardly, up to my right ear, which he hopefully didn’t realise was because I was using it as noise insulation to drown out his dreadful droning.

 

I had an even slower than usual start the next day, but eventually roused the energy to walk to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. It’s located at 221B Baker Street, an address that didn’t exist in Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime, but was created for marketing purposes afterwards. Getting inside is frustrating: you have to buy tickets in the gift shop, but you only find that out after queuing outside for 20 minutes and then being told, typically by a kindly fellow visitor rather than a member of staff, that the line is only to enter, not for tickets. So I’d queued twice by the time I got inside, where a staff member actually was on hand, in period costume, to walk us through the place.

 

It’s set up exactly as it was when Holmes and Dr Watson were in residence, we’re told, and all the items – from smoking pipes to chemistry equipment – are from the 19th century. Our attention was directed to a photo of a woman – the woman – allegedly Irene Adler, before we were asked to turn and face the wall, where bullet holes trace the letters ‘VR’ in the wallpaper. The patter continued as the guide pointed out mementoes from various cases, but without mentioning or even hinting that none of this was real or that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. 

Increasingly bemused, I sidled over to another guide and asked how many visitors believed Holmes was a real, historical person. He thought for a moment, perhaps wondering whether he should answer honestly or risk shattering the illusion, before estimating that it was about 30%. I must have looked as dismayed as I felt, because the first guide came over after finishing his spiel and asked what the question had been. “He asked how many people believe in Sherlock Holmes”, his colleague explained, and the guide looked shocked. “I believe in Sherlock Holmes”, he said, turning to me, his expression blending surprise, sadness and suspicion. “Don’t you believe in Sherlock Holmes?”

 

Chastened by my apostasy, I decided to play along, and signed the guest book as ‘James Moriarty’ before I left.

 

I headed to the Tower the next morning, an improbably beautiful one to be in London. To be honest I’d become a little inured to castles and palaces, just as I had to palaces, but the Tower was just one of those places you go to anyway. And the history here is particularly interesting to me, as this was the site of what was arguably the world’s longest running zoo. Animals were kept here, typically in appalling conditions, from around 1204 until they were finally shipped out to the new zoo in Regents Park in the 1830s. The king’s menagerie focused, naturally enough, on ‘kingly beasts’ such as lions and tigers (there was also a polar bear that, according to legend, was allowed out into the Thames on a leash to go fishing), and many were kept in the same single room inside the walls. It must have been a Hobbesian environment, with big cats roaring and swiping at each other from one cage to the next. It exasperates me so much when I hear people with no background in zoos dismissing them as “cruel”. There’s always scope for improvement, but go to London and stand inside the Tower Menagerie. Then head over to London Zoo, where you can compare and contrast 19th century exhibits – no longer used, but the zoo is stuck with them due to heritage protections – and what they’ve built in the past 20 years. See how far we’ve come.

 

I’d been at the Tower for perhaps 90 minutes when the improbably beautiful morning turned into the inevitably dreary afternoon. I took shelter inside the gallery containing the Crown Jewels, which was over-stuffed with both ridiculously expensive fripperies and American tour groups, but I could only feign interest in the former and tolerance for the latter for so long, and gave up and headed back out into the rain. I crossed over to the Tower Bridge and was weighing whether to pay to go up inside when the rain turned torrential, and my umbrella – a flimsy thing that had somehow survived since Saint Petersburg – surrendered entirely. I spent the next 15 minutes huddled beside one of the bridge towers, head down and face turned away from the rain, and thought how wonderful it was to be having an authentic British experience. I didn’t get another consecutive two hours outside without rain for the rest of the week, but I didn’t replace the umbrella: I couldn’t find one for less than £15, and I have been known to be stubborn.

 

The next morning I ducked out to the Tesco for supplies, got to the self serve checkout and… my card was declined. That’s weird, I thought, because I know there’s still plenty of money on it. I assumed the machine was dodgy, so I hopped across to the manned counter and tried again, only to have my card declined a second, more embarrassing time. I scrounged some coins from my wallet, paid, and hurried to an ATM… where my card was declined.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

 

I still had my back-up debit card from home, but I didn’t want to use it. The now mysteriously useless card was pre-loaded with pounds and euros, whereas my back-up card only had Aussie dollars, which it would helpfully convert for me at a murderous exchange rate. Meanwhile, although those pounds and euros would still be there when I got home – I’d jumped online to check, they were mercifully still there – they’d hardly be much use to me there.

I finally got on to the card company, at the expense of a mad dash to a post office and very much unwanted UK phone card. Sure enough, somebody had tried to rip me off. They’d failed at stealing my money, but succeeded in getting my card cancelled, and the only way I’d be able to access those euros and pounds for the rest of the trip was through a series of Western Union money orders. I was back in the cash economy for the next three weeks, but at least it had happened in September rather than March. I was also down to just one of my original three cards, after the Russian misadventure, so between that and carrying large amounts of cash around I was ending the trip even more security conscious than I started it.

 

It could have been worse though. I’d already intended to linger back at the hostel the next day – the Swans were playing a semi-final, which I was of course entirely relaxed about – but that was only confirmed as a very good idea as word filtered through the breakfast room that there’d been a bomb go off in the Tube. The attack was at a station about 3km away: I’d just met and enjoyed chatting to an Australian actor named Jesse who was heading that way for lunch, so I doubled back to give him a heads up to avoid the area. I kept an eye on The Guardian live blog for any updates (happily, nobody was killed), and settled back into bed to watch another train wreck – this time at the MCG. It’s my fault. I should have stayed behind the Iron Curtain. I know that now.

 

Mood thoroughly soured by the footy, I retreated to my happy place: that is, I went to Parliament. It was only when I was halfway there on the train that I remembered there’d been a bomb on a train in London that very morning. I looked around: the train was as full as they’d been all week, and people were busily tapping away on their phones or chatting to the companions as normal. We were all keeping calm and carrying on, just like we should. We can literally beat these people without even thinking about it.

 

There was a protest of some sort outside Westminster. A hundred or so elderly men, many wearing Army caps and medals, were gathered around another old gent who was speaking into his loudspeaker. He got about a minute into his prepared remarks before somebody persuaded him to stop and turn the thing on, and when we could finally hear him he announced that he’d just thrown his medals over the fence into Downing Street. I turned to one of the veterans standing nearby and asked why he would do such a daft thing. They were ex-servicemen who had fought the IRA in Northern Ireland: the bloke who no longer had any medals is facing murder charges over an operation he was involved in. I have no idea whether that’s justified, but the veteran I spoke to had an excellent point. Many IRA militants received amnesties for their own actions during the Troubles, but Army soldiers are being prosecuted.

 

I sensed that these blokes were a little new to this street protest caper, and it was reinforced a couple of minutes later. The climax of the event was the imminent arrival of one of their supporters, who had ridden his bicycle all the way from Edinburgh to attend. He was due any minute, and so a cheer went up when a cyclist appeared down the street, heading straight towards the crowd. And the cheering continued as the cyclist, who had evidently not ridden all the way from Edinburgh, continued on through without stopping, bemused by all the fuss. I left the veterans to resume waiting for the right cyclist and went inside.

 

There are no photos allowed in Westminster and it was only a short, self-guided tour of some key rooms, but I stayed for two hours anyway. I knew both the House of Lords and the Commons were small, but I wasn’t prepared for just how small: nearly 650 MPs cram in for Prime Minister’s Questions in a space smaller than a tennis court. I was told I had to stay standing and shouldn’t linger while I was in the chamber, but I feigned low blood sugar, gained permission to sit and stayed for a few minutes. It is, after all, my happy place.

 

And so is London as a whole. It’s the most familiar, the least exotic, the least challenging place I’ve been, but that’s no bad thing this far into a journey. In fact, it’s just the thing.