Day 13 - London: The British Museum and the Tate Gallery

Our main Tuesday destination was the British Museum.  The area around the museum was full of shops and pubs with great British names like, “Tea and Tattle,” “Thomas Farthing,” “Satchels and Company” and “The Intrepid Fox.” I was especially delighted to find “Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers.” Fellow Dickens fans will understand.

The “split-up-see-what-you-want-to-see-and-rendezvous-at-a-particular-time” model had worked very well at the Tower, and so became our modus operandi for most places like the British Museum.

I had Charis with me, but decided to turn entire control over to her and just follow where and when she led. At first she looked at me a little funny, but quickly grew accustomed to the arrangement.  It was very interesting to let her follow her own interests and be on her timetable and agenda!

Charis was chiefly drawn to the mummies, so we spent a lot of time there. I ended up answering a lot of questions about death, dying, entombment, etc. She was most taken by the hair still intact on one of the mummies, but also spent a lot of time in the room containing art and artifacts from the tomb chapel of Nebamun.

We continued on through some of the early British treasures, particularly of interest to me for their connection to the era of Celtic Britain in which Stephen Lawhead set his Pendragon Cycle. Those who have read the books will recognize the ethos in the photos from that room.

We also went in the Assyrian Lion Hunt rooms and the Parthenon rooms. Charis was less interested in these, but was beginning to flag in general -- just in time to meet back up with the others in the courtyard outside and enjoy some Frisbee tossing and pigeon chasing.

After lunch at the nearby Ruskin’s cafe, the group split up again for the afternoon. Dietrich, Jen and Charis toured the HMS Belfast and did a little shopping. (Dietrich bought a scarf.) Anna, Emily, Gramps and Grams went to the cartoon museum then Grams went off to do her own thing. Gramps and the two older girls went to the London Bridge Experience. (If our collective memories succeeded in getting this on the right day.)

I wandered with Nora, first around the local streets and then by bus, tube or train to a variety of locations including Trafalgar Square (where we also went into St-Martin-in-the-Fields), Charing Cross, St. Paul’s Cathedral grounds and Millenium Bridge.

After crossing the bridge, we went briefly into the Tate Gallery (where we just bumped into Dietrich, Jen and Charis!). We only had time for one room, so I visited Gerhard Richter’s large canvas abstract paintings that he executed while listening to John Cage. While I am more fond of Richter’s experimentation with photo realism (see for instance, Reader), I am always interested in what he is up to. In this case, the idea of listening to an experimental musician while painting abstract art is very intriguing.

I also quickly perused the bookstore on my way out and found three I would really like to pick up sometime, Juliet Hacking’s Photography: The Whole Story, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment and Fred Herzog: Photographs.

As I appear to have ceased taking pictures or jotting down notes for the evening, I have no idea what if anything we did.

Day 13 Reflections

Reflection One: It was great to see where Charis’ interest carried us in the British Museum. Entirely uninformed by any prior sense of greatness, excellence or art-historical significance, she guided us to what intrigued her at the moment rather than to any “Kodak picture spot” sense for museum going. I appreciated this approach and am committed to doing it more often.

Reflection Two: Back to the topic of the way Londoners' dress compared to Parisians'.

In Paris, there is a restraint and control of clothing as fashion, borne perhaps out of the combination of artistic sensibility, culture and maybe even a tinge of world weariness. Again, Paris seems an old city with old sensibilities. Even its vibrancy is mature and cultivated. (See, "Day 05 - Paris" for the dancing on the Seine.)

London, on the other hand, is all naive exuberance and accidental excess. London is a fresh young girl in a sundress with new high heels and bright lipstick, headed out to see the Queen for the first time.

Interestingly, both London and Paris are among the top four fashion capitals of the world (along with Milan and New York). It’s just that in Paris this sentiment seems to make it into every cafe, side street and urban park. In London … well, it certainly hasn't made it to St. James Park.

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Parisians: Volume III

I posted these to Facebook but left them off of the blog.

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Day 12 - London: The Tower of London, HMS Belfast

Monday morning I got up early to shoot some of the buildings at Canary Wharf, intending to head south and further explore the Isle of the Dogs.

As I walked out the doors of Fraser Place, however, I was met by a portly man with a backpack who asked me which way he should go to get to Canary Wharf station. I started giving him directions and he said he knew how to get there, he just wanted to know whether he should go up the concrete steps in front of the apartments or walk to the iron staircase by the harbor. I told him that it didn't really make a difference, but that  I always took the iron staircase because it was more scenic. So he jovially proclaimed that he would go the scenic way with me then.

I soon realized I had met the incarnation of the character Joost in the movie, The Way.

He introduced himself as John and told me that he had just woken up that morning and decided he was going to walk home to Birmingham -- which is right around 100 miles from London. My interest was immediately piqued.

The quarter mile of conversation or so that we shared followed the same pattern. He would ask me a question (“Where are you from?” “Have you been anywhere else in Europe?” etc.). My answer would then serve as the launching point for a host of personal disclosures on his part. In what cannot have been more than 15 - 20 minutes I learned that he had a wife from Thailand who grew up in Sacramento, but whom he had met in Paris; that he had been so proud to see a Royal Marine slap Andy Murray on the back (because he had served with the Royal marines for five years); and that he had done shots of tequila with American girls in Paris, where he lived with two Dublin South-Siders not far from the Sorbonne for a few years.

He also provided at each juncture his brief and colorful opinions on Asian women, various quarters of Paris, American girls, South-Siders and East-Enders.

At a certain point I had already missed my turn in order to walk a little further with him when the instinct began to creep up in me to just keep going on with him for a while, ditch my morning shoot and catch the tube back from wherever I ended up. I could do it with perhaps only minimal disruption to everyone else's schedule. But would they be worried if I didn't make it back by 9:30? 10:00? 10:30? Hmmm… And what would John from Birmingham think if I asked to walk with him for a while? What if the ebullient man suddenly fell silent and had nothing to say? Would we have anything more to talk about?

After about a block and a half of such anguished tension, I told John I was headed down the street to the left (even though I no longer knew where I was). I shook his hand firmly and long, wishing him well but unable to rid myself of the feeling that I had failed him as a fellow traveler on this terrestrial globe.

Still fundamentally unsettled, I went back to the apartment and met up with the rest. We headed out to Tower of London for the morning, spring up into three groups once we got there.

The biggest surprise for me was that the "Tower" of London is not a tower at all but an entire fortification with multiple towers within two concentric walls. I had always imagined a solitary tower with a single prisoner at a time. When it was used as a prison there were multiple prisoners in various degrees of comfort.

Another big surprise was the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh. Though I would never have claimed to be a scholar of anything remotely related to Raleigh, I did know of him as an adventurer, courtier and man of letters in the Elizabethan age. I would never have guessed that he was thrice imprisoned (including one twelve year stint in the Tower) and eventually executed.

Finally, it was just interesting to note the ecumenical nature of the place. Protestants and Catholics alike we equally imprisoned in the tower, and worse, for their defiance of the official state church. The graffiti they scrawled or even carved elegantly into the walls speaks with grace and courage of their steadfast defiance and integrity in the face of a coercive state. The stories of Henry Walpole, Anne Askew and John Gerard were particularly moving.

I was also able to do some more experimental photography in the tower -- particularly making use of out of focus shots and deep earth tones. Looking out through the windows and barricades I was struck by the same incongruity of modern and Medieval or Renaissance or Victorian architecture.

I think most of the others were able to see the crown jewels, but I am constitutionally unable to stand in a line to see just about anything. So I skipped it.

After the tower, Anna, Emily, Nora and I took off to tour the HMS Belfast while the others visited the Tower Bridge. On the way to the Belfast we stopped for fish and chips, which were quite good.

The HMS Belfast was a surprisingly enjoyable tour. We were pretty much free to roam about where we liked all over the ship. Many areas were informative and surprising, but the real delight for me was the machine shop.

My grandfather, Paul Balsbaugh, served aboard the USS Oklahoma as a welder and went on to found Best Manufacturing in Modesto, CA, where he patented and manufactured a revolutionary walnut and almond harvester. (Researching Best Manufacturing for this post, I can across a fascinating 2008 article in the San Joaquin Historian.)

My father, George Balsbaugh, is a lifelong machinist who first worked in my grandfather’s shop then relocated and worked for most of his life in a variety of machine shops in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. After the collapse of the timber industry in Oregon, he helped invent a process for repairing sawmill rails remotely and founded his own company, Acculine Rails. He and my mother now travel around the country in the summer months, doing laser alignment and grinding to keep everyone’s 2x4s true.

Personally, I also worked in a machine shop while I lived with my maternal grandparents during the summer months of my college years -- Mid-State Manufacturing in Ripon, CA. At one point, frustrated by the mundane drudgery of my early college experience,  I even asked the owner for a full time job. He told me to go back to college.

So machine shops strike a very resonant chord with this child from a town of five hundred souls who somehow finds himself the headmaster of a classical education school and who is blessed to have traveled the world.

When we were done with our tour, we headed back to Canary Wharf, intending to catch a “Shakespeare in the Park” version of Hamlet. But we camped out at the wrong park and when nothing seemed to be happening, we finally wandered around with several other confused theater-in-the-park goers to the correct location, only to find it packed to the gills and impossible to hear from any remaining seat. So we headed home.

Still … a remarkably full day!

Day 12 Reflections

Reflection One. John of Birmingham.

There have probably been a dozen or so moments like this in my life. I don't even know quite how to characterize them. It is the sort of thing that only a poem could begin to suggest and only if I could find the words and phrases. I do believe that the prompting of the Holy Spirit is involved.

I confess that I have followed these instincts less than I would have liked to have been able to say at this point in my life. Maybe a quarter of the time? A third at best?

Sometimes it's fear, sometimes a practical obstacle, sometimes an overdeveloped sense of dignity or order. But I have never regretted following this instinct and have always regretted not following it. Nor is the regret something that diminishes over time. Rather, what lingers and intensifies with time is the feeling that some great adventure has been lost forever, that I left unexplored a great "What if ..?" and that a wardrobe which might once have once led to a magical kingdom now yields only a shallow closet and solid oaken back. Such is the power of regret.

But praise be to God, who had rescued us from this body of death! His mercies are new every morning!

John of Birmingham, wherever you are, this prayer from the Lorica of St. Patrick is for you:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,Christ on my right, Christ on my leftChrist where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I ariseChrist in the heart of every man who thinks of me,Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,Christ in every eye that sees me,Christ in every ear that hears me.

Reflection Two: The movie The Way is not an excellent film in any art house sense, but it has stuck with me for several reasons -- the archetypal quality of the four main characters, the questions it raises about community in the modern world, and the fact that it is a journey movie that restores the serious religious and even specifically Christian significance to the act of journeying -- the quest, the pilgrimage, the via dolorosa.

It would be worth the efforts of Christians in America to recover more deeply and broadly the Christian understanding of the journey -- but it does meaning getting off the freeway and out of the car.

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Day 11 - London: Westminster Abbey, Greenwich, Thames River Cruise, St. James Park and Buckingham Palace

Sunday morning Jen, Anna, Nora, Charis, Erick and I went to the eight o’clock service at Westminster Abbey. I had forgotten that despite being held in Westminster Abbey, an Anglican service that early in the morning would be without a homily or any music. But I was surprised to find that the the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was being used!!! The service was nice in its own way, and you could really tell that there was a genuine of small community of believers who were regular worshippers at that time. A couple of the older folks, priest and assistants seemed particularly familiar and friendly with each other.

The unexpected delight was getting to exit the Abbey through the otherwise empty cloisters while the rays of morning sun was still slanting through the pillars. The muted colors of the architecture, the perfect morning light and my girls in their Sunday dresses playing hopscotch over the gravestones: this is a perfect storm for photography and I did get probably my favorite shot of the vacation there in the cloisters.

Among the interesting discoveries were the graves of the “Surveyors of the Fabric” -- the official church architects and aesthetic overseers.

We could never had this experience had we not been worshipers there in the morning. While there is a charge to enter the Abbey as a tourist and large crowds to contend with, there is no charge to worship in the Abbey. We had planned on returning to see more another time but never made it back, so this visit became like of my “found souvenirs” - a special, unexpected moment that lingers as a treasured remembrance.

We made our way back to Fraser Park and, on the basis of our great experience with the Seine tour decided that we would start taking in the London sights with a ride on the Thames. First we stopped at our local Starbucks. Yes, they’re everywhere. Paris and London. Gramps told stories to the kids outside while Mary, “Jane” and I waited for our drinks. We took the train to where the boat launched at Greenwich, but before boarding we stopped to have lunch and do a little shopping at the Greenwich market.

I think the best of London cuisine was on display here in booth after booth of food choices  --  which means no British food but an inexhaustible supply of authentic ethnic foods from around the world. I had a couple selections from the Thai food booth. The calamari yellow curry was especially tasty. Despite my delightful discovery of escargot in Paris, this was the most enjoyable meal I had yet experienced in Europe. I might even have gone back to Greenwich just for lunch at one of the other booths, but they were only open on the weekends.

After lunch we departed on our boat trip on the Thames. What was most striking about the view from the boat was how integrated modern London is with whatever remains of historic London and how progressive the city continues to be architecturally. London’s City Hall looks something like a glass egg. The London Eye is a constantly surprising visual presence. Buildings with nicknames like the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Walkie Talkie and, most notably, The Shard continue to rise, transforming the London skyline and throwing historical architecture like St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster and the Tower Bridge into strange relief. London’s identity must be in perpetual motion.

We disembarked at Westminster and made our way through St. James Park towards Buckingham Palace. This afforded us the best look so far of Londoners and, I must say, the sight was surprising. If you would have told me before my trip that Parisians would be exponentially more modest in their attire than Londoners, I certainly would have been skeptical. But dress in Paris was consistently elegant, restrained and fine -- even in the parks. Dress in London was … well … none of the above. A picture is worth a thousand words in the picture gallery, “Londoners: Volume I” and a deeper reflection on this surprising difference will follow at some point.

Another interesting phenomenon we discovered was “London Litter.” The closer we got to Buckingham Palace, the more impossible it became to find a simple trash can. Nowhere in sight. Not one. Dietrich carried his pitiful apple core halfway across the city. And yet the streets seemed twice as clean as the streets of Paris! What was going on???

We learned later that this was because of London’s terrible experience with the mostly IRA initiated bombings in mid 1980’s and 90’s. Trash cans were huge security concerns. So instead of depositing trash in a trash receptacle, in high threat areas of London people simply start neat little piles of trash off in some inconspicuous corner, other people add to the pile, and eventually someone comes and sweeps them up. Neat litter. This, too, is London in a nutshell.

After seeing what was to be seen at Buckingham Palace (the changing of the guard was not one of those things to be seen), we headed back to Canary Wharf. Upon coming out of the Underground, we were met by the strangest intermittent, roaring reverberations echoing off the surrounding skyscrapers. Those of you who are keeping pace with the dates of travel may have already realized that this was the sound of Andy Murray closing in on the end of his quest to become the first even sort-of-Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years. The match was being televised live on a huge screen in Canary Wharf park, and the park was packed with onlookers who were cheering every point. 

Dietrich and I raced to get there for “the moment” but heard the loud sustained cheer of final victory erupt and eventually die out before we could make it to the park. Nonetheless, we did get to see the happy afterglow.

Jen and I went out to a pub on the Thames again that night, but were very put off by the London pub culture as on display in this particular location - which was pretty bourgeoise. Loud, rude, and raucous.

The several experiences of the day left me with the following impression of London at the end of day two: This is essentially an American city. I’m not certain I have much to learn from it.

Day 11 Reflections

Reflection One: The service at Westminster Abbey led me to reflect on something I have often thought about with respect to religious, civil or other authority figures -- the tension in such a figure between his office, his role and the personality of the man. It’s a beautiful thing when done well. In American evangelicalism, we seem to emphasize, in order of importance, the personality of the man, the role of the preacher, and the office of the priest. I suspect the order is not quite the same in Westminster.

Reflection Two: In the context of Britain's reputation for having the world’s worst native cuisine, Greenwich market’s marvelous and authentic ethnic food put me in mind of something Jean Jaques Rousseau said about man among the other animals in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: “Men, dispersed up and down among the rest, would observe and imitate their industry, and thus attain even to the instinct of the beasts, with the advantage that, whereas every species of brutes was confined to one particular instinct, man, who perhaps has not any one peculiar to himself, would appropriate them all, and live upon most of those different foods which other animals shared among themselves; and thus would find his subsistence much more easily than any of the rest.” I wonder if this isn’t the genius of London and, by extension, the United States.

Reflection Three: The Thames is a very different river than the Seine and makes its way through London more as an obstacle than an invitation. There is no real way to have a culture along the river in quite the way that Parisians can. This must affect the overall spirit of the city.

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