Day 1 Part 2 Sunday 2025 06 29

We took a train from the air port to London. If there is one m lasting idea thatI came away with about the English countryside. They used a whole lot of brick. Brick houses, brick stations, brick post offices. Everything was made to stand the test of time or a resurgence of Viking raiders. 

Gotta get the iconic "double  decker bus, brick, and just a bunch of fellas working the Doordash gig" shot in there.

We have never gone on this thing. But with the weather, it'd be subjecting ourselves to a very slow, very hot greenhouse

Nelson's column, or, as I explained to my son, he was like their version of Admiral Thrawn.

We get to King's Cross to try and drop off our bags. Now to a North American, every single station in London sounds like a place alive with tea parties and cheekily misunderstood double entendres. Perhaps a bit of a comedy of errors here and there and an overly polite cop in a high vis vest going about his business in an environment where you can be pretty sure there is not a single random person better armed than your entire district SWAT team. Every single station. Maybe, except for Cockfosters but that has the double entendres going for it.

That is to say, I don't usually consider we might be wandering into a dodgy area. More on that in a bit.

We get to the hotel. One of the few hotels that falls within our budget, which forever be known as The Box. While not geometrically accurate it is accurate if you draw the reference to movies where prisons are prominently featured and the box is some kind of quasi-torture device where the occupants are beset by heat/isolation/etc. More on that in a bit.

We drop off our bags. It's morning, we cant' checkin and collapse in a jetlagged daze for a good 4 hours. We are fast approaching 24 hours being awake. 

Our best option, as there is no real air conditioned place within walking distance, is to hang out at  park. The first clue that maybe this area is a touch dodgy is the fellow still sleeping on his mattress near some small, mystery brick buidling in the park. The second was the general seediness around bits of the park. Like this area used to be a bit dodgy, bt the relentless march of gentrification has proceeded, undaunted, trying to stamp to any and all trace of where it once came from. 

We sit. Now my son is really taken up drawing, and he has a good time sketching things out, listening to young people's music, which, in the fullness of time, is retro music, which means old people's music for certain values of old. We hang out there until the lunch place opens. Plan is to eat then nap a little, then walk. This seems to be our unofficial itinerary everywhere we go but it also feels like this is a unique set of actives we arrive at every time we travel. 

Why did we choose a pub? Closest, had pretty good reviews, fell within budget, and not obviously a massive multinational with no local cultural redeeming qualities. Again, always the same decision sieve we apply when we are trying to find places to eat.

It's lovely pub. very family centric, looks like it's run by the owners who I imaagine, in my rose coloured glasses of London, live right above the pub. The air-conditioning is, as i expected, ice in our water and some doors open. 

Via an internal logic that is still baffling to me, my wife and I opt for the Sunday roast, and my son ops for the BBQ chicken, which feels more summery, you think, but what if I told you that it consisted of a chicken breast, drenched in gravy and melted cheese and served with fries? 

Clearly, the heatwave didn't stop us from having a piping hot batch of fish & chips. There is ice in those water glasses, though.

Or a rich, thick, "I think I  just cut my lifespan by 3  months" serving of sticky toffee  pudding.

I can only assume the sleep deprivation and general hunger resulted in this snap, but then to finish it all off we ordered Sticky Toffee Puddings, which sounds about as heat friendly as you'd think. This is the sort of dessert you serve  when your family has just survived weeks of low grade hypothermia and you've realized the autumn storage of grain will last through the winter.

So we finally finish dinner, staggering under the weight of gravy and British hospitality and attempt to take the edge off this fully developed case of jetlag. Into The Box we go.

As predicted there is the one brave fan ready to go, and the room has that This Place Could Double as a Amazon Rainforest Exhibit air quality to it. We open a window, set that fan at full blast, take showers, and attempt to get some sleep in. The ensuing fever dream of being too tired to get up and function yet being way too hot and uncomfortable to really get any sleep was a loop of self-inflicted discomfort that we voluntarily paid for. The room was at the top of three flights of stairs, so we had the added benefit of all the hot air from the building rising through it all and being tapped exactly on our floor. 

Somehow we got enough sleep to be cogent and didn't suffer enough heat exhaustion to make us comatose so it was time to get moving and go for a walk about.

We get to Trafalgar Square and are pleasantly surprised to see most of it is taken up with some large celebration planned for Canada Day. I'm not sure if there is always a large Canada Day celebration in the heart of London, but given the current state of some sabre rattling, it did my heart good to see support for Canadian sovereignty. 

Odd, when you think about it, that this support comes from a country that, historically, maybe not the best friend to sovereignty on foreign lands, but all things change, even, maybe especially, geopolitical strategy and sentiment of countries, given enough time.

We see the usual sights, they are as amazing as usual, Nelson's Column, London Eye, etc etc. We take a break in the strange London warmth to retreat to a garden. Specifically, the Victoria Embankment Gardens: Whitehall. It's a wonderful green space with families relaxing on benches or on the grass and a series of quite prominent statues all along the park. 

The first on has an excellent plaque for William Tyndale, who apparently was the first translate the Greek of the New Testament to English. Depending on how one views Christianity and its impact on the world, community, comfort for the sick and dying, justifications for imperialism and genocide, etc etc, this statue is at least not entirely and completely problematic. More than 50%? Maybe. 

The rest of the statues were not so lucky.

Wandering about those statues I couldn't help but notice that none of them had any plaques at all. This is hardly unusual for London, which seems to have so many statues and notable buildings that plaques either get worn away by the entropy of the city or someone though, at the time, that of course nobody would ever forget who Lord William Bentick was and the mere idea that one needed anything more than his name stated in embossed brass is an outrage.

The Least Problematic of the statues in the 
Victoria Embankment Gardens

But these statues were placed in a garden, quite large statues, with at least one statue that did have a plaque. Which lead me to believe that maybe there is a reason there is no plaque. One of them looked like a military commander and around the base had two shields (the internet tells me it's an escutcheon?), one said India, the the other Africa. Oh dear. Looking up this fellow looks like he was responsible for kicking off the whole Boer War. Oh dear.

 Another statues, some googling, a general who fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Oh, that's not too bad. Wait, he fought against the rebellion. 

The park was like an memorial to the military might and oppression of the British Empire. This shouldn't have been surprising. But the fact that there was no other information on these statues outside of their names indicates maybe some institutional embarrassment. The whole complicated idea of "We absolutely respect nation's sovereignty now".

  

It really is a lovely garden, though. Quaint benches. Statues of war criminals, It has everything

I have all sorts of questions. Does this tree need literal iron supports in the wild as well? How does this work?

We continue our wandering, see more sights. Big Ben, back up Whitehall where all the buildings of power reside. We end up the day at Covent Gardens, watch an amazingly talented busker sing, then return back to The Box, for one least breathless night fighting heat exhaustion and jetlag in equal measure.