Pocket Observations from Abroad

Our family has never traveled internationally. We simply could not afford it. And we still can’t. Not really. But our oldest child  is 15 years old. She is just a few years away from being a phone call away. Which is very silly, as she should always be just down the hall. 

Anyways, time is relentless. And we are dust. So.  We used six years of credit card points and all the room on two credit cards to pay for one of the trips we’ve always talked about taking.

London —-> Paris ——> Argentan ——> Paris. All in 15 days. Probably too much for the time we have. But also, Riley and I have been married for seventeen years and 360 days. And this is the first time we could qualify for the debt we needed to take on to take this kind of trip. So it is also certainly not enough in the time we have.

I am writing this from a train. We are leaving Paris, but I want to tell you about London. I hoped to send a dispatch each night I am here. But guiding the five of us through new places, procedures and customs every day hasn’t left much room for the typing part of writing. 

So I am writing digests where I can. I’ll send them once I get home, between Aug 24 and September 1st. I am looking forward to that those few days. They’ll function as a sanctuary for me, before I have to face working over a scalding September. (It's not you that scalds, dear Observer. It's all the stuff I have to think about in order to write. I'd be thinking about it either way. So it's very nice to have the company of your reading.)

I hope these digests function as something divertng for you too.  Postcards from a friend’s little trip, maybe. This one goes day by day. The next might go sound by sound or meal by meal. I don’t really know. Happy to find out with you.

Tuesday

A long flight through the night. Arriving in time to miss lunch. Just as well, we spent our lunch money on a taxi to our almost affordable accomodations. A little place in Blackheath. A village on the other side of Greenwich. In London, but not of London. Which really just means a thirty minutes away from the parts of London we hoped to see. 

Weeks after booking our accomodations, I realized Blackheath was the heath from the Peasants’ Revolt. Wat Tyler led thousands of peasants to that heath, to meet with representatives of King Richard. (One of many Richards. The wi-fi on the train isn't working, and so I can't look up which Richard. Not the III. I know that much.)

I am very interested in the Peasants’ Revolt. One sentence histories of the movement say it was a revolt against a poll tax created to fund a war with France. And that is true. 

There is nothing wrong with reading that sentence on a plaque or in a textbook and deciding you understand enough of the Peasant’s Revolt for the rest of your life. But it would only take another few sentences to help the  modern reader understand how the peasant’s revolt relates to their own lives. 

Under the feudal system, the poll tax was collected by the Lord of the Manor, who owned the land peasants’ worked on and the fruits of their labor. Each Lord of the Manor kept manorial rolls - records of Peasants’ names, births, deaths, transactions, harvests, payments and debts. 

These rolls were full of data that helped keep peasants ensnared in feudalism’s manorial system. When the Lord of the Manor demanded the serfs pay a poll tax, they decided to burn the data centers. They torched buildings where the manorial rolls were kept. They would not let the Lord of the Manor continue to collect and exploit the details of their lives. 

The Peasants’ Revolt failed to achieve its greater goals, mostly because King Richard was a lying liar face. But in the long run it did help end feudalism in England. And in the short run, I think it must have been grand to watch Savoy Palace* burn to the ground while rioters pitched its golden fixtures into the Thames.

*owned by John Gaunt, who definitely reminds me of some of our tech overlords

19th century chalk extraction, and post-WWII inflill and rye-grass seeding seeding changed the heath. It has suffered ecological decline. But it is still there. And I felt some wonder as we drove alongside it. It seemed a little impossible, that I should get to be so close.

A carrion crow trailed our taxi, rattling. It stayed with us as we turned onto the street where we’d be staying. And then as we lifted children and luggage from the car, it flew over my head, alighting on the ledge right over our borrowed red door. 

Riley unlocked the door. I felt disoriented as I stared up at the bird. It seems a little impossible that crows still fly over heaths, but we’ve stopped burning down data centers.

I stood on the heath that night but it felt very far away.

Wednesday

The Tower of London. My tour book told me the Tower is a place that represents the State’s power - its wealth and its violence. It was a palace as well as a prison. The crown jewels were protected here. It was also the mint. 

You’ve heard of some of the people held in the Tower, some of those killed there too. But mostly, the people have been lost. The Tower existed to end the memory of a person. All those executed were buried together in unmarked graves.

In the 1800s, 1700 bodies were found in one little plot. No one knows who they are. And so I think I’d add one more intersection of state power to the list: The power to decide who gets to be legible, and who is forced to be forgotten. When the powerful’s record keeping becomes our own, we only remember what those in power would let us. The infrastructure for other kinds of remembering fade away.

As a child, I thought the Tower of London was a single tower, taller than Trajan’s column and five times as wide. I imagined every event happening on a different level. A little like a geological formation, its sediment made of beheadings, marriages, crown jewels, coins. It grew taller as each new monarch exercised their power. 

But power only builds impossible structures in fairy tales. In real life, the buildings that house the active power of the state tend to be quite practical. Their facitilies are put to work too often not to be. And so the Tower of London is a large squat fortress wrapped around a medium squat tower. 

We took the Yeoman Warder tour. The Yeoman Warders splintered from England’s first corp of royal bodyguards, The Yeoman of the Guard. That corp was created by Henry VII. And like, the man really needed body guards because he had no legitimate claim to the throne and definitely killed the two princes in the tower.* (HISTORY ACCORDING TO MEG! WHO IS RIGHT!)

The Warders go by the nickname Beefeater because….well no one really knows. But maybe becuase they got to eat beef from the King’s table. It’s also possible they often sold the beef from the king’s table. Which would have been a huge violation of the social contract. Because the monarch was supposed to give away his table scraps to the “deserving poor” waiting at his gates. So the “deserving poor” calling the guards “Beefeaters” might have been a lot like calling them motherfuckers. 

But again. No one seems to know for sure.

Anyways. When Henry VIII moved from the Tower of London, he left a contigent of Beefeaters behind to guard the Tower. They became the the Yeoman Warders. Now, the Yeoman Warders function as guards of the Tower’s legacy. After 22 years of military service, a person can apply to live and work at the Tower.

Our tour was given by one of six women Yeoman Warders assigned to the tower. Appointed in 2017, she was the second woman Yeoman Warder in all of the Tower’s history. When she told us this, the crowd cheered. And I did too. But then felt a little silly, because women becoming Beefeaters is not really the redistribution of power I think we need. 

Still, I followed her closely from spot to spot, always staying near the front. Brontë sat on my feet, looking up. After the first stop, Brontë told me she was only interested in the death part, which was good because that was all there was. 

The tour started at the moat, now filled in. And ended at the place where a blindfolded Jane Grey could not find the chopping block. She crawled, feeling around her, and weeping out, “Where is it?” She had to put her head down when she found it, hoping she’d gotten her neck straight enough for a clean, quick cut. She had to tell the executioner when she was ready to die. “Say when!” 

It was at that last spot that my feelings about women Beefeaters became a little more complicated. Isn’t that how it always has been, you know? The most power a woman has is laying her own head on the block instead of having someone hold it down? I mean…

Women - even the most powerful women, even the most vile abusive women, even the most redeeming women - have always been subjected to men. And like I used to think that would change or had changed or was changing! But it will never change because people don’t change.

(We should still seek the change, as the seeking discovers dimensions of grace that might transmute what we cannot transform.) 

As the Beefeater told Anne Boleyn’s story, she recited Anne Boleyn’s last words, over and over again. And then the Beefeater’s voice cracked. Because it is all so sad, really. 

I’d rather hear stories about Anne and Jane and 1700 nameless souls from a woman Beefeater than one of the men Beefeaters. So when she was done, I thanked her for her time. And I meant it.  I do not like the tower, or the monarchy or the military. But I really was grateful for her. That is complicated. And that’s okay.

There were other moments that felt like the past collapsing into the present. 

Like my journey from Blackheath to the Tower. While Wat Tyler and the peasants gathered on the heath, King Richard stayed in the Tower of London, hiding from the serfs he’d made legible. 

The revolt is mentioned once, in a little diorama up along the rampart walk. The figures are dusty. A light is burnt out. Riley called it an 8th grade diorama. I waved my hands in the air while proclaiming about propoganda. 

Like my six year old leaning agains the cold wall in the room where the two princes were kept. I don’t know if Richard or Henry killed them. (It was Henry.)  But I do know little kids have always cooled their hot faces by placing them against cold stone. And so somewhere beneath layers of paint, there is the surface the boys leaned their own cheeks against after playing in the garden. 

Like the first floor of the Tower, where I learned people have been touring the Tower since the 1600s. Which means this thing we were participating in - part history tour, part monarchy propoganda machine - has been going on for a very long time and is a part of the history of the Tower too. 

I found this a bit unsettling, power never changes. And a bit comforting, power never changes. Why comforting? I guess because….even though power can subdue, it cannot surprise? And I’m the type of person who likes to know when a bad thing is coming. 

Thursday

Hampton Court Palace. Built by Cardinal Wolsley, who gave it to Henry VIII. All six of Henry’s wives lived here. Some people say you can hear Catherine Howard’s ghost begging for her life here. Shakespeare debuted a play here. Charles I was imprisoned here. Oliver Cromwell held court here. 

I could not pull mysef away from the kitchens.

Big Tudor kitchens, with huge fireplaces fitted with spits and cauldrons. 800 meals were prepared every day. For the servants, children, porters, maids: bread, beef or mutton. For the nobility: roasted meat, boiled meat, broths, custards, fritters, jellies, pies, tarts and creams. No vegetables. 

The food leftover from the royal table was passed through the palace gates to a demographic yet another plaque called “the deserving poor.” I do not know how they did means testing in the Tudor period. Who was deserving? Who was not? Something to look up when I get home. 

The kitchens, one lined up after another, were enormous, but they would have felt close with heat. The audio guide told me the kitchen fires consumed 1.3 million logs a year. It’s an interactive space. You can touch the walls, the hearth, the spits, the platters, the flagons. 

Brontë pretended to roast a plastic haunch of something and grinned up at me. I grinned back. There’s nothing I love more than a walking through a curated historical space. She and I could be glad to be in this kitchen because we’d never have to really be in it.

And I wonder what historical spaces will be curated immersive experiences five hundred years from now? Will a child pretend to be a gig work courier, looking up at her mother beaming while she loads uber orders into a basket on her bike?

Friday

The British Museum. Where do I begin? Hundreds of thousands of stolen objects - none of them displayed with an ounce of humility. 

I’ve been to plenty of other museums full of plunder. At least in those museums, the stolen objects were given space to breathe, they were contextualized, entire rooms crafted around one object, one strand of history. Those pieces do not belong in those rooms, but god! At least those museums were concerned about appearances. 

Not so in the British Museum. 

One monument or marvel surrounded by other monuments and marvels, each deserving of their own space - or at least their own moment in a space. Instead, they are shoved together. In rooms allowed to fill with so many people the air begins to steam.

The Rosetta Stone sits behind smudged glass, between dozens of other marvels treated with equal indifference. The Parthenon Sculptures are housed in a setting more concerned with conveying that the British Museum holds the sculptures than the sculptures themselves.

The entire Africa wing and Japanese wing shut hours before closing, because they were  not considered main attractions. Then give everything in your Africa wing and Japanese wing back! 

Having for having’s sake, putting for putting’s sake. Ill-lit, ill-judged, ill-making.

I’ve never been in a less curious museum in my entire life. (The staff was lovely. None of this is their fault.)

Empire is bad. The end. 

(More soon.)