On my way out to get some cash from the machine in the morning, I happened upon a strike march, complete with loud upbeat music and vuvuzelas.
Just an odd note. But if I were going to give this photo a title, it would be “Wait/Look Right.”
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I came back and gave the cash to the teenagers for lunch. They had offered to stay home with the 3yo so I could take the 7- and 11yos somewhere without him. “Should we go on the tube to St. Paul’s and climb up in the Whispering Gallery?” I asked. “Should we take a bus to the Royal Mews and see the Queen’s horses? Where do you want to go?”
“I want to stay here and sleep,” groaned the 11yo.
“I want to go on the top of a bus,” said the 7yo, “really anywhere.”
So I went out with just him.
I thought the Mews would be a good place for him, anyway, because he is interested in horses. So we waited for the number 38 bus, touched in my card, and climbed the steps to the upper level, swaying a little and clutching at the handrail as the bus accelerated away from the curb.
I am glad I only had one child to manage for my first bus trip. It turns out that the London buses are not hard to manage or to figure out, but I am wary from having lived and traveled in cities where they can be more confusing.
It was a twenty-minute ride or so, fairly scenic, with lovely views of Green Park toward the end, and the bus let us off just across from where we were going.
As we walked in the first door, a staffer with long straigh gray hair and a kind face pointed out horses exercising in an indoor yard just visible over the sill of a half-door. I lifted him up to see. “Those are the Windsor Grays,” she said, “though they look rather white. They’re the queen’s horses, and in a procession she’s always pulled by those. You’ll learn more about that on the audio tour.”
“No thank you,” he said, “I don’t really like tours.”
“You really ought to take the player with you,” she said, “it’s very fun and tells you a story. If you don’t want to listen to it, you can always take it off.”
He decided to give it a try.
The children’s audio tour was nicely designed, with a little video on the player; a couple of horses (and a corgi) take you from stop to stop, and you can skip the details or click more to hear and see more of them, like interviews with staff.
We looked for quite a while at the various coaches. The newest one, only a few years old, is fitted with many shock absorbers for a gentler ride. I liked the older ones myself.
It’s very interesting how they have put rooms of a working stable behind glass for visitors to see. I am sure there is much more going on behind the scenes. We saw the Harness Room, and I pointed out the leather-polishing equipment on the table, and the perfection of the finish of the leather on the hanging harnesses.
Under the table: a child’s toy pedal-cart. The 7yo tried to convince me it could possibly have belonged to Prince George.
Children do live here, in apartments around the central courtyard, with their parents who work here. This idea fascinated him, and he surveyed the balconies and thought aloud about what it would be like to live among the Queen’s horses.
In a grand stable hall built for George IV they no longer have horses, but they have a carriage replica you can sit in, mounted on springs, that rocks from side to side if you lean.
And a dress-up closet with miniature uniforms.
And a wooden pony with a harness you can take off and put on again. The harness was already on the pony when we arrived, with the reins pulled back and draped casually over the hanging hooks, and the 7yo set himself to trying to take it off. He ignored the numbered step-by-step instructions written on the sign behind the horse and went for the nearest buckle.
An older British couple was coming through taking pictures. The woman said to him, “Oh dear, you’ll never get it off like that. First the reins, and then this bit over here, and then this comes off after that.” She placed her hands on the leather, and I could see she knew what she was talking about.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I want to figure it out by myself.”
They went away, and while he struggled I walked around, looking at the smaller carriages displayed here: everyday carriages, and a miniature one that royal children used to use, pulled by a pony. Words from books, like “brougham,” known only in a vague fog before as a wheeled thing pulled by horses, condensed into a solid object.
After a long time in that room, the 7yo gave up on the harness and instead spent time standing behind the wooden pony with the reins in both hands, shouting “Giddyup!” I got him to buckle up what he had undone and put the reins back, and we went on to the tour’s finale, which is the Gold Coach.
Commissioned in 1760 for George III and still in use, albeit rarely (I think it was last in a procession in 2012), it only goes at a walking pace and yet requires 27 meters’ braking distance. The wheels are not spoked in a plane, and so they are tilted outward to make the spokes meet the ground at 90 degrees.
We put our audio players in the slot and headed back outside. Google Maps told me to walk to Green Park station to get either the bus or the tube, so we started off toward Buckingham Palace.
Just as we got there, there was a blare of a marching band, and the crowd there started moving from the outside in, with people dancing about on the fringes trying to get a good view on their phones. I could see horses.
I looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. We had stumbled upon something I hadn’t planned to see at all, because it isn’t really my thing: the changing of the guard.
All that we saw was a brief little parade from the front of the palace, out the gates and across the street into another gated yard (Wellington Barracks). But it impressed the 7yo anyway. He made me follow the crowd, climb through a handrail separating sidewalk from street (lots of other people were doing it) and cross over so we could get a good look. The music was all over quite soon.
I had gotten turned around with our rush to figure out what the music was, so we walked the wrong way at first, and then when I figured it out the 7yo nearly collapsed in despair for his lunch. I promised to feed him before we got on the bus, and worked out that there would be food available near Green Park station.
We took a quick selfie in front of Buckingham Palace, to celebrate accidentally seeing a quintessential London tourist thingie we hadn’t meant to.
Then walked north through Green Park while the 7yo fretted about how long it would be until he could eat lunch, as this was obviously an enormous park that would take forever to get out of.
We made it out, however, and after searching for a place to cross the street, found ourselves at a Pret-a-Manger. “I don’t like sandwiches,” protested the 7yo, but I enticed him in with the promise of a Tuna Melt Toastie.
He always forgets that he likes tuna melts.
For me, a Posh Cheddar And Pickle Baguette, with kale chips and a petite bottle of carrot juice.
I had a clueless culture moment when, the place nearly full, I set the child on the last empty stool in a long bank against the window, figuring I had room to stand at the end myself. A few minutes after I had done the work to set him up, opened his drink, extracted onions from his sandwich, etc., the woman seated at the stool next one over turned and looked at him pointedly a couple of times, with a look that I associate at home entirely with “I was dining here peacefully and then you had to g
o and put a child near me where I might hear it.” I ignored the look, because that is what you do (where I come from) when people glare silently at your children who are behaving perfectly fine.
(It’s different if they are misbehaving or having other difficulties like spilling or being audibly sad. Of course I acknowledge that. But I generally don’t apologize for children’s merely taking up space in places they have every right to be. And yes, you do encounter people who think otherwise. And I generally respond by behaving exactly as if nothing is wrong.)
A few minutes later a man came by with the tray and the two of them gathered up their things exceedingly rapidly, too fast for me even to realize what had happened, and left, presumably in search of another pair of seats together, without ever saying anything to us, let alone “Oh, do you mind, I am saving this seat.”
Ahhhhhhh. I see what you mean now about the silent seething.
That was embarrassing. In my defense, I come from a land where the apology would have been expected to come from the person taking up two seats in a crowded restaurant.
But, you know, when in Rome. I’ll try to be more alert next time.
The top of the bus, home. Front row this time, which really does afford a nice view.
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Back at the apartment, the teen boys were slurping down the last of the noodles from their second Wagamama order in eighteen hours. “What shall we do now?” I asked, and ticked off some choices.
We went for the London Transport Museum, which is less than fifteen minutes’ walk away, in a structure that was once the Covent Garden flower market. I carried the 3yo until we got there, and then put him down because it’s the sort of museum where little children run around frantically pushing buttons and having their paper passport punched at different stations.
The building itself is really cool.
And there are plenty of interactive exhibits, especially for kids who like sitting behind Driving Wheels.
Spent quite a bit of time in the play structure designed to look like a Tube station. Was amused that they included the detail of a busker’s open violin case on the floor, with some percussion instruments to play.
I was able to enjoy the exhibits myself, too. I loved a diorama showing how the Underground was built, by digging a trench, laying tracks, and roofing it over; miniature people standing in miniature back gardens with a gaping hole behind, planks laid over the edge to give them a way to walk to the shops. I played with the subway-driving simulation (key to success: begin braking long before getting to the station) and took pictures of the kids seated in various restored vehicles, from horse-drawn omnibus to twentieth-century double deckers.
On the way back we stopped to get ice cream from a shop we’d seen on the way in, just before arriving at Covent Garden. Our 3yo can be messy like any 3yo, but he has inherited his dad’s ability to consume an entire ice cream cone without wasting any, faster than the ice cream can melt. So (after myself removing just a bit of the excess, to be sure) I had no compunction about ordering him one and letting him eat while walking in London, holding my hand. He was barely sticky when it was gone.
I was completely exhausted when we returned. I sent the teen boys and the little boys back to the apartment, and went with the 11yo to the store, where I bought things I could cook. The easiest scratch meal I could think of: chicken soup. I bought a small whole chicken, and onions and celery and carrots, and salt and a package of fresh tagliatelle, the only egg noodles I could find.
Then back to the apartment where I discovered there was no soup pot big enough to hold the chicken.
I opened a cider and drank it (rapidly), and then made do by spatchcocking it and squashing it into a deep saucepan with the whole aromatics and as much cold water as I could fit. Not enough for a proper quantity of broth, so after it was cooked I retrieved the aromatics and bones and stuffed them into a smaller saucepan with more water to make a second batch of broth. Into the first batch went the diced aromatics.
And when that was done, in went half a kilo of noodles, which soaked up all the liquid. In the end we had to assemble our bowls from one pot of broth, one bowl of shredded chicken, and one pan of noodles and veg.
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I fell asleep before Mark got back and failed to answer his texts asking to be let in, but fortunately our teen son was awake. And that was one day.
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