London, part 2

London in the sunshine is my favorite place on earth. It used to be Paris, and they’ve been close competitors in more than this far longer than my lifetime, but when the sun shines in London, I want to be there.

It’s a city that makes sense in the rain, as well. All of Italy is depressed in the rain. When it rained in Pisa, it felt like we shouldn’t even be there.

But it felt perfectly natural to sit on an open-top bus in the drizzle, drying off seats with our cold butts as we changed from one side of the bus to the other for better views. When we rode the boat from Westminster to the Tower, the huge windows let in the view not only of the city but also a lovely dance of water cascading from the North Sea-drenched skies. Londoners are used to the rain, so it’s business as usual in a downpour and a holiday in the sunlight.

The gardens are the best anywhere. We’re staying just north of Hyde Park, so we spend at least a little time every day in the glorious peace that is a great park in the heart of a great city. It’s a peace that resembles the eye of a hurricane, perhaps, or the momentary break from a thunderstorm when you drive under an overpass. It’s the peace of walking or riding public transportation from your urban rooms to sublime nature. The sun on the fields stretching from Kensington Palace to the water, on a tree from the Hundred Acre Wood and a tree from Middle Earth, on the head of a swan in the waters that will host the 2012 Olympic Triathlon, warms me like little else on earth ever has.

We’re fortunate with the weather. It rains only on the second day, and only hard in the evening, after Aryn finally feels better and we meet up together for a boat ride on the river. When we arrive it’s sunny, when we see the Tower and the Eye it’s sunny, and it’s sunny the day we race through the wrong train station for Stansted airport and then finally through the airport itself to just barely make our plane.

The British Pound is less than a dollar fifty, so we’re fortunate with the exchange rate, too. We were expecting the city to be more expensive than it is, and are pleasantly surprised. It’s like any capital city in that it costs twice as much for everything, but you can find fish and chips or a kebab for three pounds anywhere, and the bus is about a pound one-way. Expecting to have to suck it up and just pay what it costs for the experience, the only “splurge” expense is our hotel room, which is huge by London standards to accommodate all four of us.

We spend most of our full, healthy day (no hint of the sickness remains in our child) at the Tower. The Beefeater tour, which starts as soon as you get inside and is essential (and included in the price of admission), lasts about an hour and a half or so. Aryn falls asleep halfway through. We see where Guy Fawkes was tortured, where Sir Walter Raleigh was held with his wife and kids and two servants, where Anne Boleyn was executed and the church where she was buried. The Beefeaters, guards of the Tower and also its tour guides, live on the grounds with their families and attend this very church of a Sunday. Ours is hilarious, and his is the face on the poster in the gift shop. The crown jewels are incredible, the walk along the walls where you can aim a crossbow at the Tower Bridge (the one you recognize in pictures and probably call the London Bridge) enough to rouse literary ambitions in a stone. But then, this is London, so maybe that’s not all that uncommon.

The London Eye, for so much of its life reviled by Londoners as an eye-sore (much like the Louvre pyramid or the Eiffel Tower), is absolutely worth doing once. If I go again, I won’t bother, but flying that high above the city on such a clear day, our shadow falling on a field of sunbathers and picnickers as we drink in mile after mile of this great city is an experience I can take to the grave. This trip has given me a hundred “now I can die” moments. But I’m not dead yet.

My heart goes out to the Chinese businessman in our little pod on the Eye. He’s traveling alone, taking pictures and enjoying himself but, as I know all too well, traveling alone is dreary. Even sunshine in London doesn’t light a lonely heart. I offer to take his picture, and want to invite him along with us. He could be Alyson’s date. She has two brothers in love with Chinese women, so it’s in her blood. But what would her other two boyfriends she found in London say? The Duke, whom she has vowed to marry for his 12.5 billion pounds, or the poor bagpiper on the Westminster bridge whose heart she broke…

So much else to say, too much else to say. It’s still being said from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Waugh and Wodehouse to the writers of today. It’s still being said in more than a dozen strong newspapers and in publishing houses not riddled with the despair of their American counterparts. I’m not done with London. I’ll be back a dozen more times before I die. Someday I’ll tire of London, someday I’ll bid this island farewell and set my longing eyes elsewhere. But I think on that day my eyes will look heavenward, and I’ll see this world no more.