Spirals, Stoney History, Cool Enlightenment, and Magic

Monday, June 11, 2017

Morning arrived early to Balcombe Street, but couldn't wait for the still-slumbering family to rise. It moved on without them and by the time they were ready for their second day in London, they were behind Agenda's schedule.  

“I think we’ll switch today’s and Wednesday’s mornings, because I wanted to get to the Tower before it opened and now it’s too late,” B said.  

AJ had diligently studied Monday’s activities in The Agenda the night before, but now she was going into her day, a little clueless again. Surprises were nice. 

The first stop was at Heal’s Furniture Store, whose spiral staircase served as a photographers' haunt ever since it was built. B set up Tripod at the bottom, then proceeded to start a photographer’s “tiff,” waiting for the photographer at the top to get done and out of his shot. 

The Cecil Brewer Staircase at Heal's Furniture Store

The two photographers, B and the man at the top of the stairs, were recording the same object–a spiral staircase, ornamented with round lights–but the results would invariably be different. They approached it from different angles, different points-of-view. They saw different things in the object and expressed it, reacted to it, re-created it differently. So it is the same in writing–fiction and nonfiction. The eye or ear of the beholder is what makes photography, writing or any representation of objects (art) interesting, worth investigation and contemplation. 

AJ and TwoSon roamed the furniture-filled floors while waiting for B. On the second floor, they came upon a literary atrocity: two, floor-to-ceiling towers made of old books. Old books were AJ’s favorite for many different reasons (tactility, smell, content) but none of those reasons included making furniture of them, which necessitated that they would never be opened again, the content bolted or glued in place.

As they waited, amongst modern, clean-lined furniture and furnishings for the fashionable Londoner, AJ had an opportunity to look back and forward on her short time in UK. She didn’t hate London yet. It was early in the day, still. Yesterday, pushing through crowds, lugging luggage, getting lost; her senses overloaded by people, new traffic patterns, new ways of everything, cars, noises, sights–yesterday she hated London. She would probably never love it, but now, sitting in a furniture store before heading to the British Museum, she didn’t hate it. 

On the roundabout search for The British Museum, they walked past a stone building of common architecture, but with strange accents on the windows. Each window was decorated, with what at first AJ thought were all insects (she loved entomology), but a snake and a scorpion disrupted the pattern. The sign at the main entrance relieved her curiosity: Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

A few blocks later, after going through a bag-check, they walked into the British Museum. Just walked right in, without paying. Because museums were free. 

After B got a shot of the greatness of the museum’s Great Court, they started their tour of the ancients. The Rosetta Stone and many other magnificently old and beautiful stone structures, originating from so far, far away in time and space, were mobbed by people, so the family strolled around, picking up bits and pieces of information, snapping pictures here and there, content to see the objects from a few meters away. It was stuffy, hot and crowded amidst the ancient relics, making prolonged interest, awe and real information absorption difficult. 

For lunch, B and TwoSon gnawed French baguettes with cheese and ham while AJ nibbled salad. After lunch, they visited an exhibit on money from all over the world and from ages past.

Watching their time carefully, they walked through the “Enlightenment” exhibit, located in a long, pleasantly cool, gigantic room lined with cabinetted book shelves and antiquities, including astrolabes, gigantic tomes of atlases, and other archaic devices and gee-gaws. The visit was cut short by time: too soon they had to leave to catch a double decker bus to a magical place.   

At a stop on Baker Street, they climbed onto the second story of a double-decker bus to the Harry Potter Studio Tour in Leavesden, UK, AJ snoozing on the hour-long ride as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Philosopher’s Stone* played on the video screens.   

The Harry Potter Studio Tour was just that–rooms and rooms of movie props and sets, in fascinating, realistic detail. AJ and B combed over the visual feast, admiring the artistry. TwoSon refused to participate in the interactive exhibits, not wanting to show too much enthusiasm and outright refusing to see the giant spider props.  

Half way through the magic, they dined at the Studio Backlot Cafe, AJ fueling up with coffee, B and TwoSon indulging in a cup of Butterbeer. After the last half of the tour, they strolled leisurely through the gift shop, browsing all things Hogwarts and related, then caught the last bus back into London.  

“Do you feel like you’re in a foreign country yet?” B asked TwoSon again. Earlier, he said it didn’t feel as if he were in a foreign country, but now he said, “yeah”, as he watched the tall black taxis rushing by. 

“Do you?” he asked AJ. 

“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s like a subtly strange dream, where some things are very familiar, but so many things are just slightly, weirdly different.”

*After returning home, AJ, curious about the namesake of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England (though she didn’t visit there), looked up Elias Ashmole and his works. She found the following, which probably had some influence in JK Rowling’s idea for the first book in her Harry Potter Series: The Way to Bliss. In Three Books., a book by Elias Ashmole, which contained the chapters “Of LONG LIFE.”  and “That the PHILOSOPHERS STONE is able to turn all base METALS into SILVER and GOLD.” 

AJ accrued a strong suspicion, through reading many British authors, that Rowling probably drew inspiration from other books and authors, including Charles Dickens (especially The Pickwick Papers), Dorothy Sayers, PD James and Agatha Christie. 

Thanks for reading!