London
We arrived stealthily at sunrise in the Thames estuary and sailed upstream in the wake of the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The English are an amalgam of these peoples, since made more various over the centuries by influxes from a variety of sources: from French Huguenots to the sons and daughters of a British Empire on which the sun never set. During the First World War, the English royal family changed its German name to Windsor. The first two Hanoverian kings, George I and II, spoke no English. William of Orange, later the dominant half of that strange royal quadruped William and Mary, who came by the English throne following a coup d'etat in 1688, only spoke Dutch. Before that there were Scottish Stuarts and Welsh Tudors and a long line of Norman French. Hardly a trueborn Englishman or woman in sight! Yet, suspicion of foreigners and their strange ways seems to be greater among this mongrel race that in many a more homogenous people. "Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off!" ran a famous headline in The Times newspaper. Not the New York Times, not the Irish Times, not the Times of India but The Times, the one from which all imitations must distinguish themselves, even when that newspaper is now owned by an Australian. The United Kingdom is the only country in the world where the country of origin is not written onto its postage stamps: the head of the reigning monarch is deemed to be sufficient identification. Yet it is difficult not to find these eccentricities engaging. Our afternoon tour of the Tower of London, one of the finest castles of the first phase of the Norman Conquest in the middle of the eleventh century, with its resident ravens and comical beefeaters provided tradition in plenty. So did the opening of Tower Bridge, especially for us, at the height of the Friday rush hour before a May Holiday weekend. Were those really friendly waves from the drivers? Our end-of-voyage glasses of champagne encouraged us to think so…
We arrived stealthily at sunrise in the Thames estuary and sailed upstream in the wake of the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The English are an amalgam of these peoples, since made more various over the centuries by influxes from a variety of sources: from French Huguenots to the sons and daughters of a British Empire on which the sun never set. During the First World War, the English royal family changed its German name to Windsor. The first two Hanoverian kings, George I and II, spoke no English. William of Orange, later the dominant half of that strange royal quadruped William and Mary, who came by the English throne following a coup d'etat in 1688, only spoke Dutch. Before that there were Scottish Stuarts and Welsh Tudors and a long line of Norman French. Hardly a trueborn Englishman or woman in sight! Yet, suspicion of foreigners and their strange ways seems to be greater among this mongrel race that in many a more homogenous people. "Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off!" ran a famous headline in The Times newspaper. Not the New York Times, not the Irish Times, not the Times of India but The Times, the one from which all imitations must distinguish themselves, even when that newspaper is now owned by an Australian. The United Kingdom is the only country in the world where the country of origin is not written onto its postage stamps: the head of the reigning monarch is deemed to be sufficient identification. Yet it is difficult not to find these eccentricities engaging. Our afternoon tour of the Tower of London, one of the finest castles of the first phase of the Norman Conquest in the middle of the eleventh century, with its resident ravens and comical beefeaters provided tradition in plenty. So did the opening of Tower Bridge, especially for us, at the height of the Friday rush hour before a May Holiday weekend. Were those really friendly waves from the drivers? Our end-of-voyage glasses of champagne encouraged us to think so…
