Wuthering Rugby

Travel stories and journals seem fairly thin without pictures, but I’m procrastinating embarrassingly on getting mine developed, so this will have to be episode two of Hannah’s Travelogue for the Blind.

First, vocabulary lesson: “fag,” in British English, which is not the same language that the rest of us speak, means cigarette. This came up while a neighbor and I were down at the pub during a false fire alarm in our building. The neighbor told me one of her flatmates was always going off “to have a sneaky fag in the toilet.” What can we learn from this? Sneaky fags cause two out of every three fire alarms.

Other fun pub story of the week: watching the Rugby World Cup finals while England battled South Africa. Well, I only caught half, as Adrienne, Onon and I had dinner first. Thus came about my first taste of Yorkshire pudding, in a dish called “toad in hole,” which is a Yorkshire pudding (savory puffed pastry thing, not pudding in the American sense) made into a kind of bowl and filled with sausage, mashed [potatoes], veggies and gravy. It is essentially happiness on a plate.

After obliterating both the toad and the hole, we joined two more friends at The Ship and Shovel, a pub near the Embankment stop…which process was difficult, as people were packed into the place like sardines, sort of blindly pushing toward the TVs in the corners and somehow miraculously not spilling beer all over each other, though making up for it in general clumsiness of every other sort. When we arrived, absolutely everyone inside was singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for reasons we were never able to divine (except perhaps that England DYING). The song came up several times again that evening, with harmony. Drunk Britishers harmonizing. I will not begin to mention the number of movies that recalls.

England lost, everybody cried. Well, actually, I don’t think many people seemed that surprised. On the tube home, three South African girls screamed their national anthem and poked and prodded the sullen-looking England fans sitting next to them, before fortunately disembarking two stops down. Can anyone say “ends in violence?”

I am still in awe of myself for standing through the second half of that game – myself, or the packed condition of the crowd that managed to hold me upright. That day I had spent entirely walking – I alighted at Tower Hill tube stop, took a meander around the castle, and then headed down the river – and down the river – and down the river. I ended in Chelsea, and took District from Fulham Broadway home. It took me 5 hours. I’ve been asked if I saw anything interesting, but I spent most of the time looking at the river, and while I’m still not sure why I felt compelled to make the trek (except to destroy the claustrophobic feeling of only seeing one small stretch of the Thames near Westminster and never mentally connecting it to the rest of the city) I think I really just needed a good, long walk.

The rest of the week consists of museum mania. It bubbles past quickly, since time spent in a museum feels like time suspended, and one day of classes between can make it feel like a completely new week.

On Sunday I spent about an hour each in the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I didn’t feel compelled to do the whole of each museum in a single day, since they’re free, an easy ride away, and I have a whole year. The National Gallery is too large to describe – or it describes itself – but the Portrait Gallery was a surgical strike; I went in search of authors.

Robert Southey is only a few rooms away from the three sisters whom he informed “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be;” those sisters now reside between Dickens and Tennyson. I sat and looked at the Brontes for a while – they were why I came, primarily – next to a girl about my age who, at one point, whispered to herself, “It’s good – it’s good.” She got up absent-mindedly and, as she wandered away, looked at the portrait to the left of them and piped, “Oh, Charles!”

I love people like this because they make me feel slightly less crazy.

The irony of Branwell Bronte’s artistic ambition finally being realized, a century later, by the literary fame of his sisters has already been remarked upon. The truth is, seeing it in the gallery was only slightly more exciting than seeing it on the cover of Juliet Barker’s biography of the family, which sports a very good photograph of that rather bad painting. This didn’t spoil the gallery, though – did I mention Dickens and Tennyson? – and upstairs the Regency crowd was waiting. I can’t begin to express the tranquility and happiness that wandering between these paintings can bring.

Postcards were duly purchased, and I wandered out to look for tea, which turned into a curiosity-driven exploration of the arch to the west of Trafalgar Square, leading to The Mall, the Horse Guards Parade, and St. James’ Park. Considering the stiffness from Saturday’s walk setting in, I figured I’d better keep moving or I’d never move at all, so I explored the Parade – a gravel courtyard edged by plundered canons, the Old Admiralty Building, and statues of angry men on angry horses, which combine to communicate the message, “Yeah, we pwned.” After a brief detour toward Duck Island, I walked down to Buckingham Palace and back. St. James is a beautiful park, and absolutely packed on a Sunday, especially the edges of the lake, where children shorter than the geese and little old ladies only slightly taller feed the birds. I saw one elderly woman painstakingly coax a squirrel onto her walker and then amble away with it.

Accounts of Wednesday’s trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum will have to wait for another day, because this post is already getting unwieldy, while I have five Word documents open beside this one, all of which require some degree of attention. Also, I must go celebrate the fact that our flat once again has a working kettle. Two days of caffeine withdrawal were long enough, and I’ve reached the sad stage of snobbery where microwaving mugs of water is simply unacceptable – actually, all my flatmates would laugh at me.