The Rhythm of My Story: Much Ado About Nothing

I got up early and headed out for a walk. First I walked past the Royal Horseguards building. They were having a recruiting event for the Army and there were a dozen little boys dressed in army fatigues waiting outside.

I felt like every direction I turned on this walk there was another statue. Most of them were in memory/celebration of war. As I headed to 10 Downing Street, I found this one in memory of the Women of World War II.

10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister, is heavily guarded.

This statue has the words “The Glorious Dead” on it. Why do we glorify war? I will never understand.

I loved this statue of Churchill….very foreboding.

I finally came to some statues that did not celebrate war. Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a suffrage activist.

Gandhi…

…and Nelson Mandela.

I had hoped I might get tickets for a Westminister Abbey tour but I waited too late. I walked by as the tour guides lined up.

Over one door of Westminster Abbey ten 20th century martyrs are depicted. I knew of only three of the ten: Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King. I read about the other seven when I got back to my hotel room.

There is a smaller church next to Westminster Abbey called St. Margaret’s Church. It is the church of the House of Commons. It has a sundial on its spire but I couldn’t figure out how to read it. It was 9:30 a.m. when I took this photo.

I walked past the Palace of Westminster where Parliament meets.

I loved the unicorn next to the St. Stephen’s entrance.

I walked back along the Thames.

This is the garden next to our hotel. The hotel is visible in the background. The statue in the foreground is of William Tyndale, the first person to translate the New Testament from Greek to English. He was later strangled and burned at the stake for heresy. His sin seems to be that he translated the New Testament into English, which the Catholic Church said was designed to promote Protestant doctrine and sedition.

I returned to our hotel room. Then Gayle and I headed out for the day. We took the Uber boat across the Thames to the Bankside Pier near the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe.

We were on a mission to go to Borough Market in search of the grilled cheese sandwich I couldn’t get the last time I was in London. I had to choose between the Raclette and the “toastie”. I went for the toastie.

Gayle waited for me on a concrete barrier next to edible insects and freshly pressed sugarcane.

The grilled cheese sandwich was worth the wait and the hype.

But half a sandwich wasn’t going to be enough. So we found a tapas bar and ordered some hot chocolate and dessert. The hot chocolate was delicious but the desserts were not great, as you can tell by Gayle’s face.

Borough Market is a fun place to explore but it is very crowded at lunch time. People were waiting in very long lines for a sausage roll or a bowl of mussels. We headed out enjoying the street art.

We had tickets to the Globe to see a matinee of “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Globe is an open-air theater. There is no roof over the central yard. Audiences are warned to dress for the weather because performances go on even in rain or snow. It was threatening rain and so we were glad we had gotten tickets on the back row so we would have a wall to lean against and be out of the rain. More than a hundred people stood on the floor right in front of the stage. It did rain during the performance.

The production was amazing. We were both so uncomfortable in our seats but it was worth the back ache. I find Shakespeare dialogue difficult to understand, then add a British accent to it and no one being miked and I didn’t always understand what was said. But the acting was so outstanding and their physical comedy was so perfect that I always knew what was happening. I loved it!

It was raining a bit when we left and we were ready for something more than a half a grilled cheese sandwich and a few bites of bad desserts. We ate dinner at a pizza joint that looked out over the Thames.

After dinner, I really wanted to walk out on the Millennium Footbridge and Gayle accommodated my wish. It just looks so different from all the other bridges over the Thames, and you don’t have to deal with any vehicles.