Westminster Abbey

My body got out of bed at 6am and prepared itself for the double tour of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. It shaved its face, shampoo'd its hair, dried itself and got dressed in - oh, who cares. I think it put perfume on itself, my body.

My body walked down to the tube station and caught the Victoria Line to Victoria, then East to Westminster. It stood underneath the statue of Winston Churchill as our tour group gently coalesced out of the chaos around the Portcullis Building. My body put headphones on and followed the talking lady as she walked into the oneiric wonderland that is Westerminster Abbey.

And there, in that place of death and grandiose self-pity, I felt like I was suddenly in my element. I came to, right in time to enjoy the tour as I walked over the top of Henry Purcell's grave, where he is laid in earth. Sorry about that Henry. You really are my favourite composer a lot of the time.

Our tour guide Emily was astonishingly good. It was almost like I was getting two tours at once: a learnèd discourse on the history of London and its relationship to the Abbey, and a living demonstration of how you can turn a history lesson into a theatre performance that occurs on the move. Emily was erudite and funny, and was mostly progressive and poetic. I did rankle a little when she gave a tiny disquisition on why Suffragists should be given statues but not Suffragettes, but apart from that she and I were in sync.

Seeing Handel and Newton was an absolute privilege, especially to know that their faces were sculpted from death masks. Seeing Ted Hughes' memorial stone was disarming; he is one of my favourite poets of all time. I know his ashes are scattered over Dartmoor, but even so I felt like I was running into him somehow.

There were a thousand things to see and photograph in Westminster Abbey, but the tour moved along at such a clip that I made a decision to do 99% looking and 1% photographing. The place is a vast gothic extravaganza with so many intersecting points with British history that it would take many visits to get some familiarity with the place. If I had any remorse it was that I didn't get time to look at the Cosmati Pavement, which I have studied in depth when I was replicating Holbein's "The Ambassadors" painting. We flew past it to get to some anecdote about Mary Queen of Scots I think. I don't know, it was a blur.

At the end of that tour, we crossed the road ready to start the next tour, the Houses of Parliament.

The body didn't want to go, and it bade Stuart a good tour and went back to Westminster Station. Enough was enough. I needed rest, which is what I did for the rest of the day. A coffee in Vauxhall proper (away from the waterfront) that evening and a visit to a great big Tesco to buy a frozen pizza ended the evening gently. But I was still a fucking mess.

A post-prandial stroll along the sunset Thames, looking gauzy and Turner-ish, did nothing to lift my mood.

I was Lon-DONE.

I have decided that for the rest of the visit I can do the British Museum and the Eye, and that's it. I'm encouraging Stuart to come up with his must-do list now before it's too late. As for me, it's time to catch up on some self-care: mindfulness, exercise, art. I need to level out. Totally crashed.Read more