cocopunk

On Saturday, my birthday, I went to the Tower of London. It is a dense place of history but as a museum experience it is, you know, just another castle. Rude of me to say that. But the main exhibits are full of famous and remarkable historical artifacts, namely the crown jewels in one building and the armory within the White Tower.

Here’s a question that sounds facetious: why are they so protective of the crown jewels? Lol. I don’t necessarily mean bank vault doors and strict security measures, though that have that. What I mean is that you’re not allowed to take any pictures. The attendants watch like a hawk for anyone attempting a selfie.

I have news for you, King Charles—they’ve got photos of all this stuff on Wikipedia. These crowns aren’t secret; why won’t you let me post it to the ‘gram?

There’s also one long room with five or six crowns in a row that you view by standing on a moving walkway. You literally ride a conveyor belt so that you can’t stop and stare too long at the jewels. I guess it’s designed to handle huge crowds that they expect to be so enamored by the glittering artifacts that they’d need to be coerced to move. Get over yourself, royals!

The White Tower is more compelling. Centuries of armor and weapons and swords and full-sized wooden statues of horses.

As you progress through the tower floor by floor, you being to notice how little ventilation there is and, depending on the time of year, how each floor is slightly warmer than the last. People begin peeling off their jackets and by the end everyone has a garment draped over their arm. Suffocating from history, I rushed though the last exhibits to get a breath of cool, fresh, modern air.

The ravens are large. Larger than a seagull. Practically a dark little albatross.

For lunch I went back to Borough Market because I had seen a sign advertising salt beef sandwiches and I needed to know what salt beef was. (Basically the same thing as corned beef, I think.) It was packed; Saturday afternoon is probably the busiest the market gets. Like shoulder-to-shoulder, shuffling feet packed. I ate the giant sandwich standing on a nearby sidewalk.

After leaving the tower I had also walked by the remains of a bombed-out church that’s now a little public park (St. Dunstan-in-the-East). People were filming tiktoks while office workers sat and ate their lunch.

Leadenhall Market was nearby so I headed there just to have a look; I think it was used in the Harry Potter films because a few tourists were happily waving wooden wands and casting spells. But I didn’t find anything appetizing and walked over London Bridge for that aforementioned salt beef.

And after the beef I found a cup of coffee, and desperate as usual for a place to sit and rest, I walked back to the base of Tower Bridge to sit in the park.

I needed to do something for dinner that wasn’t convenience store food as it was my birthday. (Though honestly I would have—whatever! Only the spectre of someone asking me how I celebrated my 40th birthday and answering that I ate a ham and cheese sandwich haunted me enough to get a proper meal.) So I went to a nearby pub.

Evidently Fuller’s—a British brewery now owned by the Japanese giant Asahi —owns and operates hundreds of pubs and restaurants, part of a somewhat controversial corporatization of pubs (essentially the Starbuckization of beer, you could say). And this was one of those. I thought it was completely fine, though; it didn’t reek of corporate efficiency and I only knew that context from Googling it.

The food was good: steak and ale pie with mashed potatoes and greens.

If you were to ask me what my favorite beer is I might say Fuller’s London Pride, an English ale I hadn’t tasted since 2014 or so when I used to hang out at a neighborhood bar between Clinton Hill and BedStuy in Brooklyn that happened to stock the stuff, itself a very pub-like establishment where I would sit and read a book.

I had that, and it was good.