Battleship in town

I was in London today with the Chinese youngsters I’ll be spending the next week teaching and accompanying on visits. In front of the British Museum columns they unfurled their school banner in Chinese and English and rapidly arranged themselves in height-graded rows for photos. They did the same in front of Buckingham Palace. They are much-practised. They also walked past Horseguards’ Parade, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and the Big Ben tower and took photos of anything they considered significant from having previously seen photos of it. Which didn’t include Downing Street or Westminster Abbey but did include other people in tourist buses. I mused on the way photos beget photos and unphotos beget a failure to see.

This picture (HMS Belfast - now a museum - and the piling up of construction behind) is from our river trip from Westminster to Greenwich. Where the children raced up the hill so that they could straddle the brass strip marking the meridian, only to find it locked behind the gates of a museum that had closed 30 minutes earlier. Not so long ago the meridian, a crucial part of global geography and a significant part of history, so important for all of us, was there for everyone, any time. As it should be, and especially for tired teenagers who travelled 5,000 miles yesterday and have just run up a hill at 1am their time.

The coach wasn’t at the appointed place to bring them home and they waited 40 minutes in the cold while I tried to give phone directions to a coach driver who had neither map of London nor satnav. I wasn’t altogether surprised when his route from Greenwich to the M40 went via Clapham and Richmond (comment for Londoners). The youngsters were all fast asleep when we finally got back to Oxford.

I will have little time for comments this week but I’ll look at blips when I can.