Adventures in Europe, Chapter 26: The decorations have decorations!

The Palace of Westminster, where the British parliament meets to do whatever it is the government of a First World European nation does when it isn’t following the fading star of the United States, sits right across the river from the London Eye, where commoners can spend money to ride the ferris wheel and keep an eye on their government.

The clock tower at the end of the palace looms ominously over the Thames, mechanically playing its chimes every fifteen minutes as it marks down the time until the inevitable machine uprising, when we will all be cast into slavery by our shiny new robotic overlords. There is a poetic symmetry in the fact that human hands built this enoumous mechanical time-keeping automaton, which ticks away the hours to our doom.

A lot of folks refer to this clock tower as Big Ben. Technically, that’s not true; Big Ben is a bell inside the clock tower. Wikipedia claims that referring to the whole thing as Big Ben is now acceptable, but in this, Wikipedia is wrong. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit frequently cant figure out whether celebrities and politicos are alive or dead, so its proclamations in matters of gigantic mechanical apparatuses clearly are not to be trusted.

After taking pictures of the Egyptian artifacts, I headed back along the Thames toward the Palace of Westminster. Even someone with so poor a sense of direction as I, in a city I’ve never seen before, can scarcely get lost in this part of London; the palace and its clock tower loom over the landscape like some sort of hulking giant monster in a Michael Bay movie.

The palace itself is enormous–eight acres, I’m told, and well over a thousand rooms. If that’s true, I could quite likely get lost within that building far more easily than within this part of London itself. The Palace of Westminster is large enough to house the entire British apparatus of government, with enough room left over for fifteen rugby teams, two dance troupes, the 22nd Infantry Regiment, the administrative offices of Cirque du Soleil, all three branches of Sarah Palin’s ego, and an Olympic archery team.

I’d love to know how many of those thousand-plus rooms are disused broom closets. For that matter, I’d love to know how many are disused, period.

The architecture of the place is…umm, interesting is a word. Yeah, we’ll use that. Interesting.

I don’t know who the dude on the horse is. Probably just some dude who rode around on a horse making speeches and killing lots of people; those generally seem to be the sorts of folks who end up immortalized in statues atop horses.

The Palace of Westminster was commissioned by King William IV, who had wanted to unload the property onto Parliament but who did not succeed in doing so even though he offered them the place for free. So he commissioned a new palace to be built there, in a conversation that went something like this:

Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Yes, er, well…
Architect of the Board of Works: Sire?
King William IV: It’s nice and all, but it seems a little…er, how to say this? Frumpy.
Architect of the Board of Works: Frumpy, sire?
King William IV: It’s not very…ornate. It needs more decorations.
Architect of the Board of Works: Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, but it is covered with decorations!
King William IV: Well, yes, I’m sure it is. But the decorations themselves don’t have decorations on them!
Architect of the Board of Works: Of course, sire. And let me say that the magnificence of His Majesty’s taste is exceeded only by the tenacity of His Majesty’s formidable grasp on the obvious. I shall rectify this oversight forthwith.
(The ARCHITECT OF THE BOARD revises his draft of the PLANS FOR THE PALACE)
Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my revised proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Well, um, yes, err… It’s still a bit dowdy-looking, don’t you think?
Architect of the Board of Works: Dowdy, sire? But even the decorations have decorations!
King William IV: Yes, err, well…the decorations on the decorations don’t have decorations on THEM, now, do they?
Architect of the Board of Works: I think I see where this is going. I shall revise the plans at once, highness.

Eventually, the Architect of the Board of Works produced a set of plans that met with William IV’s approval, and construction began. When the palace was completed, they celebrated in the conventional British way by shooting off fireworks and chopping off people’s heads, and everyone was happy. Well, except for the people whose heads were chopped off, but they didn’t count because their heads were off.

There’s a huge park adjacent to the palace, whose sole reason for existing appears to be framing the palace in dramatic and exciting ways.

That, and sitting on the green eating picnic lunches or making out, which were two of the most popular activities I witnessed. sadly, as seinneann_ceoil was still occupied with her meeting, I didn’t have the opportunity for the latter, and I was ill-equipped for the former, so I had to content myself with taking photos that I could later use to write snarky commentary about the British royalty.

On my lengthy loop back around the park and down along the Thames toward the London Eye, I passed this sign.

Now, I do quite like the British people, in spite of the snarky things I write about British royalty, so in the spirit of international friendship, I would like to offer my services as an ambassador of goodwill between our people. Don’t believe this sign. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar: “It’s a trap!”

Trust me on this. They’re playing a trick on you. The taste of the Deep South is rubbish. It tastes of cheap fried chicken, poverty, country fairs, anti-intellectualism, racism, and deep-fried Twinkies…all for £3.59 for a limited time only.

It’s how they get you. It starts with a chicken sandwich for £3.59, and the next thing you know it’s Brown v. the Board of Education all over again.

On the way back across the river, I saw this building.

I have no idea what it is. Probably the summer cottage of some wealthy British lord or duke or baron or something, I reckon.

38 thoughts on “Adventures in Europe, Chapter 26: The decorations have decorations!

  1. I think the broom cupboards in the Houses of Parliament are actually all in use – as MP’s offices, there are semi-regular gripes that they don’t have any space in there. There are 600 or so of them to accommodate (if I were applying for citizenship I’d have to know the exact number, as I was born here I can make vague handwaves in the direction of the exact number)

    There are many times I would like to move much further away from London, and then I go over one of the Thames bridges and see the view and think ‘maybe not yet’

  2. I think the broom cupboards in the Houses of Parliament are actually all in use – as MP’s offices, there are semi-regular gripes that they don’t have any space in there. There are 600 or so of them to accommodate (if I were applying for citizenship I’d have to know the exact number, as I was born here I can make vague handwaves in the direction of the exact number)

    There are many times I would like to move much further away from London, and then I go over one of the Thames bridges and see the view and think ‘maybe not yet’

  3. Mostly the following the American star is done around the corner in Whitehall, where most of the government offices are located. the Victorian gothic monstrosity only houses the legislative branch, and they are a bit less prone to americanism thank god which is why we still have the NHS and the BBC, although given the penchant for pointless destruction of the children currently in Power, I don’t know for how long.
    If the park is st James, btw, it is a decidedly smallish park by London standards, almost unworthy of the name. I’d suggest to swing by Hyde park to see a proper London park. Today it will be fun with the snow and empty because this (15cm or so of snow) counts as s blizzard in this town.

  4. Mostly the following the American star is done around the corner in Whitehall, where most of the government offices are located. the Victorian gothic monstrosity only houses the legislative branch, and they are a bit less prone to americanism thank god which is why we still have the NHS and the BBC, although given the penchant for pointless destruction of the children currently in Power, I don’t know for how long.
    If the park is st James, btw, it is a decidedly smallish park by London standards, almost unworthy of the name. I’d suggest to swing by Hyde park to see a proper London park. Today it will be fun with the snow and empty because this (15cm or so of snow) counts as s blizzard in this town.

    • Southerners do eat vegetables…just not in a way that Westerners recognize. (I found them to be suspicious of raw veg other than tomatoes.) Collards and other greens, beans of all sorts are very Southern. Especially if long-cooked with a ham hock.

      • ALL vegetables are cooked for at least one (1) hour with several strips of bacon and half a stick of margerine. anything else is unrecognizable as a food substance unless it is deep friend in which case they will eat anything.

        • Margarine? You’re talking about health freaks. Saved bacon grease.

          I’m pretty sure carrots and peas are okay, but not cooked a la greens. (They may fall under the mayonnaise exception? Or is that more Midwestern?)

          Deep-fried anything, yep. Affinity with their Scots roots.

          • maybe the margarine was just my great grandmother. she bought it exclusively because it was $0.10 cheaper than butter and they don’t sell lard these days. the woman was a bit of a fanatic. i use saved bacon grease, of course. but yeah we are bits of scots hundreds of years ago mixed liberally with unnamed brown people. where are you from? i’m from east texas.

          • *grin* My folks aren’t East Coast at all. They’re Far East. 😉

            I’m a L.A.-born Angeleno of Japanese descent, who spent a bunch of time recently in North Florida (also known to some as Baja Georgia 😉 and Charleston, and North Carolina.

            They sell lard if you go to the tienda. Not that nice Southerners (white or black) tend to go to the tienda. But there are a surprising number of Mexicans in the southeast these days.

          • in the town where my great grandmother lived the minority of mexicans couldn’t even get a catholic church in edgewise much less la tienda. our matriarch learned to cook during WWII when rationing was in and margerine was sold in bags by the pound with the little orange dot of dye in the middle. it’s strange how these things happened but this was well before the term “saturated fat” had any currency and predates the term “trans fat” by several decades.

            i might just be rambling here but the anthropology of cooking never gets old to me.

          • *grin* I’m game for talking food history anytime.

            I think we’ve got a time-shift going. I’m referring to recent Southern stuff, you’re talking about your great grandmother’s day. Which makes sense. Butter was rationed, and I seem to recall reading about fat-collection drives. I’ve read about the squeezing the dye into the oleo. Fascinating!

            I was stunned to see a tienda in far Pamlico County, just outside the Village of Oriental, population 800 or so. But then, the IGA in Oriental sells a bunch of nouveau ingredients thanks to all the Northern retirees there.

          • oh well my great grandmother only passed away a few years ago so she pretty much dominated my idea of southern cooking. even now that my grandmother has taken the throne the food is still fairly traditional though my mother managed to phase out the margarine last year. modern southerners do not appear to eat vegetables of any sort unless they come on a pizza and even those are suspect.

          • It probably depends on how much influence their grannies have on their diet. Paula Deen appears to be the vanguard of the New Southern Diet. 😛

  5. Southerners do eat vegetables…just not in a way that Westerners recognize. (I found them to be suspicious of raw veg other than tomatoes.) Collards and other greens, beans of all sorts are very Southern. Especially if long-cooked with a ham hock.

  6. ALL vegetables are cooked for at least one (1) hour with several strips of bacon and half a stick of margerine. anything else is unrecognizable as a food substance unless it is deep friend in which case they will eat anything.

  7. Margarine? You’re talking about health freaks. Saved bacon grease.

    I’m pretty sure carrots and peas are okay, but not cooked a la greens. (They may fall under the mayonnaise exception? Or is that more Midwestern?)

    Deep-fried anything, yep. Affinity with their Scots roots.

  8. maybe the margarine was just my great grandmother. she bought it exclusively because it was $0.10 cheaper than butter and they don’t sell lard these days. the woman was a bit of a fanatic. i use saved bacon grease, of course. but yeah we are bits of scots hundreds of years ago mixed liberally with unnamed brown people. where are you from? i’m from east texas.

  9. *grin* My folks aren’t East Coast at all. They’re Far East. 😉

    I’m a L.A.-born Angeleno of Japanese descent, who spent a bunch of time recently in North Florida (also known to some as Baja Georgia 😉 and Charleston, and North Carolina.

    They sell lard if you go to the tienda. Not that nice Southerners (white or black) tend to go to the tienda. But there are a surprising number of Mexicans in the southeast these days.

  10. in the town where my great grandmother lived the minority of mexicans couldn’t even get a catholic church in edgewise much less la tienda. our matriarch learned to cook during WWII when rationing was in and margerine was sold in bags by the pound with the little orange dot of dye in the middle. it’s strange how these things happened but this was well before the term “saturated fat” had any currency and predates the term “trans fat” by several decades.

    i might just be rambling here but the anthropology of cooking never gets old to me.

  11. *grin* I’m game for talking food history anytime.

    I think we’ve got a time-shift going. I’m referring to recent Southern stuff, you’re talking about your great grandmother’s day. Which makes sense. Butter was rationed, and I seem to recall reading about fat-collection drives. I’ve read about the squeezing the dye into the oleo. Fascinating!

    I was stunned to see a tienda in far Pamlico County, just outside the Village of Oriental, population 800 or so. But then, the IGA in Oriental sells a bunch of nouveau ingredients thanks to all the Northern retirees there.

  12. oh well my great grandmother only passed away a few years ago so she pretty much dominated my idea of southern cooking. even now that my grandmother has taken the throne the food is still fairly traditional though my mother managed to phase out the margarine last year. modern southerners do not appear to eat vegetables of any sort unless they come on a pizza and even those are suspect.

  13. “It tastes of cheap fried chicken, poverty, country fairs, anti-intellectualism, racism, and deep-fried Twinkies…”

    God Bless America! Glad to be a southerner. But I take exception to being called a liberal…we are definitely not “anti-intellectualism”, nor are we racist. In fact, most people who hurl that insult at you are racists themselves. Quite ironic, really.

  14. “It tastes of cheap fried chicken, poverty, country fairs, anti-intellectualism, racism, and deep-fried Twinkies…”

    God Bless America! Glad to be a southerner. But I take exception to being called a liberal…we are definitely not “anti-intellectualism”, nor are we racist. In fact, most people who hurl that insult at you are racists themselves. Quite ironic, really.

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