Here are two more pieces of art with pieces of Art… me… in them… although, technically, I guess these are pieces of art with pieces of art with pieces of Art in them…
The only thing I forgot to do was Photoshop myself standing in front of the big pictures of me looking at myself…
I must be slipping.
What trip to London would be complete without a visit to the theatre district?
Oh look, I am wearing my good shirt again… HA!
I do love a good stage musical.
My mom actually had some of our English cousins come to London and stay over night so we could all go to this play together. It is a long story, and we will get to it later. For some reason, I haven’t run across any pictures of them yet.
We saw Les Miserables at the Queen’s Theatre.
It was about as fancy as the name would imply.
No, we didn’t take pictures during the show. I think Mollie took that one of a poster in the lobby.
And yes, it is still the longest running musical in London.
I think this brings us to the end of our second full day in London.
I have tried to limit the number of pictures. I am not sharing every meal, every funny moment, every interesting sight.
I am trying to give you the feel, the sense, a taste, a hint, of what London is like.
There is a magic that traveling to new places imparts upon us. I remember the feeling of pouring out of a theatre with a crowd of laughing, talking people, all excited about sharing the show we had just seen, bonded in a unique way, and then being suddenly deposited, at night, into a part of the city that I barely knew, and how the life and vibrancy flowed and pulsed around me, and I will be left forever with these memory-visions of bright neon lights and twisting narrow streets and the hustle and bustle of throngs of strangers all intent on living that one night of their own lives, and you can never fully recapture that moment… you have only the impression of it… and a few photos that capture one split second of a magical day.
That red arrow is pointing to a little blue and pink blob. That blue and pink blob is the baby Prince George, being held, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace by his father, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge. You can’t actually see the proud daddy in this shot, and the little Princess, Charlotte, was not there. But yes, we saw pretty much the entire Royal Family.
Admittedly, by the time we reached the Palace, the crowd was pretty big…
And as you can see from that unzoomed photo above, we weren’t all that close to the Palace when they came out.
But we had a great view of the Royal Air Force fly over…
And don’t forget that most of the Royal family had just ridden past us… multiple times… in their carriages, only a few yards away.
So I am not complaining about the crowds.
All in all we had a great time at the Queen’s birthday celebration.
It was an incredible day.
And as the Royal Family went back inside the Palace…
And the marching bands, and the crowds, began to disperse, we had the satisfaction of knowing that, from however far away, we had seen the little prince…
And besides, later on that day we were going to see Les Miserables at the Queen’s Theatre in London… with our cousins… so, stay tuned for that.
Yeah, you heard me… that right there is Kate… (Catherine)… Duchess of Cambridge. And who is that sitting in the carriage with her? Her brother-in-law, Prince Harry. Her husband will show up in a later post… keep your pants on…
And who should be riding beside her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cambridge? Yup… that is Cruella… no… I mean… uh… Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. Sorry for the slip. The best part of Mollie’s plan to race the Royal carriages down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace is that we got to run alongside most of the British Royal Family.
We would stop and take pictures, and then run some more, all the while dodging around crowds of people. We were actually only a few yards away from the Royal Family.
And here comes the Queen again, with her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Do I sound giddy?
I know, as an American, I am not supposed to get giddy about being close to royalty… but I will be honest with you… I was.
It was freekin’ exciting.
I wish we had had time to stand really still and focus the cameras, and zoom in correctly, and not have to take the pictures by holding the cameras above the crowd…
Because if we had, those pictures of Harry and Kate and Cru… Camilla… would have turned out better…
…and these last three pictures… well… we might even be able to tell who the heck those people are…
Seriously…
That might be Kate’s sister in that one.
But that is just a guess.
After we saw the Queen of England formally inspecting her troops, Mollie had the bright idea of running over to the Mall to get ahead of the procession back to Buckingham Palace…
We got a good spot along the route and were treated to quite a parade.
The thing is… hey, I was wondering what happened to all my ‘things’… that the next few posts will be a little weird because we would wait for the Queen to pass by and then Mollie would start running again, and we would pull ahead of the Queen’s carriage, and then stop and take more pictures, and then repeat the process… so… uh… these are all mixed up.
Is there a more English sight than the Horse Guards riding down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace???
Oh, the pageantry!
Okay, look closely at the photo above these words… and now look quickly at the photo below…
That is the same cell phone on the right… belonging to some unknown person. The camera randomly… and I say randomly because Mollie was holding the camera above her head to take these shots… but the camera decided to focus on the parade in the first picture, and the cell phone in the second one. I think they make a great pair of photos. I guess I could remind you that Mollie was holding the good camera for most of the trip to Europe. It was her trip. But she would let me grab it whenever I wanted to, and it is hard to tell who took what pictures… except for all the selfies of me… which I took with my old, cheap camera.
And we all took pictures with our phones now and then, so all in all it is a little confusing to sort through these.
I have to say that one of the stranger sights of that day was the horse-mounted marching band.
I can’t really imagine playing an instrument, riding a horse, staying in formation, reading music, and keeping time all at once.
But these guys managed to do all that.
Now please come back in a while to see who else we saw on that crazy day.
No, I don’t actually expect you to keep coming up with names for these pieces of art that have pieces of Art… me… in them. I am just going through all the old posts and cataloging all my weird pictures to make them easier to reuse now and then.
That being said, this old picture is a great way to break up all my photos of London…
… sort of… I don’t even remember what this post was about, but there is me, Big Ben, a London cab, some aliens from my action/adventure science fiction series of novels, and Nazi planes. The great thing is that I know, somehow, that it all made sense in the original post… more or less… HA!
So yeah, we saw the Queen of England…
She rode by in her carriage about 30 yards away as she inspected her troops.
And then she rode over to that arch under the red flags on the other side of the parade ground…
And she took a seat on that raised platform as the troops paraded back and forth and the bands played.
And it was all very exciting and a little mystifying.
Either way, there was quite a lot of marching around by various troops of soldiers.
And there were even Bobbies with machine guns keeping the Queen… and the marching bands… safe.
And there was that one Bobby with the square jaw who looked like he had been set there by central casting to play the typical English Bobby. But then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more exciting, the Trooping of the Color ended, and the Queen got back in her carriage to ride back down the Mall to Buckingham Palace… and my wife and Mollie and I ran and got ahead of her, and then things got really crazy…
First we had to watch a big parade of soldiers and bands and so on and so forth…
But you will not want to miss the next few posts… trust me… even though you may have to wait until tomorrow…
Here I am looking all giddy as I wait for the arrival of the Queen of England…
You could feel the excitement build as more and more troops of soldiers marched in to be inspected be her majesty… because who doesn’t love to inspect troops on their birthday?
Plus, there were lots of horses… and you know I love horses…
One thing that helped me pass the time whilst waiting for Her Royal Highness, was talking to a young English couple that had come in from the country to see the Queen. I wish I had a picture of them. We talked about British comedy and all the English TV shows we can watch in America. And I fine-tuned my knowledge of English slang as we made fun of the rich and well-connected posh people who had tickets to sit on the bleachers closer to the Queen and the Trooping of the Color… You should have seen the hats the women were wearing.
So I now know which is a worse thing to call someone, a ‘tosser’ or a ‘whanker’… oh, just Google it, for cryin’ out loud.
Man, I loved all the pomp and circumstance!
It was a truly moving bit of living history.
Whoops… somebody forgot their horses…
And at last, the big moment… and the Queen… arrived…
The Queen used to ride her favorite horse to inspect the troops, but now she does it in this fancy carriage… but more on that in the next post.
Yeah… we saw the Queen of England. I can’t even tell you how exciting that was…
I know that isn’t a very good picture. I used better pictures in that first post I did telling you I was back home. And I have more pictures coming up that are better. But I didn’t want to waste any of them.
There I am, looking all excited that the Queen was going to be arriving soon. I had to blur out Mollie’s face… because that is the way my wife likes it. Security is always a concern… and speaking about security, you know who has a lot of it?
The Queen of England.
Okay, that lovely set of British Bobbies were there mostly to answer stupid questions from American tourists. But they did form the front line of defense.
I will be honest. When my wife said we were going to go watch the Queen’s official birthday celebration and the Trooping of the Color, I thought she was a little nuts. I thought we would be so far away that the Queen would be a little dot in the distance. I am here to admit that I was wrong. So wrong. But I will get to all that soon enough.
Look at that… the security was so tight that when one of the crack squirrels that live in my head popped out for a closer look, the Bobbies politely turned it away.
The excitement kept mounting as more and more regiments of the Household troops arrived. I wish I could explain the tradition of the Trooping of the Color. It goes way back. These are some of the oldest units in the British army and are technically under direct command of the Royal Family. There is a lot of history being played out here.
These men are dressed in the fancy dress uniforms, but all the units are serving military units, and these men were all in combat in Afghanistan before being rotated home.
I was so excited by my personal experience that day that I spent the rest of our time in England telling everybody I met that I had seen the Queen and the Royal Family. It seems that seeing the Queen to the British is a little like visiting the Statue of Liberty is to the people of New York City. Most of them haven’t yet. I guess they figure they will one of these days. They just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Members of these famous units were also selling pamphlets that explain the traditions and ceremonies. They also explained all the symbolism of the fancy red dress uniform coats. That little symbol on that soldier’s collar and the way the buttons on the front are arranged tells you what Household Cavalry or Foot Guards unit he is part of… you really ought to Google all this stuff.
The main thing is that I was wrong, and my wife was right, and we saw the Queen from not to terribly far away, and we had an awesome time and it was a great life experience.
I love the irony of the fact that I waited until it was fully gray… or white, as the case may be… before I grew it out.
I hope dogs, babies and horses still love me. I might have to test that.
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Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
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Pouring My Art Out 
