Hookel Bird Party

Today was another carefree day of touristy stuff with my family. Hooray! We started out the day with breakfast, and after some flight confirmations for tomorrow, we headed to the Tower of London, the large, thousand-year-old castle in downtown London. If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite a sight. There are wall foundations which date back to the Romans. We accidentally joined a tour group, led by a Beefeater, as soon as we entered, so we ended up following a group around for awhile and listening to all the gruesome stories of the Tower. I remember lots of beheadings, and hangings. I think it was a pretty grim place in its heyday. We ended the tour at the tomb of Ann Boleyn and some other executed members of the royal family, and we headed to the crown jewels. Apparently the Tower of London is the keeper of the largest diamond in the world, which sits at the top of a scepter wielded by some king or another. We saw it, and it was so big it looked fake. It was 530 carats or something like that, cut from a rough stone of over 3000 carats! I know nothing about diamonds, and even less about carats, but even I was impressed by this mammoth. The crown jewels were pretty amazing. As the name suggests, the collection also included several crowns throughout the ages, dating back to the 1600s, I believe. There were some spectacular crowns, all decked out in gold and diamonds and gems of all sorts.

After the jewels section, we went another ancient building housing specimens of armor worn by royal knights, which was fun to see. We left this section eventually and walked along the pediments for awhile, looking through the archers’ holes and such. We found out that the Tower was only attacked once, by peasants outraged at a new tax in the 1370s. They looted the Tower, and executed the archbishop, who apparently wasn’t a very nice guy.

Overall, it was a pretty overwhelming place to visit. I certainly had fun, but I’m amazed at how thoroughly museums can damper the interest you may have for some objects. For example, if you were to see an old cannon out on the street, you would be amazed, and you would walk around it and be really impressed, but when you see twenty of them, all lined up in a museum, you wander off and look for somewhere to sit down. The crown jewels were astounding, but any one of them could have been the pinnacle of the visit. When you walk through and try to experience all of them at once, you just get bored with it. Instead of attaining a genuine appreciation for any individual work of craftsmanship and beauty, you perceive their collective identity as “British crowns,” and you just walk through the exhibit with mild interest. It’s as if, instead of reacting with, “Look at this huge crown over here! It’s amazing, because there’s only one of it!” you react with, “Oh, look at these forty jewel-encrusted crowns. Hmm, I guess they do exist….My feet are tired, we should go sit down somewhere.” I think it’s a damn shame. A DAMN SHAME.

Tonight, as the last night of my partial family’s visit to London, we decided to have a good old-fashioned hookel bird party. (For those of you who don’t know, a hookel bird party is a long-standing Maloney tradition which involves one family, one television set, and ample amounts of junk food.) We bought a couple of pizzas and some chocolate from the grocery store and headed off to make a night of it. We were a happy family tonight, sitting on my parents’ bed and watching a John Wayne western (who, by the way, was a USC quarterback before becoming a movie star).