Hampton Court - Hello Henry, goodbye KenningtonSep 18, 2010
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| This morning we packed up, said our goodbyes to Simon our host and headed out of London. On the way through Kennington we dropped Ms SatNav off and breathed a sigh of relief as we continued the journey in silence. Damon lives in Surbiton which is a suburb of Surrey, near where we bought Pat’s Fender guitar. I cant believe we walked this far to pick it up. Today was incredibly warm and sunny and there were thousands of people out jogging, cycling and playing sport in the many huge parks and recreation reserves. It makes sense that if you live in these terraced houses all week with no garden and you commute to the city to work, that you’d make the most of green spaces at weekends. There seemed to be a lot of young couples with babies or toddlers in prams out walking together and I guess if you are both working, this would be precious time at the weekend. Damon’s girlfriend Donathea has come to live in England from Germany. She teaches English to young children of German immigrants on Saturday mornings and arrived home on her bicycle just after we got to their flat. Once we’d had a cuppa and a slice of Donathea’s fabulous strudel, we headed across to Hampton Court, the stately home of Henry VIII. Talk about green space. This is a huge park where deer roam unmolested and the locals spend quiet time strolling with their dogs on leads or playing with their kids in the spectacular playgrounds. We took the audio-guided tour around the palace and gardens and saw a re-enactment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine Parr in which the actors engage members of the audience to be part of their retinue for the occasion. The rooms of the palace are well preserved and its amazing how many rooms were used for singular purposes with quite Spartan decoration. There’s an eating room, where the King would eat his meals, sometimes alone. Separate privy rooms where members of court could do their lavatory business alone, which was unusual for those times. Certain privileged members close to the monarch might be invited to sit in the privy room whilst the King cogitated. A velvet covered privy box was being restored whilst we visited and we were able to view it and wonder how on earth it had survived the rigours of lavatory service virtually unscathed. I speculated that maybe the velvet cover was removable and could be washed…urgh. The gardens around Hampton Court are ornate and geometrical and the maintenance is constant and labour intensive. Its very peaceful to stroll around the garden beds and look over the river beyond the palace gates, where paddle steamers still ply their way upstream and not much appears to have changed at least in the last couple of hundred years. The rose garden has hundreds of varieties all still in bloom at present and the palace grows its own fruit for sale onsite including very old varieties of grape. It was getting late when we dropped Damon & Donathea off before heading towards Yorkshire and Barkston Ash. This had been a lovely day, the weather was one out of the box, one of several actually that we’ve managed to score on our trip. |
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