I'm having WAY to much fun and am running behind on my messages - sorry. I'm in Villefranche on the Côte d'Azur (in France) at the moment, where Tina Turner has a villa. The Rolling Stones recorded their 1972 album Exile on Main St. here and it's also the location of lots of movies (Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief – The Madwoman of Chaillot with Katharine Hepburn – Never Say Never with Sean Connery - The Jewel of the Nile with Michael Douglas - The Bourne Identity with Richard Chamberlain and - Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Steve Martin). 

 

Here's an account of my London visit - where I last left off. 

 

London, Wednesday, June 13

I began my Princess Diana pilgrimage today. I took the bus to Harrods Department Store, which is in Kensington, a borough of London but London to us tourists. Kensington was known as Diana’s hunting grounds. It’s the area of London where she loved to shop and it offers some prime, upscale shopping. Harrods (as I’m sure you all know) is owned by Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, When you enter the men’s store in Harrods you are greeted by a a statue of Mohamed al Fayed. He’s perched upon a pedestal, and, at first glance, I thought it was a real person - until I realized there wouldn’t be a real person on a pedestal in the middle of a department store. But it’s so realistic it could be an escapee from Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, which isn’t that far away. Mr. Fayed has established a couple of memorials to honor Diana and Dodi at Harrods and so I thought that was a good place to start my pilgrimage.

 

If you take the Egyptian escalators down to the bottom floor, you will descend upon the shrine built for Diana and Dodi.  Photos of their faces are mounted in the middle of a carving of golden birds, and below that are fresh lilies and candles. Below their photos, encased in a plastic pyramid, is a dirty wine glass from their last dinner together and the ring that Dodi had just bought to give (as in “propose”) to Diana. This rests upon a base of more fresh flowers. The wall behind their altar features a montage of all kinds of birds. The theme of being released and free as a bird abounds in both memorials to Diana and Dodi. People constantly stop by this shrine to pay their respects and to get their photos taken as yours truly did. 

 

As you ascend the escalators, after leaving this altar, just above the ground floor, there is a large bronze statue in the middle of the escalators,

"Innocent Victims." It depicts Diana in a flowing dress and Dodi in an unbuttoned shirt, dancing and holding their hands out. In front of them a bird clasps their hands together. According to CNN.com, the statue “shows the pair dancing beneath the wings of an albatross, symbolizing freedom and eternity.” You can see the statue from the various different levels of the store as you ride the escalator and you can sign a guest book if you’d got any messages to leave for them.

 

I left Harrods after a quick visit to the food court, which was amazing. You can get all kinds of food to eat there or take out and it’s all beautifully displayed; prepared foods of all nationalities, cookies, pastries, candy, fish, meat, an oyster bar, etc. There’s lots of stained glass and old English looking signs and the sales people appear to have just been liberated from a Mary Poppins film - in their white aprons and bowler hats. I purchased some Indian take-out and walked to Hyde Park, about a block away. There’s a memorial tribute to Diana, a Serpentine sculpture in the middle of the park. Part of the sculpture is a shallow pond and it was originally designed so that children could play in it. But after some serious injuries they put a stop to that. I was enjoying a peaceful reverie when the amount of unruly teenagers around me began to multiply. They began to frolic about in the water, running back and forth and I decided to move on to Kensington Gardens in search of the next Diana memorial.

 

Hyde Park is right next to Kensington Gardens and together they constitute a very large parcel of land and I was beginning to feel the hugeness. It was so humid, my feet were quite sore and I was starting to limp like Walter Brennan again, so I decided to skip trying to locate the statue of the author of Peter Pan and head for the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. I passed many a sunbather stripped down to various sorts of bathing “costumes” - just taking advantage of the partial sun and the comfy high grass in the park. When I finally reached the playground I found that there was nothing a childless grownup could do. Kids need to be accompanied by an adult but the rest of us are banned from entering. So, I walked around the Kensington Palace grounds where Diana lived and checked out the gates where her mourners stacked all the mounds of flowers that we saw on TV.

 

Thursday, June 14 – my last day in London 

Sarah told me that Abbey Road, where the famous Beatle’s album cover photo was taken, was very near their flat. So, on my last morning there we bundled Beatrice into her stroller and headed out to see it. It was only about a five-minute walk away. Taking a photo was a bit problematic as it’s a rather busy street. However, we hung in there and took turns snapping shots, trying to recreate similar poses to the album cover. An American tourist came up to me and said, “Is this the Abbey Road site?” He had read in Frommers guide that it was a few streets away from the St. John’s Wood Underground station, but the guide was rather vague in giving the exact location, so he was very pleased to have us validate his finding. We walked a few steps down the road where we came upon lots of graphitti covering the walls outside the recording studio. Fans come and leave messages here. The walls get washed with fresh paint every so often, allowing the next fans to scribble their new messages.

 

After seeing Abbey Road, I made a pilgrimage to the Tower of London before catching the Chunnel back to Paris. I wasn’t so much interested in seeing the crown jewels as in checking out the guards to see if they were still as stiff as they were when my sister and I visited it in 1967. And, more importantly, I wanted to see if they still had toilet paper that had “Property of the Government” stamped on each sheet. I had been so impressed with this novelty in ’67 that I collected toilet paper throughout my introductory trip to Western Europe. I found that it came in three general styles; lightweight waxed paper in the British Isles, Crepe paper in Holland, Germany and Denmark, and lightweight brown paper bags in France. I even wrote a paper about toilet paper in college - but that’s another story. Today I’m happy to report that the toilet paper in Western Europe has become softer and more absorbent, although it still had a crepe paperish feel to it in the airport in Frankfurt and it was still a bit waxy in public places in London. 

 

The Tower of London was totally different than I remembered. There are all kinds of new buildings around it to accommodate the tourists and they didn’t have the Beefeaters standing there, stiff as boards, staring straight ahead, making you want to get some sort of reaction out of them. Instead, there was one sitting in a booth opposite the ticket-taker’s booth and I saw another one leave the tower to make his way through the tourists to the mail box to post a letter. AND, to my COMPLETE disappointment, the toilet paper did NOT have any writing on it whatsoever.

 

I took the Chunnel back to Paris and managed to stay awake the entire ride. More tales from Paris to follow.