The air actually tastes like smoke this morning – not cigarette smoke, but that gunpowder smoke that drifts down from the fireworks. It’s still hanging in the air from the party last night.
I don’t bother visiting London on New Year’s Eve anymore but back in the day (I’m talking about twenty years ago) we used to queue up for the revelries in Trafalgar Square.
It was completely different in those days because the authorities actively discouraged you from coming and did just about everything possible to put you off. They used to search you first (no glass no bottles no beer no anything) no food, no music, and no countdown on the clock. You’d just stand around for hours in a steadily tightening crowd of thousands trying to spy the time on a distant Big Ben.
And there were no fireworks either. Nowadays they let off more bangs than the Battle of Waterloo. Last night’s show had lasers, lights, thumping music and free public transport to take you home.
Once the clock struck midnight that’s when the fun would really start because you were facing another hour of pushing and shoving past the people on the Strand and kicking through all the plastic pints and boozed up students on Waterloo Bridge. By the time you finally got home at 4 AM your hangover had already been and gone. That’s too much hassle for me now – I’d rather just turn up the next morning and watch the party being packed away.
This bearded bloke looks like he’s in charge because he’s handing out the jobs round the back of his council van. You stack up the crowd control barriers and you wind up all the wires from the sound trucks. Five minutes later it’s all drills and bangs as they start dismantling the scaffolding. One guy is putting on a pair of fishing waders so he can push a big broom through the fountains, whilst another one is spraying his jet washer at the pavement and turning the icy cold water into a cloud of freezing fog.
Photo: londondrum.comA family of early morning tourists have just hauled all of their luggage out the back of a taxi and it’s obviously their first morning in London because they’ve all got excited looks on their faces. The parents are staring up at Nelson’s Column and taking it all in whilst their kids are kicking a discarded party popper against the lions.
That’s not a bad way to start your holiday is it… standing around Trafalgar Square on a cold January morning with the big Christmas tree twinkling in the grey gloom and the smell of bonfire smoke still seasoning the air.
The bronze lions at the base of Nelson’s Column
Photo: londondrum.comKids are always climbing onto the back of those giant lions against the advice of their worrying mum, who will usually be standing on the pavement imploring them to get down. I must admit that I am siding with the mums on this one because those things are huge. I wouldn’t want to climb onto the back of one anymore than I would a real lion, because if you slip off the side then it’s a fifteen foot fall to the floor.
A few minutes later the dad is marshalling the kids into position so he can take a souvenir photo and go, but what’s the rush? Tourists are always in a tremendous hurry to get things done nowadays and I wish they would just slow down and look around before Snap! taking a quick picture of Nelson’s Column and Snap! one of the family by the fountain and then Snap! Snap! Snap! some pictures of mum posing in a phonebox.
Photo: londondrum.comOnce they’ve taken their photos they jump on a bus and are gone forever, never to return. When they get home their neighbours will probably ask them if they went to Trafalgar Square and they’ll say, oh yeah, we did that in five minutes on Monday morning.
No one visits a place just to sit around and stare anymore, so do me a favour and watch a bit of life go by. You’re in London!
Monument to Lord Admiral Nelson
Photo: londondrum.comIt would be very hard to build something like Nelson’s Column these days because we don’t glorify war in the same way we used to. Churchill would have deserved it but he’s a statue man, not a column one. So who else could we have put up there? Marlborough and Wellington but that’s about it… certainly nobody else from the last two hundred years.
Nelson would have absolutely loved standing up there. The Duke of Wellington would have been happy standing at the bottom but Nelson didn’t do modesty. He was the kind of guy who talked about himself in the third-person and wore all of his medals at once – all fifty-thousand of them jingling and jangling like a one-man band. He knew he was good and told everyone worth telling.
Apparently that’s what got him killed at the Battle of Trafalgar because a French sharpshooter spotted his glinting gongs through the gunsmoke. If you go and see his uniform at the National Maritime Museum then you can see the actual bullet hole that ripped a couple of inches above where he his wearing them.
The plaques around the base of Nelson’s Column
Photo: londondrum.comThe four bronze plaques around the bottom of the column represent his four most famous victories: St. Vincent in 1797 (where he still had two arms, but only one eye); the Nile in 1798 (one arm, one eye); Copenhagen in 1801 (one arm, one eye and lost a shoe), and finally his death scene at the Battle of Trafalgar.
He fought the Battle of Cape St. Vincent as a lowly Commodore and somehow managed to sail his frigate straight through the Spanish fleet without being seen thanks to a heavy curtain of fog.
Photo: londondrum.comBy the time the Battle of the Nile rolled around he was up to Rear Admiral and famously squeezed all of his ships into the narrow gap between the French fleet and the shore. The French hadn’t bothered to properly prepare their guns on that side and got blown to pieces.
The Battle of Copenhagen saw Vice Admiral Nelson helping to rout the Dano-Norwegian navy before they could ally with France, and his death scene at Trafalgar shows him dying a few hours before victory was declared.
. If you’re interested in Admiral Nelson then check out the National Maritime Museum. You can also visit HMS Victory in Portsmouth. And whilst you’re in Trafalgar Square you might like to gvisit the National Gallery. If you walk down the Mall you can see Buckingham Palace, and if you go down Whitehall you’ll end up outside the Houses of Parliament
