Thursday, March 30, 2017

london bridge is falling down

Today was great, except for the fact that I got up too late to get much done in the early morning hours. However, I did get a lot of great stuff done despite that. I wrote for several hours in the late morning/early afternoon, and then I left the house to go to a museum. I'm glad that I prebooked the ticket - I wouldn't have gone today if I hadn't, but it turned out that today was totally gorgeous - the warmest day we've had since I got here, with enough sunshine to start replenishing all the vitamin deficiencies that have caused some surly moods.

My destination was the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which is quite far from here (six miles is an eternity). I decided to take the Thames Clipper there - the ferry down the Thames is about as fast as any other option and faaaaaar more scenic, although it only runs every twenty minutes and so may not be as efficient if you mistime it. But I timed it perfectly, and it was a gorgeous day to take a boat down the Thames, even if I had a few moments where I feared seasickness. But it was #worthit for sure, since I saw all sorts of London landmarks while enjoying the sun.

When I got to the Maritime Museum, I went straight to the special exhibition on Emma Hamilton, who was the infamous mistress of Admiral Nelson. You of course allllll know who Admiral Nelson is - he was the hero of the British Navy (although he became much more of a hero after his death, since it's easier to deify people who die tragically and are no longer able to insult you in real life). He'd lost an arm and an eye in previous naval battles over his long career, and spent many years thwarting Napoleon - he fought the Battle of the Nile against Napoleon way back in 1798, where he destroyed most of Napoleon's hopes of becoming a new Alexander the Great and conquering Egypt before going on to conquer India (I read a lot about this in 'Napoleon in Egypt' several years ago, which I'm sure I waxed lyrically about at the time).

But the exhibit wasn't about Nelson - it was all about Emma, a poor working-class girl who rose to the height of celebrity and infamy in the late 1700s. She became the mistress of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples, after his nephew (the guy she was previously sleeping with) sent her to stay with Hamilton without telling her that he intended for her to become his uncle's mistress instead. Gross. She was furious, of course - but there wasn't much to be done about it, since she was already in Naples when she figured it out.

Whatever happened next, she did seem to eventually fall into genuine love with Hamilton (not the same Hamilton who got shot by Burr, obvi), and they finally married many years later, which was *not done* back then. But she was on her way to respectability...and then she fell for Nelson when he came through Naples. Sir William seemed to be okay with this, as the three of them traveled together to get back to London in ~1802, and she split her time between the men going forward.

But things don't work out well for mistresses. Sir William died, and left her money but not enough for her lifestyle...and then Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar, cementing his place in British history and leaving her out to dry. She was barred from attending his funeral, and the British government gave all sorts of honors/money to his estranged wife (whom he hadn't seen in eight years) while giving Emma nothing. She lived for a few more years, increasingly desperate, before dying in poverty in France.

So...now you know. You're welcome.

The exhibit was really cool, but I was pretty angry throughout - she was a very intelligent woman (she was fluent in French and Italian within a year of reaching Naples) who had the misfortune of being born poor in a time when women had very few rights, and she suffered all the consequences of the Nelson affair while he became the hero of his age. Ugh.

Anyway, to wrap this up, I then did a speed tour through a couple of other sections of the museum (which I've seen before), then left when they closed at five. At that point I was starving, so I went to a nearby restaurant and had a steak and a glass of wine while writing in my journal and contemplating the things I'd seen. Then I took trains and tubes back to my neighborhood, and when I got here I did some solid writing for a couple of hours (when not talking to [censored]).

And now I need to sleep so that I can repeat these feats of writing and cultural exploration tomorrow - goodnight!

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