Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

12:  What Blenhiem Should Have Been

Thursday was an “in town” day.  But first, a couple of travel tips.

Before you leave on your trip, take some time to think about your morning rituals.  I certainly have them, but I’m usually on autopilot when I perform them.  This is great when I’m getting ready for work with only one eye open, but when I’m traveling, everything is different—nothing is in its proper place, I get distracted and sidetracked easily—so making sure I do all the tasks in my morning ritual is important, ESPECIALLY since I take medications.  I mean, forgetting to shave before I shower isn’t a big deal, but forgetting to take my meds is a much bigger deal.  So before you go, think a bit about your morning prep, and be cognizant of each step in the morning when you travel.

We also have found two things that can very useful on a trip.   One is a good pair of small scissors.  Swiss Army knives do not cut the mustard on this, so find a small pair (2-3″ shear blade), preferably with a travel sheath, and tuck them into your checked baggage.  Second is a small bag of clothespins.  You’ll never have enough hangers in a hotel room, and clothespins can make hangers do double-, triple-, or even quadruple-duty.  And if you’re doing laundry Neapolitan style, they’ll help keeping wet things where you want them until they’re dry.

Now…onward.

What the Sir John Soanes’ Museum was for me, Apsley House is for my wife: a small venue museum that was repeatedly pushed off the itinerary in favor of the bigger marquee sights.  It’s the house in which the Iron Duke (the 1st Duke of Wellington) lived after giving Napoleon what-for at Waterloo.  Back then, when he first moved in, it was a pretty nice address: called #1 London, since it was the first house within the London gates.  However, since then the location at Hyde Park Corner has become one of the busiest traffic circles in the city, and now Apsley House is surrounded by noise and bustle, instead of greenery and peace.  The current Duke of Wellington still lives up in the attic, we’ve been told—well, “attic” is a bit disingenuous, as it’s really the top floor and quite posh if it bears any resemblance to the floors below—but I’m sure he spends most of his time in one of his other homes.

We popped up from our Tube ride at Hyde Park Corner station, and arrows pointed in every direction like a freeway interchange (use Exit 2 for this, use Exit 3 & 4 for that).  It’s all very helpful and, even if you do take the wrong exit from the station, there are color-coded maps at every point of entry/exit to aid you in navigating the pedestrian underpasses, crosswalks, and pathways.  You see, inside the traffic circle are the Wellington Arch, the Australian War Memorial, and several other statues and monuments, while outside the circle are Apsley House and other places, some of which are of actual use to Londoners.

You can tell that Apsley House—a big square mansion built of Portland stone and limestone—is one of the smaller museum venues because it doesn’t have a line out front.  In fact, it didn’t even look like it was open: there was no one outside, and there was a tag hanging from the front door that looked suspiciously like something that said “Closed due to lack of interest.”  Upon closer inspection, we found that the sign read:  Please turn knob and come inside.  I don’t know why, but I found turning the same handle that the Iron Duke used when he came home pretty cool.

Inside, Apsley House is a brilliant collection of historical, decorative, and fine art.  The entrance price of £6 included a complimentary audioguide, and while I generally don’t like audioguides, we took them just in case.  As it turns out, the audioguide was excellent, guiding you both from room to room and from object to object within the rooms.  It’s informative, intelligent, well-presented, and gives you as much or as little as you want.  The guide leads you from room to room, upstairs and down, describing the history of objects in each room and of the room and house itself.  And there is so much to see in this museum.

The décor is predominantly French Imperial, and Wellington insisted on using yellow and gold together in the same style Napoleon liked.  Yellow satin and silk striped wall hangings, pale cream woodwork, all filigreed with gold on moldings and frames.  Only one room deviates greatly from this color scheme, and that’s the main gallery room which replaces yellow with red, as insisted upon by the 4th Duke.

We spent hours at Apsley House, enjoying each object and item, hearing the stories behind the artwork.  In the banquet hall, the table has down its 24’ length a huge centerpiece of solid silver with dancing figurines, palms fronds, and columns of spears along its length.  In the state rooms are portraits of friends and people he admired, including Napoleon and Josephine—Wellington was a great admirer of Bonaparte and actually thought him to be the greater general.  In the long hall is a huge organ, still used at Christmas-time.  But the high point of the tour is the gallery, the Duke’s personal art collection, a gathering of Dutch narrative art, Italian Renaissance work, and several exquisite pieces by Velasquez.  The collection fills the huge room, floor to ceiling, door to door, and here, the red wall hangings are indeed much better than the yellow would have been.

Apsley House is underappreciated and under-visited, in my view.  It’s a great combination of history, art, and personality.  It tells the story—albeit incomplete—of a man crucial to English history, of his curious relationship with a great adversary.  Apsley House is all that we expected from Blenheim Palace, and we left it well satisfied.

We had an apple in the shadow of Wellington’s Arch, had a moment to complain about the lack of trash bins in London (in Paris, they are EVERYwhere), and headed home.  And there everything turned sour.

We’d had minor annoyances with the apartment we’d rented—the dryer that didn’t dry, the lack of privacy—but this evening they all happened at once.  The wifi that had been intermittent finally cut out completely and we lost connection to the Internet.  The dishwasher leaked because of a loose connection in the outlet pipe.  The cabinet door on the washer came loose.  A handle on a drawer fell off in my wife’s hand.  The smoke detector went off when I tried to roast some potatoes.  The family from above us was using the “private patio” that had been a selling point for us, and the toddlers were cranky, which set off the baby.  We tried the DVD player but it spat out every disk presented to it.  And then the heat wouldn’t come up and we found out that when the people in the main house turned off THEIR heat, they turned off OUR heat as well.

It all came to a head and we got pretty discouraged—our first week wasn’t even out and we were starting to really dislike the situation we were in.  It got to us for about an hour, during which we weighed all our options.  In the end, we decided that we needed to shake it off; rethink, reevaluate, reset our expectations.  This helped, and we set about planning the rest of our stay.

k