Hampton Court Flower Show: When you consider that we have not been especially avid gardeners, it may seem odd that we have been to two flower shows in about five weeks. They just seem like very English things to do. I do think that many British people are very caught up by their gardens, although I wonder if this might be a class thing, since you have to have some money to have a place to have a garden. This flower show one was next to Hampton Court Place but not actually on the grounds of the palace or the extensive palace gardens. (The palace was originally built by Cardinal Wolsey in 1515. He gave it Henry VIII to try to forestall the inevitable when he lost favor in the whole Anne Boleyn controversy. But it only gained him a brief reprieve. Henry and later monarchs did many renovations and expansions, so it is a bit of a hodgepodge of styles. The last monarch the actually use it was George II. We’ll have to go back and visit the palace sometime.)

I think I enjoyed this show more than the Chelsea Flower Show that we attended with Robbie and Bob in late May, mainly because it was less crowded. The area dedicated to this show is much larger and we went on the first day, which I think is limited to Royal Horticultural Society members. It just wasn’t such a mob scene and it was easier to see and get refreshments, etc. And, finally, it was a lovely summer day, with sun and temperatures in the low to mid 70s. Portions of the flower show are aimed at selling you plants and every sort of garden thing you can imagine from tools to outdoor furniture to incredible sheds to garden sculptures of all sizes. Of course, we have no use for any of that in London, although it gave us something to think about for Montclair next year. So the main thing we did was look at all of the various sample gardens. Some were silly and some would be so expensive to recreate that they weren’t much use. But a number were very nice and gave us images of what we might do in Montclair when we return next year.

Fourth of July: It is obviously not a holiday at all here (although we did see some fireworks from the terrace of our flat that night for some reason). We decided that we ought to do something to mark the occasion, so we went to Ben Franklin’s house. It is part of an 18th century development of Georgian row houses near to Charring Cross Station and Trafalgar Square. They claim that it is the only standing house where Franklin lived. He lived there from 1757 to 1775, leaving when he was basically deported for treasonous acts against England. (He left his wife in Philadelphia the whole time, as she was afraid of sea travel, and never saw her again.) While he was there, he represented various American interests and was eventually the de facto American ambassador. He also did a variety of scientific experiments and met with thinkers in England and around Europe. He is said to have run up and down the stairs of the house carrying weights, attempting to figure out the relationship of exercise to heart rate. He also designed the lightning rod that was used for St. Paul’s (winning a contest). It remained on the Cathedral until the early 1900s, when it was destroyed by a large lighting strike! While at this house, he also invented the Armonica in 1761. This is an instrument based on the sound you get when you rub the edge of a crystal glass. It had a series of bowls on a spindle attached to a treadle, which turned the bowls. It was easier to play that glasses filled with water and more precisely tuned. It became so popular that composers such as Mozart,Beethoven and Strauss wrote pieces specifically for it. The house had one (refitted with an electric motor) that we could play.

The house itself was a boarding house in Franklin’s day and later became a small hotel after the nearby train station was built. The windows were all blown out in the blitz, but the place was not hit. At points it was derelict and abandoned and home to squatters who removed and sold all the marble fireplaces but one. But other than that and a few Victorian additions from when it was a hotel, the building is essentially unchanged from when Franklin lived there. He lived in one large room on the second floor, overlooking the street. The place has the Franklin stove that would have been in his room, but it is too heavy to put on the old floors. (The house is leaning over a bit as it is.) The other tenant in the building, other than the landlady, was a famous anatomist who ran a small school and dissected bodies. This meant that the house had to be visited by grave robbers in the middle of the night, since that was the only way to get cadavers that the time. It is easy to imagine Franklin seeing the bodies being brought in and going downstairs to watch or participate in the dissections. When the house was bought and renovated for the museum in the 1990s, thousands of bits of bones were dug up from the back garden, representing at least 20 bodies.

British Political Update: The pace has slowed, as it had to. The bombshell-a-day politics after the Brexit vote couldn’t possibly continue. This doesn’t mean that things will turn out well. It is simply going to take time for the inevitable to happen, which I suppose gives one hope that cooler heads will prevail and that somehitng might be worked out over the next two or more years that won’t be as bad as the impact of leaving the EU looks right now. In the meantime, Nigel Farage, the detestable head of the UKIP party, announced his resignation, saying that he had accomplished all that wanted by getting Britain out of the EU. He promised to stay around in his role as a member of the European Parliament (it is hard to imagine anyone worse for that position) to make sure that Britain actually leaves.

The other two parties continue to try find their way. Corbyn is stubbornly hanging on as Labour Party leader, although he has utterly lost the support of the vast majority of Labour MPs. He clearly thinks that he retains the support of the rank and file and would survive a challenge. There is some speculation in the press that his support is weakening among the members and that the unions are fed up with him, but no one really knows. There was one theory that he was waiting for the Chilcott Report on Blair and the Iraq War to come out so that he could denounce Blair in Parliament as a war criminal and then resign. But that turned out to be wishful thinking by those who want him gone. Labour really needs a resolution to all of this since they are just getting increasingly weak and divided. If Corbyn remains in place, the Conservative would have to be tempted to call an election, which could be very bad for Labour’s very future.

On the Conservative side, the party members are going to get to choose between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom, now that the other Tory MPs have expressed their distaste for Michael Gove, who seems to be viewed as a psychotic Machiavellian figure now. (It is possible that Boris may ultimately come out ahead of Gove in this whole political drama. He retains some support and is still the only really charismatic Tory figure. And he will miss all of the mess surrounding the Brexit negotiations, which will inevitably tarnish the next PM.) As for the near future, Theresa May is clearly competent and experienced. She is somewhere in the Cameron wing of the party, which means that she is a “compassionate conservative” who seems to favor all of the usual conservative economic dogma without being Neanderthal on social issues. She reminds a lot of people of Thatcher, which is a little scary. Andrea Leadsom, on the other hand,  is a bit of an unknown. She was an important figure in the Brexit movement, which is really her main claim to fame in this vote and has gotten her support from the big Eurosceptics. She is much further to the right than May, as far as I can tell. She has been stressing the fact that she is a mother (clearly trying to disparage the childless May) and can therefore be trusted somehow. But she has also come out against marriage equality and rights for pregnant women. It sounds like the majority of the country is hoping that May wins, but it isn’t up to the country. It is up to 130-150,000 Conservative party members, who are old and white and male. It is far from impossible that that group could pick Leadsom.

Of course, this all seems like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta compared the mayhem taking place in the US. Between Trump, the collapse of the Republican Party, the utter dysfunction of the system of government, the revival of racism and police violence and the worsening gun violence (if that is possible), America is looking pretty horrifying from this distance.