Josh Getzler
Greetings from row 60 of a Virgin Atlantic red-eye from Newark to Heathrow. It's 2:30 am, the nine year-old is sleeping on me, my knee is begging for a stretch, and there is no way I'm going to be able to get up for at least another hour or two--bless her, the nine year-old knows how to sleep. The turbulence of the last four hours has subsided sufficiently to allow me to write in the convenient-yet-awkward manner afforded me by the iPad, and I marvel anew at my son's feat, during six hours of a flight to Israel last year, of writing an entire original episode of the Muppet Show on an iTouch. Kids.
This is the first time we're taking our brood on an extended trip that didn't include their grandparents, a Seder, or both. It's simply a vacation, after camp and before school, during the second-slowest week of the publishing calendar (Christmas Week being the slowest).
We decided on London partly because we thought it would be a gentler transition to another culture for the kids if they spoke the same language as the natives; partly because my wife and I know the city well from our previous trips there; and partly because between Amanda's career as a World history teacher and my own representing a good number of books set there, the kids feel a bit like they know the place already.
OK, so the London they are expecting is a bizarre combination of Hilary Mantel and JK Rowling, and is filled with Tudors and Muggles. They may be disappointed on Friday to find that there are no Royal beheadings scheduled on Tower Green, or on Sunday not to find Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell at Hampton Court Palace. But they'll be relieved that the Millennium Bridge was rebuilt after the Death Eaters destroyed it in Half-Blood Prince.
I'm incredibly excited to experience London in a third stage of life. The first time I was there I was with my own parents on a trip like this one. I was a teenager and my lasting memories were experiencing Wimbledon; being horrified, as a New Yorker, to discover that people ate pigeon; and having my life changed by The Smiths when I heard Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now for the first time on BBC1 on the way to the Cotswolds.
The next time I was there was on my honeymoon. On a Saturday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery, my new wife gave me a three hour summary of a thousand years of British history without a note or a blackboard, simply taking me from painting to painting from William the Conquerer to Diana, William and Harry. It was a revelation in two ways: I knew that Amanda's future students would be extraordinarily lucky to have her, and that I was going to spend the rest of my life, one way or another, accompanied by Stuarts, Tudors, Windsors, chivalry and Shakespeare, and Bedlam and the East End.
Now I return as Dad, fresh from 15 years of reading Allison Weir and Conan Doyle, Bruce Alexander and PD James; watching Prime Suspect and Upstairs, Downstairs; and seeing my kids experience Harry Potter and Mary Poppins. Recently, my son read Maile Meloy's superb historical fantasy of 1954 London,The Apothecary (coming out in October from Putnam). He was so struck by it that both my wife and I read it--devoured it, really. (It's a can't miss.) We decided to tweak our itinerary a bit, and will be hitting the Chelsea Physic Garden this afternoon before we even officially check in to our hotel, in order to experience one of the key scenes of that book. The week will be filled, we hope, with moments like that one which will entertain and--not even stealthily on our part--educate. I'll be fascinated to see what my kids' takeaways will be. Will they find the next Smiths? Become infatuated with Churchill? Obsess over the identity of Jack the Ripper? Want to follow cricket? (Nah...)
Tune in next week.
