KEY POINTS:
At Slough railway station there is a dead dog in a glass case on Platform 5. I say to a man in a pin-striped suit: "Excuse me, would you happen to know why there's a dog in a glass case?"
"Yes," he said, rustling the pages of his
Times in an irritated manner, "it was the stationmaster's dog". I laughed so much I snorted. He moved away. Well, really. Who's barking? The one who thinks it's mad to keep a mangy old dog in a glass case on a railway platform or the one who doesn't?
I found out later the dog was called Station Jim, that he was a collector for railway orphans and widows and that he died, suddenly, on November 19, 1896. Small wonder he's a bit manky.
His plaque reads, in part: "He knew a great many amusing tricks ... He would get up and sit in a chair and look quite at home with a pipe in his mouth and cap on his head ..."
He once got on a train to Windsor and when the guards tried to put him on a return train, he wouldn't have it and walked back through Eton. I suppose the Queen would approve, loving dogs as she does, but this is Slough.
I was at Slough, which is where you change for Windsor, because I'd come up with a hare-brained scheme: to go to Britain to see the Queen, and Windsor is a likely spot for royal watching.
There is the obvious reason of the castle which looms largely over the village, just as a real castle should do, reminding all the little people of their minor status.
Ascot is nearby and in town is the Guildhall where Charles and Camilla, and Elton and David got married.
I got a cab to the Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park, started in 1740 when it was just Surrey Bog.
In 1986 Her Maj, whose garden this is, sort of, was given a collection of New Zealand natives, so should you be longing for a cabbage tree, you can see one here. It is lovely in autumn. You can shuffle through leaves and sit under an acorn tree and get pinged on the head and watch squirrels. A sign reads: "Well-behaved dogs are welcome in the shop and on the balcony."
To get to the castle just go past the Victoria statue. To get to my B&B, said a friendly policeman on my first day: "If you turn right at French Connection, you'll find Peascod Rd." That is a sentence you'd hear only in modern day Britain.
The castle is opulent state room after opulent room; the Rubens and the Van Dycks; and the portrait of Bridget Holmes is here. She was "a necessary woman" whose responsibilities included the disposal of the chamber pots and who died at the age of 100 having served four reigning monarchs. The painting was probably commissioned by James II.
George V purchased the Hunting Negress clock made in 1790. You pull (well, not you, dear) on the right earring and the time is shown in the eye sockets. The musket ball that killed Nelson is here, removed after his death by the surgeon on board HMS Victory and made into a pendant locket and presented to Queen Victoria.
Queen Mary's dolls house is here. It has running water, working electricity and two Rolls Royces and two Daimlers in the garage. The architect was Lutyens and the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll.
"It's wonderful, I reckon," said the old man who has been guarding it for 20 years. Had the Queen played with it?
"No one's ever played with it!" the guard said.
"It was given to her when she was 54!" No wonder the royals are a bit funny.
At the guard changing a little boy said: "Where's the Queen?" "She's very busy," said his mother.
He demanded, "Are they good soldiers or bad soldiers?" "Good soldiers," his mother said soothingly.
"I want bad soldiers," he said. Then, loudly, "Look! There's a black one!" Well, he was. As black as his (bearskin) hat as people, probably people like Prince Philip, used to say. "Sshh!" said his mother, mortified.
The Queen is at the National Portrait Gallery and so are her ancestors. Given that the gallery is, as AA Gill writes in The Angry Island, "England's greatest club: offering membership to the worthy and the uplifting, the glorious dead ... This is England's catacomb, England's CV," you'd be mad to miss it. It has a vast collection of portraits of royals. The most widely used portrait of the Queen is adapted from a painting by Pietro Annigoni and it is not here.
The portrait was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, completed in 1955 and displayed at Fishmongers' Hall, London, an ancient, influential guild and quite a fancy building. But still.
I read this in a lavishly illustrated book called The Queen which is in my room at the lavish Langham Hotel in Regent St. The Queen is quite a sad book. The Queen, it says, "once turned to her lady-in-waiting and remarked wryly: 'You know, I do work most awfully hard, but mummy has all the charm'."
The Queen's House is at Greenwich. It was designed in 1616 by the architect Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark but completed around 1635 for Henrietta Maria, Queen of King Charles I. It is important architecturally: the first consciously classical building in Britain. I asked if the Queen ever came here and a guard said, incredulously: "This Queen? It's not for this Queen!"
Nobody was there and quite a lot of it was closed off, but I was able to look at Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar, alone, which was wonderful.
In the Painted Chapel with its grand painted ceiling at the Old Royal Naval College the guide tells me the Queen hasn't been to a service since the Navy left. "She said she never would again."
He says the Navy leaving in 1998 was the best thing that ever happened to the chapel. "They spent all the money on guns and ships. The place was falling to bits."
On my last day in London I went to Hyde Park determined to see the Queen. It was the opening of the New Zealand Memorial to our war dead.
The royals arrived and Prince William got a cheer. I couldn't see a thing, let alone a Queen.
It was the only cold day in two glorious weeks of autumn. We were handed a copy of Helen Clark's lengthy speech. I went up to a lovely bobby and said: "Can I get out of here?"
"Oh, no, love," he said. "I'm locking you in for hours yet." He was joking. "Go and stand in the subway, darlin', that'll warm you up. Go down that tunnel."
I turned to go down that tunnel and there she was, the Queen, five paces away from me, inspecting the troops. She looked like a little old lady.
Michele Hewitson explored London with help from Air New Zealand and Visit Britain.
