Streets of London: Royal procession

The wedding.  The dress.  The kiss.

Spectators, fresh-faced choristers, flower-girls, prelates in embroidered copes, family in jewels were supported by highly polished cars, police, soldiers, and carriages.   Royal procession in the 21st century.

Clifford Geertz, anthropologist, wrote about 16th century procession.  The display of Elizabeth I made her authority visible.

Geertz also wrote about 14th century royal procession.  Hayam Wuruk was suspended in the Javanese cosmos between his people and the gods.  His authority was apparent in the length of his retinue, the magnificence of his gold and jewellery.

Later, down at the Thames, all was quiet.  I watched the tide, surging against a bollard, and made a drawing.

British Museum: Ornament of Oman

More exquisitely detailed costume...

Traditionally, for an Oman man, a weapon was part of everyday dress.  Fastened in a belt at the front of the tunic was a khanjar - a thick curved dagger sharpened on both edges.  It was said to take a month or more to make the blade.  The belt and the sheath were decorated with silver.

Traditionally, a dagger was also carried in Indonesia.  Men wore their keris in a belt.  Women might also wear a small sheathed keris, as a hair ornament.  The blade might be straight, or the edges shaped in almost-parallel wavy lines, gradually converging.  The craft to make these blades has been compared with the craft of samurai sword-makers.

The shape of waves can be elusive.  At Blackfriars Bridge, with joggers behind me, I watched water as it lapped against the Embankment.  I made a drawing.

British Museum: Parthenon Marbles

What can survive repeated conquest?  On the Acropolis: 

• The sanctuary for Athena was destroyed by Persians in 480 BC
• The Parthenon was completed in 432 BC, a Doric temple and treasure store
• In the 5th century AD the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church
• In the early 1460s it was converted into an Islamic mosque, with a minaret 
• In 1687 a Venetian bomb exploded the Turkish ammunition store inside, causing destruction
• In 1806 an Englishman took some of the sculptures to England.

Perhaps Indonesia had more luck - the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch were interested in spices, not terrain.  Before them, other sailors and merchants came to trade: Chinese, Arab, Buddhist, Hindu.  And if later there were priests and dignitaries, their influence could be absorbed in a more gradual process.  That is, until the final period of colonial rule, as enlightened nations were building their empires.

The Thames has been flowing for thousands of years.  Today I watched it flow under Waterloo Bridge.  Waterloo: one of the last stands of Napoleon the Conqueror.  I made a drawing.

Tate Modern: Picasso

There was a room with several works from the 1930s, and a 1920s work in a separate exhibition.  The subjects (objects?) were mostly women.  It is astonishing to stand and stare as if this were an everyday occurrence, to be mere inches away, to see the overlaps of lines, to examine the edges and joins of coloured planes, and then walk backwards... and see the larger effect.

With a Sunday afternoon ice cream, I walked along the edge of the Thames to Southwark Cathedral, where bells were ringing, sounding like an Indonesian gamelan orchestra.  One person starts, and everyone joins in, playing each percussive part in cycling patterns.  In the breaks, bells could be heard across the water, at St Magnus the Martyr.  The tide came in.  I made a drawing.

British Museum - bronze bells

On the way in, there's a row of bronze temple bells, some from the Qing dynasty.  They're as tall as a child and they probably weigh ten times as much.  But they're not for ringing.  They sit on their rims, like statues.

In the Indonesian National Museuam there are bronze drums from Vietnam, and outside a bronze elephant, a gift from the King of Siam, Chulalongkorn, on a state visit to the Dutch East Indies in 1871.  In return, he is said to have received Buddhist statues from the temple at Borobudur.

My purse runs to less substantial artefacts - less statuary, more implements of daily life - a tartan scarf from Edinburgh, a book at the airport, a new set of pencils.

At Canary Wharf there was a spectacular sunset.  I made a drawing.

The British Museum - Enlightenment Gallery

It was a surprise to see them - in amongst the cases of ancient Greek and Egyptian artefacts - the Indonesian wayang masks and puppets, the bronze gamelan instruments.  A gong with the Indonesian central boss.

And there I was again, in a moment, at the door of the dusty showroom at the Bogor gong factory, 2 hours from Jakarta.  The Saturday traffic snarled and roared in the street behind me and, to the fore, the hammers of the workmen in the darkened forge chimed, gradually flattening the metal for another gong.  When my luck was in, there would be wayang golek for sale, as well as an assortment of gamelan.

The wooden golek heads and limbs were carved and painted in traditional elaboration.  The clothes were patterned and satin, sequin-studded.  It was an endless source of wonder.  'Which character is this?' I would ask.  They would tell me the name of the Ramayana character based on their examination of its features.  The carver provided no information other than the work itself.  Sometimes the staff would talk about it a bit.  Sometimes they would call in one of the older men to give a final opinion.

I stood in the Museum, looking at pieces collected 200 years ago.  They could have been collected yesterday.

I caught the train to the river, where a bird, probably looking much like its antecedents 200 years ago, was catching fish at low tide.  I made a drawing.

British Museum again - Balkan textiles

The richness and variety of the wedding dress was unexpected - layered and pleated, embroidered and crocheted, woollen and linen, draped with coin belts, fastened with embossed silver buckles.

The wedding dress of Indonesia was also unexpected - at least to my western, white-lace-trained eye.  I sat one day in a songket workshop in Palembang, south Sumatra, as a young women whirled about her length after length of red brocade - golden threads and silk in elaborate abstracts - patterns glinting in the dim light.

In the Balkans and Sumatra alike, companions also wore sumptuous clothes, grand gestures for moments of magnificence.

I took the number 19 bus to the Thames.  We passed through Sloane Square - a place of magnificence, with almost more fashion in the streets than in the shops.  Beside Battersea Park I made a drawing.