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The Union Jack. 

London's Coat of Arms.

     Finally 20^th June 1988 arrived, and I got my first trip to London via Dubai.  Hooray!  I’d been champing at the bit for this trip.

     And what was so special about this trip, dear reader?  Actually this:  With SAUDIA I had previously flown to London merely as a passenger or deadhead.  Never had I been allowed to pilot a flight into London Heathrow Airport.

London Heathrow Airport.

The Heathrow Airport is surrounded by important archeological sites.

                            Taxiing “me” Big Top to the gate at Heathrow after landing.            

     As luck would have it, I got to operate the leg from Dubai to London, and all went smoothly on this beautifully-clear spring day.  As London Approach Control had me intercept the localizer quite away out for Runway Two Seven Right (270°/090° magnetic, West/East) – deliberately slowing us down for traffic landing in front of us – allowing me the luxury of my favorite pastime: “sightseeing.” 

     Frankly, dear reader, I’m not flying this jumbo jet for the glamor, glory or money.  I’m up here for the sightseeing!

     And as I engaged in this pleasurable activity, I surprisingly stumbled across a location that smacked me right between the eyes!

     During my senior year in high school, 1960, I caught a black & white movie entitled “Our Man in Havana,” based on a novel by Graham Greene.  

     It starred Alec Guinness, who played a failed, British, vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, Cuba (of all places), in 1959 on the cusp of Castro’s revolution.  He’s recruited as a spy for the British, and hasn’t a clue how to accomplish this.  So he makes up fictional agents and illustrates Cuban atomic power plants (modeled after vacuum cleaners); which in reality British Intelligence buys.  In the end it all comes unraveled and he’s recalled to London for censorship; possibly even a serious prison sentence.

 

Alec dispatching a spy in Havana.

Alec with his movie daughter "Milly."

The Vickers Viscount.

The Viscount's passenger cabin.

     As he and his daughter fly the approach to Heathrow, in an antiquated Vickers Turboprop Viscount, his teenage daughter looks out her window and exclaims, “Oh, father, what’s that big castle?”  She was raised in Havana; this is her first trip to England.  Alec Guinness rises up to look out the window – the camera pans down to Tower Bridge, spanning the River Thames, and a square castle standing beside it – then back on Alec as he cringes and slumps back in his seat.  Afterward answering, “The Tower of London.” - history’s notorious prison for traitors.

     Well I’ll be gob smacked, dear reader, if that very same view of Tower Bridge, and the Tower of London, didn’t present itself outside my right side window!  Not in black & white, but in ever-living Technicolor.  It took me 28 years to see this particular site in person; by God it was worth the wait!

Question: Were you aware that Tower Bridge is actually a drawbridge?

     SIA put us up at the Gloucester Hotel, on Harrington Gardens in Kensington, near the Gloucester Tube Station; allowing me to zip up to Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square on the “Tube.”  This gave me access to the West End theater district with its amazing drama/comedy stage shows and musicals; not to mention me favorite pubs and book stores. 

 Piccadilly Circus.

                                                     Leicester Square.

Parliament and Big Ben.

                                         The Noel Coward Theatre.

                                   “Shakespeare in Love.”

                 Jude Law in “Henry V.”

     Laying-over in London was like hooking up with an old friend.  Speaking of which, I also renewed my acquaintance with some of the dancers from Madrid, who were dancing in a musical stage production entitled “Ziegfeld,” starring Topol playing the role of Florence Ziegfeld.

     Attached to invisible wires, the dancers would lift off the stage and fly out above the audience; taking us spectacularly by surprise. 

     After the show the dancers would escort me to the London hot spots, and we’d boogey until dawn.

     If San Francisco was the cherry on my cupcake; London was the frosting.

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