Day 3: Stonehenge!

Wow. That’s what sums up Stonehenge for me. It was hard to be too engaged with Woodhenge, what with it being a bunch of cement posts in the ground and feeling motion sick besides, but Stonehenge… wow. The concept is simple—make a circle out of stones going up and across. It’s not until you’re there, looking up at these colossal stones, some weighing up to 45 TONS, that it really hits you how amazing this structure is. It was made FIVE THOUSAND YEARS ago, with 45 TON stones. What really drives me crazy is not only that we don’t know how they did it; we don’t know why they did it. It seems so purposeful—the structure acts as a big calendar, with the sun rotating which post set it shines through each month and it being so perfectly aligned with the summer and winter equinoxes. I have a feeling everything is going to be exactly awe inspiring, so I’m going to stop saying that. Seriously though, it just…it just hits you!
We took a detour to the city of Bath, one of the most gorgeous cities I’ve ever seen. The cathedral in the middle of the city…bam. We didn’t spend too much time there, really just for a fabulous bit to eat a local brewery where I got a fabulous bowl of cauliflower and cheese soup, and this garlic sauced mushroom dish. Unfortunately I was still feeling rather sickly, so I couldn’t enjoy it as much as normal but it was still neat. For some reason the restaurant REALLY liked Tin-tin, with posters of covers all over the place.

We found our way back to London just in time for a fabulous Jack the Ripper tour with our guide Karen. We had our doubts—she was from the same company as David, our ghost/cemetery “guide”, but she was so enthusiastic and knowledgeable, it was pretty much the exact opposite experience. As I mentioned previously, there are a bazillion theories as to who Jack the Ripper was, but no one can deny their brutality. The living conditions in Whitechapel in 1888 were already horrible—filth and disease, pollution from the plants surrounding the area, disgusting mattresses being the only place to sleep for cheap… a rather horrible existence, and that’s just the physical environment. Not all of his victims were prostitutes, though those that were suffered the greatest brutality. The one that wasn’t, the wife of a local business man, only had her throat slit, but the rather sensible hypothesis, based on the other, far nastier murder that night, is that Jack was simply interrupted in her killing by her husband coming into the alley with their cart and pony (the husband told the police his horse got spooked when in the alley, like someone brushed past him…) and took out his frustration on his other victim. What makes it all really really sad is that many of the women had come to Whitechapel looking for jobs, either running from places of no husbands or drunken ones, and fell into desperation so far that prostitution was their only option. I for one think it was the American doctor with creepy collections of organs back in the States and who left 2 days after the last murder. With how precise the cuts and organ removal was, the idea it was a surgeon is highly sensible. Lots of London had to be rebuilt after the Blitz, so not many of the original places exist anymore, but Karen did a great job setting the mood with what we had. It wasn’t the jump-and-scream scary of London dungeon, more a creeping suspicion that the world is not as pure as you thought it. These slight, shall I say suggestions, of a slight imbalance of good and evil, wasn’t as noticeably unsettling at first, but it stayed with me much longer. It didn’t help that we still had to walk through London at night after hearing about Jack the Ripper…

Below is Johnny Depp as Inspector Abberline in the film From Hell in which another common theory is explored--the grandson of Queen Victoria fell in love with and married a prostitute, and her favored doctor, Sir William Gull, killed the women who witnessed the ceremony (the bride herself was lobotomized as to not be able to talk, goes the theory) to cover it all up.