On Saturday I saw the Queen.

She didn’t look too cheerful, sitting in the full sun in a purple suit and hat next to Philip in his furry black bearskin and red suit. But there she was, preceded in carriages by Prince Harry, the Duke of York and his daughters, followed on horseback by Anne and Charles, and surrounded by a few hundred guards on horseback. The Mall was lined with union jacks and London metropolitan police, while red guards with bayonets and swords marched up and down the long straight road leading up to Buckingham Palace. At 1 p.m., after the gun salute, convoys of planes—spitfires, red arrows, and bombers of various descriptions, filled the sky with red white and blue above the palace as the royal family watched from the balcony and we watched with thousands of others from the edges of Green Park and St James’ Park.

Afterwards we made our way to the British Library to sit in the cool silence leafing through thick volumes, pencil in hand, waiting for the call lights to indicate the arrival of more research material. Three hours of study seemed to redeem the day of the morning’s heat and crowds, and the Saturday evening buzz of Leicester Square came as a shock when we arrived at a restaurant on Charring Cross Road. The little Italian place we keep returning to had all its windows open, so our mealtime conversation was punctuated by squealing sirens. I remembered the last time we sat in the same restaurant, eating cannelloni and ravioli and watching the police interrogate a homeless drunk across the street as tourists stepped around the scene.

We spent an hour in Waterstones at Piccadilly – Europe’s largest bookshop and a must-do element of any London visit – where I sat quietly again and thought about space travel and politics, clouds and the great American adventure. Thirty minutes later we made our way through Russell Square, past another homeless man covered in pigeons, to spend almost two hours staring through sheets of glass at Michelangelo sketches: bulging muscles, the hand of God, cross-hatched drapes of material, Christ’s limp body on the cross, and, in the corner of one piece of paper, a defecating man (one wonders).

Friday had been a day of fingernails (a gift voucher... the manicurist cut a hole in my finger) the most delicious roast lamb, and one of those realisations that borders on epiphany about the earth turning and air travel (the things one learns from trainee pilots…). Sunday was a barbeque with my family, a Father’s Day event at which I realised my taste for potatoes is seriously offensive, and that I miss talking to my Dad.

This weekend I thought about Concorde and jet packs and space exploration and how the world has changed. What we imagined only a few decades ago—even when I was growing up—would be a relentless progression into the future has given way to a type of nostalgia for the past combined with a fear of the future. Perhaps it’s that we have lost our inquisitiveness, or perhaps it’s just that our objectives have changed. Back in the age of lunar landings the world was desperate to expand boundaries at all costs, particularly when space exploration coincided with national interests in the Cold War era. Since then our realisations about global warming and the environment are necessary boundaries that we have to respect. And yet we still can’t come up with an efficient vehicle that combines progress with respect for the environment.

So there are this weekend’s thoughts.
And some pictures of the queen below (more here).