The Blog of Persuasion

TARDIS Paper 3 second draft

The plane was taxing into the lane to take off. Then the whoosh of the engines starting and the plane slowly moves towards the lane to take off. I can feel the excitement start to well in my stomach, or maybe it is the feeling of the G-force of plane taking off. I would like to think that it is just the excitement. This excitement is my feeling of going on vacation for the first time without my parents. This is my feeling of growing up, finally leaving the nest.

            Of course this flight wasn’t an easy one. At the time Colorado was teaming with storms. Greeley got hit with a couple of tornados; the east coast was also getting storms. When on a plane most of the time you will get your first drink about fifteen minuets into the flight and if it is a long flight a meal will be provided within the first half hour. That wasn’t possible on our flight it was going to take up to an hour or two to get our meals. The turbulence was just that bad.

            The flight attendants finally had to give us our meal even though the flight was still very bumpy. I had the chicken platter with a diet coke; I even had a crunchie bar. That is a chocolate candy bar from England with a honeycomb center. After dinner the coffee cart came around, I distinctly remember asking the guy who sat next to me if I could use his cream. After drinking my coffee I fell asleep.

            That was the beginning of my trip to England. Over the course of those three weeks I learned about my family and grew up as a person. This was my first trip out of the country without my parents. I also brought my best friend, who I at times call Dani, who has never been out of the country. I stayed in Nottinghamshire with my grandfather.

            My favorite thing to do in England is go to the wax museum Madame Tussauds. Every time I go the museum changes. Madame Tussauds is in London, so when we went there we also took a tour of London. The first stop was the museum itself. The first room looked like a red carpet event, flashing lights and upbeat music. There are many wax figures of famous celebrities. I had my picture taken with Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter,  and I have a tendency to tell people that I actually met him. I did the same thing last time I went to Madame Tussauds in 2003, my mom and I got a picture with the wax figure of Simon Cowell. I also got a picture with Graham Norton, who is a talk show host in England, that first room was rhythmically interesting.

            The next few rooms were very different than that first room. There was a room of old movie characters. I have a picture of superman, Charlie Chapman, and other cool characters that I would have to look in my camera to see who they are. There was also a room of terror that had scarily realistic looking heads on spikes. In this room there was also a live action show of terror. I didn’t see it but Dani and my grandfather saw it. I obviously am still as afraid of horror as a genre as I was when I was younger.

            The rest of the museum was the same as I remember, and by that I mean the hall of presidents and old kings and queens. There was all of the US presidents, the most famous kings and queens of England and many of the diplomats from other countries. In this room there was also the Beatles. It took forever to get a picture of them, since everyone wants a picture of the Beatles. The end of the museum was a ride of old London wax figure style.

            As I grow up and visit England many different times this place changes with me. As I grow older so do the wax figures, as new things happen in life, or movies that come out, new wax figures are made to correspond with the new happenings. I also learn more about the museum every time I go. During the tour there was a new room, it explained how the new figures are made and how the old ones used to be made. I always feel as if the changing of the museum is a signifier of how everything changes as people age.

            On this trip my friend Dani and I went to my parents’ friends’ house in York to see a different part of England. The coolest thing we did was go to a coal miner’s museum; I actually went down a coal shaft.  It was a scary thing, but it was also a very interesting thing. I learned a lot about coal miners and the different ways that mining changed over the years.

            Before going down the miners shaft every one has to take off any of there electronic devices. That includes watches, mobiles (which is the British term for cell phones), cameras, and any other electronic item. After giving any of the items over to the person on the other side of the counter they gave us a huge battery and a miner’s cap, which was a heavy item to carry while walking around in an uneven environment. After everyone was caped and checked to see if their lights were working we were finally able to go into the shaft.

            I don’t quite remember every single thing that I did but I do remember some of the things that happened. The first room that we came to was shut entirely and the lights all turned out. When the lights were turned back on there was a fake rat on the floor to scare all of the youngsters that might have been there. In that room there were also figures of a pony and a family. That was to show us that there were once a time when an entire family would work in the mines, but unlike us they didn’t have any light so the children had to sit in the pitch black and wait until they heard their parents knock on the door of their area. It was a scary thought that any child would have to live through that. I know that when I was a child I was afraid of the dark, and anything that may go bump in the night. I may not be afraid of the dark anymore but I know what I was like as a child, having three brothers doesn’t help a fear grow into a strength.

            As we went through the mine museum the instructor that was bringing us through told us of the new inventions that helped miners as they went through the changes in technology. I even walked the back way of an area, which means I walked through the machinery and got to see the inside area of the machines. At the end of the tour through the mine the instructor asked us if we knew anything that coal was used in. It was interesting to find out that it was in makeup and even in toothpaste; apparently coal is a great whitening product.

            While in England I saw some of my relatives that I haven’t seen in years. My mum is an only child so the only relatives I have on her side are her aunts, uncles, and cousins. One day my granddad brought Dani and I to a pub to visit our Michelle and a few of mum’s other cousins. They told me a few stories of mum when she was younger. She did a lot of things she probably didn’t want me to know.

            She has told me a few of the stories about her youth, mostly so that I wouldn’t do anything bad, like about how she had skipped some of her classes, about growing up an only child, about only having a few BBC channels on the TV, about the only phone being the red phone booth at the end of the street, well you get the point. I realized that she told me of the things she wanted me to know about her.

            I won’t say any of the things that I learned about my mum but I did learn a few things about my cousins. The main thing that I remember that I have in common with the cousins is that we have the same favorite actor, David Tennant (you’ll learn more about him later). We talked about many things, any diets we may have done, music, differences of life in America compared to in England and many other things.

            While in England I had my first taste of alcohol. Even though I was only eighteen while I was on vacation that is the legal age in England. I realized that I don’t really like alcohol at all. After one drink my head starts to hurt. I also realized that if I do drink alcohol it has to be the fruity drinks that don’t actually taste like anything alcoholic. I only had Bacardi breezers when I went to a pub.

            It is kind of bad that in England they don’t check ID’s unless you are getting an alcoholic drink without a meal. It is a good thing that Dani and I remembered to bring our drivers license with us to England. The only bad thing about going to the pubs in England with my granddad is that he likes to go dressed up nice, walking for half a mile in heels is killer on your feet.

            My favorite part of the trip to England was when Dani found what we called “the Doctor Who store.” The store was actually called Forbidden Planet and there was more than just Doctor Who merchandize, there were comics, other sci-fi television show paraphernalia, and many other things. I used most of the money I brought to England on items there.

            The reason I loved that store was because I am a big fan of the British TV show Doctor Who. My favorite actors are in this show, David Tennant, who most Americans will know as Barty Crouch Jr. from Harry Potter, and John Barrowman, who was the main tenor in the song “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. For a little background on this show David Tennant plays The Doctor, a Time Lord from a different planet, who is a time and space traveler. His space ship the TARDIS, which means time and relative dimension in space, looks like a blue police public call box. If you hadn’t noticed I also called the paper TARDIS, I have a brilliant explanation for this. The TARDIS is a time machine, for me to go to the future I have to grow up, thus the title for my memoir.

            Watching the show in England was an amazing experience, the season just started this month in America. I even got Dani to watch it with me, she once saw an episode and thought it was a bit loony. It felt more authentic to watch the show in England since it is a British show. But that is another story for a different memoir.

            Back to my original story about the store, I bought a lot of Doctor Who merchandize. When I first went into the store I bought two books, a “decide your destiny” style book. Before leaving England I bought seven of these books, I got numbers two through eight. I was very excited when I saw that they had a TARDIS. I bought it before anyone else could, it’s a coin bank but I think it is brilliant. I even got a picture of my favorite actor John Barrowman that was signed by him. The last two things I bought were a poster of The Doctor with the TARDIS and a poster of the main cast of the Doctor Who spinoff show Torchwood.

            On the plane ride back home I thought back on what I did while in England. I didn’t do everything that I wanted but what I did do was very exciting. While in England I also bought my first autobiography. I read the entire book within a few hours, randomly telling Dani a few of the anecdotes that I saw in the book that I thought were funny, like for example when he talked about a state, which I can’t really remember which one it is, that is as flat and curve less as Paris Hilton. I don’t think he said it quite like that but that is all I remember.

I did many things while I was in England. I even survived Friday the thirteenth, which is a running joke between Dani and I (meaning that she bought me a how to survive a horror movie book that said that I may not survive the next year’s summer) that we were going to become werewolves (well maybe Dani would). I walked a lot more than I usually would and I even got a library card for the Hucknall library. My thoughts at the end of my trip are kind of like the end of John Barrowman’s autobiography, “My ending isn’t written yet, my show’s not over. Stay in your seats. This is only the intermission.”