Social distancing and the Tower ravens

Snapping the Tower Walk from above Dead Man’s Hole

TO THE Tower! Two hundred and fifty yards across the river from my front door and it’s full-on Hilary Mantel.

Her latest opus The Mirror and the Light is on the radio right now – episode 9: Bloody Chamber.

The Tower of London is where Anne Boleyn and her nemesis Thomas Cromwell both got the chop, the latter for failing to measure up in a crisis. There’s a thought. We could bear it in mind for the present lot if they screw up the latest business.

As Mantel writes of Henry VIII’s first minister before his fall in 1540: “The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him, and the keeper of the king’s beasts trots up to say it’s dinner time — they eat early, the beasts — and does he want to see them fed?”

There wasn’t much clatter this morning. They’ve shut the gate at the southeast entrance and there wasn’t a Beefeater in sight. More ominously, there weren’t any ravens.

You know the old myth: “The kingdom and the Tower of London will fall if the six resident ravens ever leave the fortress.” They even clip their wings as an insurance policy that that never happens.

There are actually seven ravens – six and a spare – so maybe they’ve stuck them in cages somewhere for the duration because Jubilee, Harris, Gripp, Rocky, Erin, Poppy and Merlina were nowhere to be seen.

If they have any sense, which apparently ravens do, they may just have hiked off to the country to get away from Coronavirus-Central. If any of them resurfaces, please keep to the Covid-19 two-metre advice on social distancing. “These magnificent birds respond only to the Ravenmaster and should not be approached too closely by anyone else,” according to the people at the Tower.

The courtyards and the river walk over Traitor’s Gate are usually jam-packed with tourists but these are now as absent as the birds.

William the Conqueror built the fist part of the Tower in the 1070s. I’ll never forget walking past a French couple looking at it across the river from the south bank. He was expounding on how it was yet another testament to French style and innovation. Chapeau, mon vieux!

The French in London are one of our most significant communities – at many as 300,000 it’s reckoned. I’m not sure how many of them might have chosen to head back to France in the current emergency. Apparently Paris is locked up even tighter than London, so they are all welcome to hang on here.

The Français à Londres website has explained to its followers that when Emmanuel Macron banned travel to non-EU countries, of course he didn’t mean Britain. “Cette disposition,” it explained with caps for emphasis “NE S’APPLIQUE PAS AU ROYAUME-UNI.”

The Brits may have opted to turn their backs on Europe, but what are the next door neighbours supposed to do. They’re stuck with us, and we with them, in this latest time of crisis.

It was the same in Henry VIII’s time. When Cromwell was already on the slide, Henry confided to the French ambassador that his minister was “a good household manager, but not fit to meddle in the affairs of kings”.

Well, I’m sure we can all think of a few other bigwigs like that.