There’s a company here in London that offers daily free walking tours of London, and the other day I went on one. The tour centered around the area that houses Buckingham Palace, and our guide was a funny, young college student. Two things I found particularly amusing:
• It has been notoriously easy to bypass security at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen resides. Two famous incidents stand out. In the first, a group of Germans who were looking to see London on a budget decided to camp out in Hype Park one night rather than stay in a hotel. They scaled a barbed-wire-topped wall and set up camp in what they thought was Hyde Park. Turns out they had set up camp on the back lawn of Buckingham Palace, spent the night, and weren’t discovered until they packed up the next morning and were wandering around enjoying the “park”. The second involves a drunk man who one night entered the Palace and set off so many alarms that the security guard assumed the alarm system was malfunctioning so he just restarted the system. The man made it all the way into the queen’s bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the queen’s bed and woke her up. She remained calm, but was unable to press her panic button because the man was between her and the button. She thought quickly on her feet and called her butler and ordered a cigarette, and since the queen doesn’t smoke, the butler knew there was an intruder. The man was arrested, but since there isn’t actually a law saying you can’t break into Buckingham Palace, he wasn’t charged for anything. But the Brits did get the best of him as he wasn’t a citizen and was deported.
• The offense for peeing in public still holds its original name from the 1800s. If you are caught going to the bathroom anywhere other than a bathroom, you will be issued a ticket for “wild pissing.”
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