Hampton Court

The irresistible loneliness of the red-brown bricks creates a strong colour-contrast with the grey bleakness of English weather. The stubborn and gloating clouds swarm above the the great sienna house, focusing precariously on it, as oblivious as the rest of nature. The clouds sprout from their bosom the tell-tale and obligatory drops of rain, which land on the walls, creating a circle of blackness as it sinks. It stands proud and forgotten by its builders who are long dead. Only the ghosts walk its halls and laugh and chatter at its tables. The great Tudor palace stands off in the distance, the final result of the wandering eye. The rain is ceaseless and lands into the river beside, it's flowing and beautiful current sweeping time with its strokes, like a sailor and the restless influence of the moon. The curios arrive in their tens and their hundreds; couples and the solitary intrigued, all wander these historic paths and happen to hope to see into the past. Hampton Court towers above the people's intelligence, all-knowing in its experience of mankind. In a way, the building is like a higher power, it judges not but let's passers-by through, its beautiful head averted away from the treachery that once occurred deep within.

Amongst the excited and irrelevant masses there walks an old man, who wears his clothes as if in duty and not happy appreciation. Crowded both from the choking people and the atmosphere of dreary rain, he thinks in sadness that never has he felt more alone in this timeless world. However, he smiles all the same, and follows the treacherous crowd into oblivion, his gentle footsteps opposing his thoughts and future. This man, this particular man, dedicated his life to the study of the momentous and powerful palace which looms above him, looming like God. A professor, a man of prestige, visits his heart once more before he departs the world of life. The inexhaustible doctors told him that his days were undeniably limited, but all he could do was chance to hope of meeting the ghosts of this Court.

Spending some peaceful time outside, he holds his unsteady breath to enter the halls of history. He runs his hand across the bricks, closing his eyes, imagining the types of people which once copied his confined movements, drunkards and youngsters of the time of the houses' glory days. Five hundred years ago, and the walls of the palace still live on, the cement never crumbling, the paint not once beginning to fade. He desperately, like many others that have visited before him and many who will soon visit, try to see past the force of time into the life of the past. His mind's eye is not a window though, and he sees no further than his own fantastical imagining.

In the chapel, gold glints off of every surface, blinding momentarily the present observers. Not a Christian man, he is more holily faithful to the golden crown to the right of him. The inexplicable crown of the King. Desperately he searches for a trace of evidence on the rim of a past head wearing it, but his scrutiny is brought to inevitable disappointment. The house graciously lets him pass through, in which he eagerly does. The ceilings of Hampton Court hold it all together, past and present and future alike.

The man turns a corner into the anger of the one-time palace. The old and beautiful Tudor furnishings are obliterated in imaging and in evidence, as future creatures remake and remodel to suit their own intricate interests. Another King, three hundred years back, is everywhere in the walls and complicated staircases. The man scowls, alongside the house, at this monstrosity of demolition. Cracks appear down these new age walls as if the palace were weeping.

At long last he exits and walks down the hostile reminder of a path and turns his head back to the monument. When he dies, his spirit will join the ones that fly through the Court's air like butterflies, he hopes. Leaving this sacred place makes him stop momentarily, as he realises that his life's dedication also evades. When he is gone, the house will still be planted in the ground of Hampton, with the promise of further captivation of future generations. However, the imminent day will come when the house will fall drastically and without consequence to the ground it lies on, forgotten like the ancient temples of Greece. But for now, it faces the rainy sky, sunlight shining though its omni-benevolent halls, regardless of the threatening weather. Timeless it stands, and timeless it will fall.