Another trip, another plan

It's time for me to start planning my September trip to London. My loyal readers (all four of them) will think that this blog is sounding like a broken record. The main focus of this trip is London Open House Weekend -- two days when over 600 buildings, usually not accessible by the general public, will open their doors to the hoi polloi. I've placed my online order for the booklet (5 quid) detailing all the buildings that will be open so that I can start making my plan of attack.

I'd actually given some thought to going over without having made a spreadsheet for the trip. Who am I kidding? As if. But the spreadsheet is looking mighty empty right now, and I've got to get cracking. I reckon the weather will be much better in September than what I've had in my previous April and October visits, and so I'm thinking of doing some walks along the Thames, weather permitting. One might be in Chiswick, and another from Tower Bridge to Rotherhithe. I'd also like to go back to Southbank Mosaics to volunteer again. I'll post more as the plan takes shape.

My Wordle

I made this at Wordle.net, but I can't figure out how to make it look bigger on this page. You'll just have to click on it. Wordle makes a graphic representation of the words you use in your blog. It's pretty cool.

Mother Nature

I really don't know squat about nature. Agriculture, yes, but nature, not so much. When I was a kid, my mother used to take us for evening drives in the country, and she'd point out all the different crops in the fields, so I can identify squash or beans at 55 mph, but I hardly know the difference between a crow and a pigeon. I prefer my flora cultivated and my fauna domesticated. But now that I have a digital camera, and work on a campus with lovely lakes and gardens to look at on noontime walks, I've been trying to pay more attention to it all.

Last year, I saw dragonflies and damselflies, cedar waxwings and a great blue heron, and I've learned the names of a couple new plants like fernleaf peony, Spigelia marilandica and Eryngium. I often took pictures of things and then posted them on Flickr and asked people to tell me what they were.


This year, I've been watching tadpoles turn into froglets in a little artificial pond near the Mount Holyoke greenhouse. Here are two tadpoles as they looked back in April. You'll probably have to click on the photo and view it large in order to see them. They're the grey blobs with eyes in the middle of the photo.


Nothing happened for weeks and weeks. The tadpoles swam around in the pond, but didn't seem to be morphing. Then, in June, they quickly got legs and came out of the water to sit on the lily pads. If you look closely, you can see that one still has a long tadpole tail, one has a stumpy tail, and the others have tailless bums.


Here's Big Mama (or Big Daddy) watching over all the little guys in the pond. Two weeks ago, I could see twenty or so of the froglets at any given time. Now I only see a couple. I think the rest have learned to hop and have left the pond to explore the natural world around them.

Miles and Miles

My last full day in London served up quintessential English weather. It was dark and pouring when I headed out for the day with the intention of going from museum to museum, spending as little time as possible outdoors or above ground. By the time I reached the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, the rain had tapered to mist, and it had stopped by the time I had finished looking at the Impressionist paintings and the Renoir at the Theatre exhibition.


Wednesday was St George's Day, which apparently England is trying to reclaim from its more recent association with the British National Party and football louts, and there was a festival of English food, with lots of vendors from Borough Market, in Trafalgar Square. I wandered around, watched the tea ladies and some other entertainment, then had a bowl of various types of salad, made from spelt, rye, beets and other veg from The Veggie Table, and a scrumptious piece of banana cake that came from Flour Power City Bakery.


After lunch, I nipped into the National Portrait Gallery to see a small, but fab, photography exhibition by John Londei called Shutting Up Shop. Then, with the weather now warm, sunny and gorgeous, I decided to stay outdoors and really started covering some miles, most on foot with intermittent bus and tube trips. First to Oxford Street -- a place I usually try to avoid -- to hit John Lewis for another pair of knitting needles.


Next, a walk up Marylebone Lane to The Button Queen where I got a couple of interesting buttons, one vintage deco one that was probably too expensive but I think it would look neat on a neckwarmer. From there, I went by bus to St John's Wood to pick up a Beatles floaty pen for rosenbeans, and ran into Esther walking back to Belsize Park.


Not wanting to waste a moment of spring air and lovely late afternoon light, I decided to do the Hampstead walk from www.londonwalks.org. Some of it was in streets and lanes I'd been in before, but most of it was new. I skipped the Admiral's House, but otherwise did the entire walk, all the way up to the flagpole by Jack Straw's Castle, a pub that both Dickens and Marx liked to frequent. The flagpole is on the highest point in London, and I was hoping for splendid views, but there were no vistas to be seen from there.


Walking back to the tube station, I went by the Holly Bush Pub and caught sight of the BT Tower and the London Eye over the rooftops of Hampstead.

Before leaving for home on Thursday, I took a quick walk down some previously-unseen streets of Belsize Park. Everywhere I walked, there were signs of spring bursting forth -- lilacs starting to bloom, magnolia blossoms opening, tulips and pansies in all the front gardens. I saw the site of a painting by Robert Bevan that we'd seen in the Camden Town Group exhibit on Saturday. As soon as I saw the painting, I thought it had to be Belsize Park (the label confirmed it), and I dragged Spooner over to see if he would recognize it (without looking at the label or my saying where it was). He hadn't a clue, even though it's a five minute stroll from his house. I guess I'm getting pretty good at identifying the sights of London, or at least the sights of some of the areas I've gotten to know.

The trip home was long and tiring. I left Spooner's at 10 a.m., and while I was underground for an hour and a half, making my way to Heathrow on the tube, a storm went over and planes weren't allowed to take off until it had passed. This put all flights behind schedule, and ours sat on the tarmac for two hours before they let us move to the runway. It was 8:30 p.m. by the time I got into my car in Framingham, and 10 p.m. on the dot when I pulled into my driveway. My body is now somewhere between London and Eastern time, and I got up at about 4:30 this morning to dump my 617 photos onto the computer and look at them. After I unpack and do some laundry, I'll start putting them on Flickr and will drop a few into my blog posts. I'm sure I won't get far before jet lag takes a grip of me and I crash.

The Sea and the Gloatfest

On Monday, two of my Flickr mates took me on a great daytrip to Whitstable, a little seaside town in Kent. It's just the sort of place where I could imagine Mr. Peggotty, Ham and Little Emily living in their overturned-boat-turned-house, although I think they lived in Yarmouth. It was really fun -- great company, and nice to be in a place where the scale of things is smaller than in London.


The three of us happily wandered about with our cameras, pointing at the sea, rocks, beach huts, birds, and boats. I took dozens of photos and will add more to my Flickr photostream when I get a chance to sort them out.


Yesterday, I walked through Southwark and went to the Imperial War Museum in the morning (there was a roiling sea of school groups in the museum, so I didn't stay long, but did go through an exhibit about the WWII experience of children in Britain), bought knitting needles at I Knit in Lower Marsh Street, met a Flickr mate and a Ravelry mate for lunch, and looked for Donna Leon books for rosenbeans at the book stalls under Waterloo Bridge (sorry, no luck). After that, a group of six of us did our volunteer work at Southbank Mosaics. I don't have any photos of that, but I will write more about it later (here's one of my mates' photos of me working on one of the Blake mosaics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/76743095@N00/2436035855/).


Then, it was on to the Royal Festival Hall for the Guess Where London meetup, a.k.a. Gloatfest, in the bar. It was so nice to see people I'd met last autumn again, and to meet more of the group.

Today is my last day of exploring, and I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do. Time to check the weather forecast and make a plan.