Routemaster ii
The Routemaster’s triumphant return to London
(via Tired of London, Tired of Life: See Stevenson’s Rocket)
Interesting
(via The Guardian Dickens walk four: Heart of the City | Books | guardian.co.uk)
(via The Great Smog of ’52 » ISO50 Blog – The Blog of Scott Hansen (Tycho / ISO50))
The V&A. Nice place. Rakka and I sat outside under the shadow of that entrance thing being assembled and had or cabbie tea and our litre and a half of Harrods Evian. Then when in for a quick shifty round. Don’t think we saw a quarter of it. We were exhausted at this point, and sick.
Still sick, to be honest. But I made dinner without setting the place on fire tonight, so I think I’ll be back in the office tomorrow.
Harrods. Two words: Not fun.
Too much stuff. Too many people. Laid out like a Vegas casino (I.e. a maze). I bought bottled water (1.5 litres each for Rakka and I. Seems like a lot, but we drank it all and were still thirsty. I believe I mentioned the dehydration).
And now I can say I’ve seen Harrods and I never have to go back! So, net positive!
Right, so I also took a bunch of video of the horse guys. Here’s some.
Horse Guards. We randomly came across these guys while we were in Hyde park for a little picnic. They were practicing their formation riding, and it was quite the show.
The pictures do most of the speaking here, other than these guys just did what they did with very little fuss. In the states no such organization would ever practice any such thing in public at any time, but if they did everything would be cordoned off and controlled. The horses and spectators would have to be protected from each other. It would be a big to do.
When a guy walked across the sandy area to join the path on the other side, Rakka and I both freaked out a bit. We were sure he was going to get arrested or something. At least a stern talking to.
But here in London there’s enough respect for the populace to expect them to not, at least this once, get trampled by a phalanx of horses. Here in London the populace tends to live up to this expectation. Nothing happened with the guy. The horses weren’t galloping towards him, so nobody else even noticed him. The UK feels much… freer than America. It’s weird.
This could get really political, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s just general, every day interactions seem… freer. And it’s nice, and I miss it.
We went to the Theatre. No we didn’t go to a new, high profile show. No we didn’t go to an underground show that only the cool kids know about.
See, I’ve never had luck at the Theater. Always be a tedious bore. I think Rakka’s had a similar experience. We suspected that the Theatre would be different, but we wanted to maximize our chance of success. Also, we both love Dame Agatha. So we went to see The Mousetrap.
And I think I can speak for both Rakka and I here when I say we enjoyed it. The performances were fun. Played more for comedy than you might expect for such dark material, but it sort of fit. More Margaret Rutherford than Joan Hickson.
We sat next to a nice old couple from Newcastle, in the 2nd row from the top. We could almost touch the ceiling. It was a constant struggle to not get vertigo, the cheap seats being also the steep seats.
The other fun thing is that St. Martin’s is old enough that, as we were gently informed, to get to our cheap seats we had to go outside and back in through a special door round the side. It wouldn’t do for our dusty tradesman’s clothes to, even accidentally, come in contact with the better patrons evening attire.
It’s not like that now, of course, but walking up to the side entrance I could almost see back in time. Top hat’s and tails arriving by taxi, studiously ignoring the common folk as they went through the side door and started up the decidedly unfancy side-stairs. It was weird. Probably just the jet-lag.
