@pfooti · 2024-06-28 · travel

London, 28 June 2024

Those tables are, as far as we can tell, for show. You can’t go into the cloister courtyard.

Last day in London! Tomorrow we fly home; it’s the good timezone direction, so we technically land only a couple hours after takeoff, but it’s still a 10h flight. I’m completely on London Time now, so it will be a couple of days before I recover. I have to go to work on monday, so wish me luck.

The oldest door in London is pretty neat, but the best thing about it is the sign, and everyone looking at the door saying, “hey, that’s the oldest door in Britain!” As for the other signs, well, let’s just say: I didn’t see a guard dog at either the park or the construction site.

Today we started off with the V&A museum, where we primarily focused on Fashion, Chairs, Ironmongery, Jewelry, and Ceramics. The Ironmongery was kind of a surprise.

There was a lot of more-or-less random stuff in the museum, which began life as an Expo showing all people the wonders of the Industrial Revolution. I like museums like this, you’re never sure what you’ll see. I saw so many chairs, a table that was 3d printed in 2009 (that’s like forever ago) using UV laser / resin techniques (you have to see the video to really grok it, but look at the shadows as well!)

Also there was a room with plaster casts of lots of stuff. All this stuff is plaster casts of the original, brought to the V&A because the common folk couldn’t travel to the place where the stuff was. Chrissy added for scale.

I’ll also spare you most of the ceramics photos- I took a lot; it has been a while since I’ve thrown anything, and I was feeling like some of these shapes were really inspiring.

Stoneware mug, made 1703 (at least that’s what the date on it says). It is double-walled, the liquid-containing part is a straight-sided cylinder, but the exterior skirt has piercing decorations. I love this idea, and have been nonstop thinking about how to throw and sculpt something like this since seeing it. Expect to see a lot of posts about this kind of thing in the near future.

After that, we headed to Westminster Abbey. Real talk: it was too crowded, and apparently (based on what some tour guides said around me) it wasn’t even that crowded. Still, my autistic self found a ton of overstimulation and crowds and difficulties. Still, it was worthwhile, and I really enjoyed having seen a lot of that stuff. I think that’s a good way to put it: I am glad I went, but I’m also glad I’m not there anymore.

What can I say? I just really like ceilings. And, not going to lie, the collage feature in google photos. It may not be perfect, but it’s like maximally good enough for this kind of thing.

The abbey itself is a lovely old gothic (ish? I’m not a churchology expert) cathedral, with flying buttresses, lots and lots of dead people (and even more memorials for dead people buried elsewhere), and the aforementioned Oldest Door In Britain. No, you don’t get a picture of the whole door, you’ve got to visit yourself if you want to see it. Someone walked by saying “where’s Shakespeare?” and I could say “around the corner, right underneath Keats and Shelley.” Of course, none of them are there- Shakespeare’s buried in Stratford-on-Avon, and both Keats (tuberculosis) and Shelley (shipwreck of all things) are buried in Rome (they have a special cemetary just for Protestants).

Steven Hawking, just one of the many scientists interred or memorialized there. The formula for the temperature of a black hole due to Hawking Radiation (where spontaneous matter-antimatter pairs fall on either side of the Schwarzschild radius, and thus escape instead of annihilating shortly thereafter, which results in radiation away from the black hole). Anyway, in addition to not being a Churchologist, I’m not an astrophysicist either, so I cannot tell you why they’re using hbar there instead of just dividing by sixteen pi squared, or why they don’t just fold all that into one of the constants. But I digress.

After the church, we moseyed (carefully, both of us are having joint and back pains with all the walking around and stuff) over to a fancy Tea restaurant, where we had Afternoon Tea (not High Tea, that’s for kids or something, and is in fact way less fancy than Afternoon Tea).

The Tea was themed around the secret garden, so there’s a key buried in cookie dirt as the opener, plus lots of delicious snackables themed around the book. Sweet was: mango ganache on olive oil and lime cake, tart with basil almond cream, raspberry ganache in a rose mousse, and a chocolate flowerpot. Savory was: egg and cress rolls, salmon and avocado on spinach bread, chicken salad, beetroot sandwich. We had seconds on the salmon, chicken salad, and egg and cress. Plus scones. (en.wikipedia.org)

And now all that is left for our intrepid selves is hoping we can pack everything away for the trip home. Thanks for following along with the trip in real(ish) time! I’ll post followups with more photos that didn’t make the cut, and then return to my regularly planned blogging schedule of short fiction, thinking out loud about game design, and other stuff that piques my interest.

This door is old, but it is not the oldest door. It was the door that at one time safeguarded the official coins, that were used as the basis of comparison every year to make sure the currency didn’t get too debased. Someone should write a really long series of books about currency and its invention, I’d probably read it.

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