Final week in London

Sunday

Liz had to work all day, so we hung around and were good parents; washing, supermarketing, getting meals, reading quietly and napping - a proper family Sunday.

Monday

Summer has arrived - forecast 23 today and much the same for the rest of the week - clouds and a little rain, perhaps, but 23 - 24 all week. Liz suggested we take advantage of the day to visit Kew Gardens, so off we went, south-west along the Thames to this gigantic botanic garden, of which we covered about 20% in 3 hours - and took a few nice piccies.

Back into South Kensington. Bev sat while Russell browsed the Energy Hall (Boulton/Watt and the steam engine, Parsons and the steam turbine, etc), then wandered along to a display of 3D printing and learnt quite a bit he didn't know.

This is a model radial-cylinder aircraft engine, about 60 cm diameter, and has a handle on the back. When you turn the handle, the crankshaft drives the pistons in and out and the prop-housing on the front turns, as you'd expect.

But it was 3D printed in one piece, and they had a movie showing it being done. Amazing.

Tuesday

One warm day, and the bare polled trees we've been passing on our walk to the station have burst into leaf.

V&A - wedding dresses

Liberty - some fine Liberty-print cotton shirts

Russ procrastinated about a Nike jacket

Wednesday

A wasted morning visiting the Keats House at Hampstead;. He lived there productively from 1818 - 20, and it's now a museum and library. We'd researched this before we came over, even drawn a map of how to get there from the station. But we didn't read our crib-sheet this morning, so when we walked out of  Hampstead Underground station, 55 minutes after leaving Liz's, it wasn't the station we remembered, or the one we'd mapped. But Bev had read the item in the Eyewitness Guide last night, so she could figure out where to go. A pleasant long walk down the slope of Hampstead High Street followed, checking out the Georgian and Edwardian architecture, and figuring that this place must be as expensive as Notting Hill or Holland Park!

Got to Keats' House a bit before 11 - read the sign saying it doesn't open till 1 PM. Mmmmmmm? Let's go back into town and tick off the National Gallery.

So we walk further downhill 2 blocks to Hampstead Heath overground station, look at the Railways Map, and decide that we can't get there from here (too many changes).

So we have a long slow trudge up Hampstead High Street, and it's hot, because it's summer today!!!

Tube back to Charing Cross, into the now-familiar Crypt at St Martin in the Fields for some soup and crusty bread, (recommended) then into the Gallery. Revisit all the icons, get revitalised by Moroni, Botticelli, Vincent's chair and wheatfields (both painted at St Remy, where I stayed on my 2012 motorcycle jaunt), etc. Our brains refilled, it's shopping time, so up Oxford Street Nike jacket, then John Lewis - amazing stuff! A couple of nice jumpers and that's about all we have energy for. Luckily Bev remembered that we can catch the 23 bus in Oxford street, so we make use of a roving Information Officer (in his suit and bowler hat, they're everywhere) and just sit and let someone else drive  us to within a hundred metres of Liz's door.

Thursday

Domestic chores consumed most of the day.

We had a leisurely walk around the area to the west of Liz's flat, passing by very many white-painted Georgian buildings as well as the walled garden featured in the film Notting Hill. Wandered further doe Portland Road to Avondale Park; lots of trees and shrubs and gardens, plus tennis coutts, play equipment  and a cafe. Entirely unheralded, only three blocks from Portobello Road. It also boasts the worlds first grass-free lawn.

At 4.30 we headed off via tube to Sloane Square station and thence to the 50th Chelsea Flower Show, and spent a happy 2 hours wandering past some stunning massed flower displays and very many underwhelming wildflower-themed display gardens.

Exhausted, we decided to wait for the 352 bus and let it carry us all the way to Ladbroke Grove, 2 blocks from home. 20 minute wait, while seven 352 buses went past on the other side of the road. Then 40 happy minutes on the top deck of the big red bus; a low-energy finish to our London explorations.

Another week in London

Monday
Rainy and grey early, but rapidly improving to 16 and blue.

Finally getting rid of the damned car.  It ran well but was a responsibility we didn't want when we weren't travelling. So off to Kensington Olympia Europcar at 9.15  and by now we have enough of a handle on the GPS and the local streets not to have any issues. Then the tube quickly to South Kensington, and along the tunnel to the Natural History Museum.

Fantastic informative fun in a great environment.

Joseph Banks' herbarium specimen page for Tristania suavolens, collected in Endeavour Bay in 1770

 The current exhibition was Britain: One Million Years of Human History. Excellent info and presentation, but these archeologists keep putting more and more detail into the gaps in what I think I know! It's hard to keep up.

Once again we were about the first in the door, and could take our time without moving obstructions to diminish our enjoyment. 

Bone needles. Can't recall the date of these, but we've been making them for 60,000 years

Bev considers Neanderthal man, compared to the current crop

After lunch, dinosaurs et al. The Attenborough TV show NHM Alive was fresh in our minds and we could animate the fossils from memory. Great stuff.

Bev reading about another great woman

Bev found some jewellery she liked in the shop, and bought an amethyst necklace for Liz.

Worn out by 3.30, so surrendered and took a quick tube home.

Tuesday
Rainy to start

A morning off, washing and grocery shopping. Then back to the NHM for sabre-tooth, mammals display etc, including gigantic blue whale, and more jewellery.

Mammoth at front left, blue whale behind. That's a big one!

Wednesday
Brilliant blue day.
Today, at Liz's suggestion, we start with Sir John Soane's house/museum, a 3D maze filled with ancient relics. (No photography allowed)

Soane was an early 19th C architecture professor and antiquarian who collected Greek, Roman and Egyptian relics for use in his teaching. He purchased three adjacent 3-storey houses and lived there while gutting and rebuilding them, filling them with his collections. Unfortunately, his two sons hated him, so he gave it all to the state. An unexpected bonbon for us was a display about 3D printing. I found that a beautiful gilded three-legged funeral reliquary I'd admired in a previous room had only just come into existence, based on a detail in a Piranesi etching from the 1820's.

Lunch in Lincolns Inn Field, just opposite, then a wander through the Inns of Court, reliving Sansom's Tudor history stories of the Dissolution era, the 1530's.

Then we sought out the Temple Church (see Da Vinci Code) and happened upon an organ concert. Bach's BWV552 was the feature for me; it ends with three melody lines interweaving; mind-blowing.

The church is well-maintained, financed by the Inns as a result of a 16th C deal - the King gave them all the land between the Church and the river and they took on looking after the church.

Home in time to cook a spag bol to my usual recipe, but dissapointing lack of zing. The olives here are poor, tomato paste hard to find and expensive.

Thursday
Another Brilliant blue day.
London Eye
All you'd expect, but we wish it went on for longer.

River cruise

Walk north along the river bank

past Blackfriars Bridge to Borough Market, nestled adjacent to the Shard and above the new London Bridge Tube Station

Over the river to St Pauls, to collect brochures for May. Bev discovered there was a concert this evening at St Martin in the Fields, so we walked a very long way (St Pauls to Trafalgar Square) to buy tickets. There we discovered that the performance was by a favourite group, the Belmont Ensemble, who I'd heard here twice  before. After all the trudging, we settled in the Crypt Cafe, coffeed, dined, booked tomorrow night as well, and waited for the evening.

Wonderful music. The second movement of their Spring was rapturous.

Friday
Another Brilliant blue day. Took the day off. Bev had a long sleep (controlling a treatening migraine), Russell caught up on the blog. In the evening, back to St Martin's for another great concert. Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Pachelbel. Only low note was a Purcell piece that paled in the company. Group varied from 4 to 8 with the work.

The Pachelbel Canon and Gigue was excellent, so clear with only 4 instruments, and the evening finished with Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Violins in A minor. The principals were recalled three times by the applause. The Festive Orchestra of London. Worth hearing.

As Liz was away staying with friends, we took our time winding up the day. A short stroll up to Piccadilly Circus; memories recalled of the kids' amazement when we walked out of the tube station there in 1998.

Saturday

Sitting in bed with the strains of Pachelbel's Canon wafting in from the street. Magical. But the magic waned over the next three hours as the musician in yellow (below) continued sawing on his fiddle, accompanied by the magic box at his feet, fed by an iPod nano.

Portobello Market is in full swing below Liz's balcony.

More writing filled the day while Bev battled an incipient migraine. Adam and Liz finally spurred us to arrange a dinner meeting, 5.30 at Grangers, with Adam and Meron. Reasonable tucker and great company. We're on a promise from Meron next visit to be taken to an Eritrean restaurant.

Somerset

Friday
Off to visit Polly and Paul Triggol. Hammered along the M4 towards Bristol, then joined the M5 South into Somerset .  At a motorway stop, we found an interesting literary innovation.

 

Lunch was taken at the Quantock pub on the edge of Bridgwater, where a chance conversation with the pub cat introduced us to a couple of locals who are frequent visitors to Oz, checking the growth of their grandchildren in Manly. They urged us to have a walk around Bridgwater, and we found it strange indeed. There are individual ancient and beautiful buildings interspersed between drack. There's a statue of the local hero, Admiral Robert Blake, one of Oliver Cromwell's appointees who made the British Navy a modern fighting force, then had his body booted out of Westminster Abbey by the reinstated monarchy.

The GPS was given the postcode for Wood Farm, and took us straight there, after a 30 minute wait to get through a local roundabout undergoing maintenace. The council sign reassured us that the work would be finished in 6 months.

 Polly and Paul are looking healthy and happy, and the farm is lush and green. 

Paul has changed from dairy to beef cattle, and we were served some great steaks for dinner, about as locally-sourced as you could ever hope for.

Saturday

Another literary pilgrimage took us to the local village of Nether Stowey, where Coleridge brought his family to live in 1797. His wife had the hard time cooking and cleaning in the miserable hovel now known as "Coleridge's Cottage", while Sam enjoyed walks and visiting his friend Tom Poole at the bottom of the garden. In 1798 Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented Alfoxden, three miles away, to be near to Coleridge, and they collaborated on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads. Then the three of them went off to Germany to write, leaving Mrs Coleridge to look after the hearth and home and the kid.  What a marriage!

Dinner at the Lamb Inn at Spaxton Three pork loins and my magnificent Venison and Stilton Pie.

Sunday

Cheese from Cricketers Farm Shop, then back to London

Back to London again

Tuesday
Back down the A5 towards London, stopping at The Bell in Woburn village for some good tucker.

Wednesday
Grey and cold
Off to Westfield; a brain-free day required, some international comparisons to be made and parking all day for 6 pounds. Naturally spent a couple of hundred more, seeing we had the chance, at Ecco. The trip from Notting Hill to Westfield at White City was interesting in the Chinese fashion. Two wrong turns and some wandering - finally surrendered to the guidance of Apple Maps which took us directly to Westfield along a dead-end road ending at the high brick wall of the shopping mall? Good work, Apple. Took us an hour to get there - Liz says she can walk there in 20 minutes.

Thursday
Grey
Back to Westfield, to Debenhams in search of dresses for the end-of-year Easton weddings.

North

Sunday

An extended discussion about Frances options re her bungalow,

followed by a smooth run up to visit Elaine and Martin Jenkins in Clifton Upon Dunsmore, near Rugby.

Caught the train from Rugby to Coventry

to have a wander around Coventry Cathedral and the University of Coventry, where Martin works. Later a great dinner at Turmeric Gold, an Indian restaurant in Spon Street (not Goonish) in a restored medieval shop. Our walk passed a terrific display showing the industries working in Spon Street from the 12th Century to the 19th.

Monday (Bank Holiday for E&M and millions of others)

Ely Cathedral and Etheldreda Food Fair

Coton Manor Garden, only 12 miles from Rugby

South

Thursday
The worry and cost of parking our rented Fiat dominated our day; eventually we found our way to Westfield London, a giant mall where we discovered that parking, while not free, was limited at 6 pounds for however long we wanted to stay. We spent a lot more shopping of course, especially after we found the Ecco shoe store.

In the evening we GPS'd to Heathrow T4 in the rain (only 2 errors) and met Charlotte off her Alitalia plane from Milan Linate. Then a scary (rainy, dark) drive down to Mudeford on the south coast, arriving just before midnight to a table laid with wine-glasses and a pasta-bake in the oven, but Terry the cook had gone to bed.

Friday
Walked down to the shore at Avon beach, then east past dozens of beach-cabins and a beach damaged by storms; most of its sand removed and now being replaced by giant earthmovers.

To Highcliff Castle, with its interesting social history.

Frances arrived in the late afternoon from Canada, having spent two weeks helping her sister Stella recover from a severe asthma attack.

Saturday
Brunch courtesy of Charlotte. Then a tour of inspection at Jenny and Alex's new house; young people have a different view of their living space, but garden ideas are more aligned with ours.

A drive past Corfe Castle to a walk up to Swire Wood overlooking Kimmeridge and the Isle of Wight,

 then a beer at the Scott Arms overlooking Corfe Castle.

In the evening a full family feast at Bellagio in Poole. Adam drove down to meet us, so Frances had her three children with her for the evening.

Back to London

Wednesday

Elaine departs 6.40 for the long car/train trip to Derby. Tyre replaced in Rugby by Kwik Fit, who handled all the paperwork invisibly. Walked to Rugby station with Martin, (10 min train ride to Coventry Uni) then back to pick up the car and on we trundled.

On Martin's advice, we followed the A5 rather than using the M1, and a much more pleasant drive it was too. Lots of countryside following the old Roman Watling Street, and crossing over the Grand Union Canal at Stowe Hill. Having coffee in the garden of the Narrow Boat gastropub, we could see 13 canal boats, including one in a sling being repaired at Rugby Boats, Stowe Hill Wharf.

Then some provision-collection in Dunstable (driving in circles until we resorted to the GPS again) and on to join the M1 near the edge of London. From the end of the M1 to Notting Hill took only 25 mins, despite the crawl through London streets. Then we played tag with the on-street Park-and-Pays near Lizzies (max 4 hours, A$4.50/hour).

Our darling daughter failed to show her face, pulling an overnighter at work as part of a team closing a deal. Her firm provides "sleep-pods" for such occasions.