tooth soup

photo credit: i:tzharr

In the days between Christmas and New Year we didn’t do a huge amount of sight-seeing, mainly wandering around all the famous monuments and getting a feel for the city. We did go up to Grenwich though, to touch the sacred time line and be incredibly underwhelmed. There could at least be some kind of LASER show or perhaps even a clown, just something. But nope, it’s a silver line in front of which a whole bunch of people line up (and I gotta take a moment out here to thank whoever invented british civility, because lining up in every other country than England was an occasion for bared teeth and snarls to prevent arrogant prick arseholes from just up and putting themselves in front of you. England you felt like you could actually talk to whoever was with you without needing to backhand some bastard sneaking up from the right. Hell you could probably make some tea.) and take photos of themselves. On the line.

Anyway since there’s really very little else to do in Grenwich we went down to grab a Sunday Roast (capitals apparently required if the amount that Cian and co. bigged it up is anything to go by) at one of the local pubs. And at this point I’d like to reach back and retrieve the capital ess and arr just above this sentence because the meal we had was the most uncapitalisationable meal I’d ever had. But hey, the atmosphere was good, it was in from the cold, and we got to graffiti the menues with pen to warn off further customers. Oh, and abuse the waiting staff. So on the whole it was a pretty good experience! On the way out from Grenwich we stopped at a bookshop to prevent ourselves from freezing out on the docks (actually we froze a little in a windshield box then stated a very emphatic ‘fuck this’ and ran back to bookshop and Costa coffee) and bought a couple of books for extra reading. The guy who did the ferry tour guide was pretty great too, had a dry sense of humour (dry as in he’d probably been peddling the same jokes for several years now) which fit in with the events and landmarks he was describing.

The next couple of days have vanished somewhat in my memory, I’m pretty sure that Cian went back to work and so Louise and I used that time to go see some stuff that Cian had already seen, namely the National History Museum and the Science Museum. The National History Museum was both fascinating and utterly packed, it being the school holidays and all. We wadnered around inside there for a bit, checked out all the awesome exhibits, said a screw you to creationist theory and continued the theme at the Science Museum to escape the crowds. Now I’m relatively sure that Louise didn’t quite enjoy the Science Museum as much as I did, since I’m a scientist and these are my people. But the computation and mathematics exhibits were really cool and did alright at explaining some seriously hard concepts, like Klein bottles and some tricky geometries. Although it didn’t do a lot to make them seem special, it was more like a walk-through tutorial rather than anything inspiring. But ah well, it was pretty great to see people interacting with science and having fun. Us scientists don’t often have the opportunity to show people how awesome what we do is to us but it seemed like the message was getting through okay there. Plus they had a seriously great gift shop!

Before New Year’s I also met up with some of my friends from deviantART that lived in the area. Martin, William, Jobie, and Jobie’s friend Nicki all came along to what was initially going to be heckling the poets at a poetry reading place (or at least I was planning to do that, being a short story proponent), but it turned out to be closed so we escaped to a not-so-bad pub up the road and sunk a few quiet ones while marvelling at each other’s realness. I enjoyed the experience, which makes it something like the sixth in a row of meeting people ‘IRL’ that I’ve talked to online beforehand that has been pleasant. Unfortunately I underestimated my bladder extension on the way home and had to make a stopover in a private garden in Earl’s Court which resulted in a bruise the size of a small watermelon on my thigh (which, I should add, didn’t fade until a week after we landed back in Perth–3 weeks later). I’m not going to say how I did it, suffice to explain that Oak trees are great for getting over fences, while my eyesight is not so good for judging distances.

I’ll have to continue this tomorrow morning, since my eyelids are slowly dropping off, but next episode will include NYE shenanigans, plus Avenue-Q, and more! Woohoo!

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