Everyday MRM

Monday morning and I wanted to get a good head start on the day. For the past week, I’ve habitually been out the door around ten am. Today, I was up and moving at a healthy nine thirty. We had another full docket today, and I wanted to hit the ground running. First, Westminster. The church was teeming with students. Tourist students, the worst kind. I’ve been a tourist student many times and there seems to be a behavioral code. First, you must assume zero responsibility for your body and bags, always look up, walk sideways and in groups of five or more, laugh loudly in cavernous marble spaces, give no one the right of way, never have exact change (or any change for that matter), and demand to be in every picture. Westminster, church of ancient rites and modern weddings, gravesite of saints and poets and half a millennium of nobility. St. Paul’s Cathdral. Beautiful and enormous, final home to Lord Nelson and John Donne, Winston Churchill and the Duke of Wellington. Finely constructed wh...

Yesterday was taken up by 10 hours of two sights, and today was ten hours of ten sights. Jor and I got off to a good start at a respectable ten am. We made it into the city and went first towards the Queen’s Mews. We decided to stand in line for our tickets only, and then we took a walk up to Buckingham Palace and towards Wellington’s Arch. The Buckingham tourist crowd was another overwhelming area, and even though there was a big sign posted that there would be no changing of the guard today, people were lined up three deep to take a picture of the bare ground and the palace edifice. Joren lined up with them, more out of a sense of duty than anything – being a good steward of tourism – and took a picture of a bobby in the palace gates. The Queen was not at home, so we couldn’t call on her. We decided a walk up the boulevard was in order, because it was such a perfect blue sky day. Wellington Arch was dead ahead, and it became our first Day Two London Pass stop. Wellington Arch, as y...

I'm taking a break from archiving and joining Joren on some sightseeing and museuming. Kew Gardens had the distinction of inaugurating our London Passes. Jor and I walked down the road a few paces and entered the Royal Botanical Gardens. When you are faced with 533 acres of royally cultivated beauty and only 3 hours of viewing pleasure, where do you go first? Why, the answer is: the King and Queen’s Summer Palace. Kew Palace. Home to King George the Third (erroneously called Mad) and Queen Charlotte and their fourteen children. Home to others as well, but the palace’s décor was restored to George and Charlotte’s era. This was particularly of interest to me, since most of my British research takes place during King George’s reign, in the late eighteenth century. Following Kew Palace, we toured the rock gardens briefly, and then launched into the larger botanical acreage. A flower here, a tree there, two or three hothouses devoted to lilies or tropical flowers or a temperate zone and...

My brother asked me the other day what it was that I did in the archives. He had a vision of gas lights and catacombs and old parchment paper. I gave him the run down and I’ll post it here also because I’ve had the question from others. Dear Brother! I like the catacomb vision although sadly, this isn't totally the case here in modern industrialized Britain. I mostly just go into this big building that sits on a man-made lake (next to the Thames) and then I go upstairs to where some guards in jackets ask to look through my stuff and then I swipe a card that lets me pass. Then I swipe my card again and it tells me my seat assignment and cubby number for the day (usually 27D). Then I go to my cubby and pull out the dusty old whatevers I’m looking at. For instance, today I looked at whole books of correspondence, called CO from the Colonial Office. Apparently, way back in the day (i.e. the eighteenth century, and possibly before and after too), when noble men wrote letters to each oth...

I cannot even begin to describe the Natural History Museum. Here. I will let Wikipedia relate a few of the less interesting details: The museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 70 million items within five main collections: Botany, Entomology, Mineralogy, Palaeontology and Zoology. The museum is a world-renowned centre of research, specialising in taxonomy, identification and conservation. Given the age of the institution, many of the collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as specimens collected by Darwin. The Natural History Museum Library contains extensive books, journals, manuscripts, and artwork collections linked to the work and research of the scientific departments. Access to the library is by appointment only. Here is one of the more interesting details, via wiki: J.E. Gray (Keeper of Zoology 1840-74) complained of the incidence of mental illness amongst staff: George Shaw threatened to put his foot on any shell not in th...

Today dawned bright and beautiful and full of hope. The Archives are closed on Sundays and Mondays, so Jor and I decided to hit up central London and give some of these museums a run for their free entry. First stop was the National Portrait Gallery. We spent some time looking for this on the map in order to distinguish it from the National Gallery – only to find that the two are conjoined. The day was so gorgeous that a nice little walking tour to the Gallery was in order, and so we alighted (yes, this word is used a lot and is now part of my vocabulary. You can make fun later) at Westminster stop and emerged into a spectacular scene: the gold turreted face of Big Ben greeted us at the Tube exit, chiming the quarter hour. I looked up and walked straight into a closed crit race for the Tour of Britain, which was going on all day and which we would continually have to cross. After a brief stop and a chat with some fine English racing fans, Joren and I took a walk over the Westminster Br...

Hello all! here's a quick message to let you know that i'm alright and london is going great. There's a lot to catch up on with past entries, but I'll save those retrospectives for another time. After the two flights on thursday, we landed in heathrow at 6:52am london time, which was somewhere around 2am nashville. But then there was a 2 hour immigration line. It was awful. i was so tired and everyone just shuffled forward about four feet every few minutes. If it's like this all the time, I'll be glad when they finally institute some sort of behavioural terrorist identification scheme. [edit: I will not be glad when they institute a behavioural terrorist identification scheme. That was the jet lag talking.] So, we finally made it through the passport line and then we had to get on the tube and make it out the Kew. The tube itself was easy, but getting the ticket was a small difficulty, as neither my nor Joren's credit card worked in the machine. After 24 hou...