We took the train to Oxford to have tea with our old friends David and Carole. This is what a proper English tea looks like.

Sandwiches (smoked salmon, egg salad, crab, and chicken), cakes, and scones with clotted cream. Oh, and somewhere there may be a cup of tea in there as well.

Carole is now the master of one of the colleges, so even on a public holiday she had a working lunch, but David met us at the station, and after lunch and we wandered around town and into the Pitt-Rivers Museum. In another museum a collection of netsuke would have a room of its own, with a description of each piece, all carefully lit. In the Pitt-Rivers they are jammed in cases which are on top of other cases, and unevenly lit. Here are some of the better lit ones. Click on the pictures to see the full size versions.

The Pitt-Rivers also has a box of zombie curators whose eyes glow and bodies twitch when you put a coin in the donation slot.

Now a rant about train service.

I bought advanced tickets for the train on the web, and was amused that the website gave us a choice of seats facing the engine or away, table or no table, etc. We were duly assigned to seats 18 and 19 in coach D. When we got on the train, neither the coaches or the seats were labeled, and we only got seats because we were early. There were lots of standing passengers all the way to Oxford. The railways were all run by the government when I was a kid, and were privatized by the Thatcher government. We have gone from the crappy service of a government monopoly to the crappy service of a series of regional monopolies, but with the websites that give the appearance that things have improved.