Today we visited the former home of the historian Thomas Carlyle, and his wife Jane, a modest Victorian house in a Chelsea terrace near the river. The furniture is mostly the Carlyle’s, including the sofa, on which may have rested such illustrious bums as those of Dickens, Tennyson, and Darwin. Jane Carlyle felt the need to justify such an extravagant purchase to her husband. I came, saw and bought – a sofa! – It is my own purchase, but you…
Sometime a great tree can grow from a tiny seed, and sometimes a bloody great weed. The Chelsea Physic Garden has been collecting and cultivating medicinal and useful plants since 1673, and has been responsible for some of each. The garden occupies almost four acres of some of the most desirable real estate in London, just across the road from the River Thames. They pay a rent of five pounds a year for this, a figure that was set in…
This is the actress and poet Mrs Mary Robinson, aka Perdita, and boy is she pissed. I think this painting was by way of being a threat. She had had an affair with the Prince of Wales, the man soon to be ruler of a powerful country. The affair had not lasted, but she had the evidence, and now she wanted money in exchange for his texts letters. She commissioned a portrait from Gainsborough, one of the great painters of…
There has been a botanic garden at Kew since some time in the 1600s with the current collection being started in 1759. That means it’s older than America. There’s 300 acres of outdoor plantings and greenhouses with plants from every continent and climate zone. We visited at peak rhododendron season. The rest is pictures.
It’s clear that the inhabitants of Camden Town eke out a precarious existence giving one another tattoos. Every other shop on the main street seems to be a tattoo parlor. Now, I know what you are thinking. Andrew, you’re thinking, that’s an economic impossibility. Eventually every inch of skin in Camden town will be covered in tattoos, and the whole economy will grind to a halt. But you’re wrong. Some of the tattoo joints also offer laser tattoo removal, thus…
We were off to the Kensington Science Museum this morning, and the then walked home through Hyde Park. The Science Museum’s best exhibits are the steam engines, airplanes, and timepieces. They have James Watt’s workshop, reconstructed exactly as he left it when he died. OK, maybe not exactly as he left it, the video projected on the wall is new. Wen he died, Watt was working on machines to copy sculpture, or as we would call them, 3D printers. Modern…
We’re back in the UK, in London for a couple of weeks, and then on the canals and rivers for more adventues on Wharram Percy. The pub was long a mainstay of British life, being at once bar, social center, entertainment venue, gambling den, and in some cases even a place to eat. Times change, though. Pub food has got better, but far fewer people drink and drive, and many immigrants to the UK have no tradition of social drinking….
We’re back in San Francisco, and it’s Easter, which means it’s time for the annual Hunky Jesus competition put on by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. For those of you who don’t live in the Bay Area, the sisters are a sex-positive non-denominational order of cross dressing nuns. They create or help run a number of progressive and transgressive events, and are something of a local institution. If you see the sisters are involved in a event, that means it…
Yesterday we visited a National Forest site, the V-V (pronounced Vee Bar Vee) ranch, for an archeology fair. We missed the Hopi dancers because of time zone differences. Arizona as a whole does not observe daylight savings, but the Native American reservations do. We turned up in time for the dancers Arizona time, and they had performed at reservation time, so we were an hour late. Even so we had a great time. There were a number of exhibits by…
First cow of the day yesterday at 12:23pm when we were over the border into Arizona. We arrived mid afternoon at the home of Paula’s sister Andrea and her husband Rennie. Here are some flowers from Andrea’s garden.