Oof. Sunday was a funny sort of day. By now, London had sweltered through a full week of over 30C temperatures and everyone was over it.
Corinna, her flat ate Michelle and I listlessly dragged ourselves around the apartment, before finally deciding that Corinna and I would go to
Wait rose, the supermarket around the corner, and buy some readymade meals for lunch and dinner.
On our return, we ate and then decided we’d go to the Natural History Museum.
This was a mistake.
If you have children, then this would probably be a great place to entertain them for a while. There was certainly enough of them around the place.
We had two things we wanted to see. Corinna was keen to see a collection of photos that the photographer had taken of places in the arctic circle that had links to oil / petrol / other evil stuff.
She enjoyed it. Me? Not so much. I got bored with looking at buildings surrounded by snow. I’m the silly sort of person who wants to see real dinosaur bones in a natural history museum.
There was a dodo!
And another one!
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This is the famous Blue Whale skeleton, suspended high above us all in the central hall.
Corinna and some giraffes. See how droopy she looks? The cool change hadn’t arrived then.
This was the only interesting thing in the dinosaur exhibit. This little dinosaur had eaten a crocodile and then was frozen in time.
The bones of the crocodile can still be seen in its stomach.
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Zero in on the pterodactyl above the window.
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Oof. Sunday was a funny sort of day. By now, London had sweltered through a full week of over 30C temperatures and everyone was over it.
Corinna, her flat ate Michelle and I listlessly dragged ourselves around the apartment, before finally deciding that Corinna and I would go to
Wait rose, the supermarket around the corner, and buy some readymade meals for lunch and dinner.
On our return, we ate and then decided we’d go to the Natural History Museum.
This was a mistake.
If you have children, then this would probably be a great place to entertain them for a while. There was certainly enough of them around the place.
We had two things we wanted to see. Corinna was keen to see a collection of photos that the photographer had taken of places in the arctic circle that had links to oil / petrol / other evil stuff.
She enjoyed it. Me? Not so much. I got bored with looking at buildings surrounded by snow. I’m the silly sort of person who wants to see real dinosaur bones in a natural history museum.
There was a dodo!
And another one! This one looks very unimpressed at being extinct.
I noticed a lot of fossils had this woman’s name attached to them. It’s worth reading the information tag about her, especially the third paragraph. Like, really???
Here’s one of the fossils she discovered. There was heaps of them.
This is the famous Blue Whale skeleton, suspended high above us all in the central hall.
Corinna and some giraffes. See how droopy she looks? The cool change hadn’t arrived then.
This was the only interesting thing in the dinosaur exhibit. This little dinosaur had eaten a crocodile and then was frozen in time.
The bones of the crocodile can still be seen in its stomach.
We went to the dinosaur section. Corinna weighed up the situation much quicker than I did and she was out of there, messaging me that she was going to the cafe to buy some water.
As I emerged from the hellscape that is the dinosaur section, I messaged Corinna. While I’d been knee-deep in screaming kids, she’d been having a lovely time wandering around and looking at the building.
She remembered it from a school trip in childhood and was really pleased to see it again.
Once she started pointing things out to me, I saw it. This building is beautifully designed.
The brickwork and gargoyles alone are amazing. Such attention to detail!
Suddenly the trip was all worthwhile.
When we emerged, the cool change had finally hit. I didn’t realise quite how much Corinna had been affected by the heat. She revived in front of my eyes!
We looked at a modern art gallery, which neither of us liked, then we grabbed a coffee and sat outside and talked about all sorts of things.
(Zero in on the pterodactyl above the window.)
One of the best things about staying here with Corinna was our conversations. She’s a very deep thinker and our talks ranged all over the place. It was lovely to spend so much time together.
After our coffee it was time to go and see ‘ The Gunpowder Plot’, which coincidentally was situated right next to our tube station of Tower Hill.
This play was an immersive experience. I’d never done one of these before and it was fun. With a mix of live actors, VR helmets and a maze of sets that we were guided around, we became part of the gunpowder plotters.
The part where we were put in a priest hole and they “searched” for us was actually quite good. It gave a slight flavour of what it would have been like to be hiding in one. This will become relevant later on.
Two funny things:
Corinna knew one of the actors. They went to university together.
The character of the priest had my real life name.
We walked back home along the docks, ate our Waitrose dinners, worked out how much I owed Corinna for tickets she’d bought along the way, then I fell into bed. I mean… my couch.
Tomorrow I leave Corinna and Tower Hill and I’ll be travelling to the suburbs to meet my friend Deana.
Onward!
The pictures of the museum (by which, I mean those focusing on the architecture) are beautiful. Did you take those with a phone camera? Or did you bring a “real” camera with you?
I just have my trusty little iPhone6 with me. The newer iPhones far outstrip it for photo and video quality, as I discovered on the Antarctica trip, but it still holds its own very well.