The Earth Beneath Her Feet

Considering the credit crunch, I thought I'd be able to get cheap tickets back to New Zealand despite booking just after New Year, i.e. less than a month in advance. Wrong, wrong, wrong. According to the very helpful guy at the Flight Centre, people have stopped booking several weekend trips a year to Europe in favour of a single holiday far away. Apparently, they spend just as much or more, but tell themselves they're saving money.

On the upside, the travel agent found me a Virgin/Air NZ deal that would get me back to London by way of five days in Tokyo. Yes! He actually gave me the option of Shanghai or Tokyo, and I decided (in five seconds) that it would be Tokyo. I'm equally ignorant about both cities, but I'm sure either would've been great.


Today at lunchtime, I went shopping. It's becoming more and more of a challenge to find interesting presents to take back home but the museum shops saved me again. Luckily for the intended recipients, I went to the V&A first and then to the nearby Natural History Museum because the temptation to buy everyone presents made of elephant poo would've been too much. The latter shop also had some cute soft toy birds from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, but that temptation I resisted. After the juggling ball "bomb" incident, I don't want to explain to Customs why my luggage is full of birdsong.

Also, I'm sure they meant well, but I feel this is slightly wrong:

This bag doesn't want to go clubbing

In front of Natural History Museum

It was 12°C over the weekend which felt strange. It must've come as a surprise for the skating rink at the Natural History Museum too because the skaters were trailing shallow waves of water as they made their rounds!

The reason we were in South Kensington was that sshi had suggested going to the V&A's Cold War Modern exhibition. The whole thing veered between fun and deeply depressing. The clip from a socialist musical about the joys of a housing development was highly amusing and the space age design of the 60's was just mad.

Afterward, uitlander took us to an Italian family restaurant in the West End, which was great, even though sshi's dinner had more legs than she expected.

Wingnut and me had to duck out early to go to a party with beautiful cats and people, and where Wingnut was called upon to defend the honour of the Albert Heijn chain of supermarkets.

We walked the last stretch home on a positively balmy night. The stars were out for once and so was a fox! It's the third time I've seen one on that street. Wingnut wondered why it is that there are more squirrels and foxes in London than cities in the Netherlands. I don't know if it's a good or a bad sign that they're here, must look it up.


I can't remember what happened yesterday. There were mince pies.

The Science Museum held its first ever late night opening a couple of weeks ago. There was live music, robot races and plenty of opportunity to try out the displays without having to elbow aside small children.

The first thing we visited was an exhibition on the development of technology in post-war Britain. Although the first part seemed to be so much about design that we wished sshi were there. The exhibition really brought home to me how long rationing had gone on for (into the 50's) and how much shortages had influenced design in that period.

Now, I'm not normally given to squee, but...

Goblin Teasmade (1966)

A device that wakes you up in the morning with a cup of tea. Only here. :-D

Wingnut's Three Mills photos

London held Open House last weekend, so Wingnut took me to the House Mill in nearby Bromley-by-Bow. The mill stopped work in 1941 but is one of the biggest tide mills in the world, if not the biggest. It's in the Three Mills area, an idyllic spot surrounded, London-fashion, by blandly ugly modern buildings.

The guide only did a partial tour because of the number of visitors they had to get through, so we'll have to go back sometime because it was very good. He did have time to work up some indignation in the group over the lack of funding to get one of the mill wheels working again. According to him, the mill failed to qualify for providing the Olympics with green power because it's just outside the site boundaries.


For a while now, I've been muttering about this city being a village because of the way people keep turning out to know other people. (This is why I was against moving to London for so long; there are so many Kiwis here that you can trip over your classmates on the street.) Last month's examples were par for the course: volunteering at a charity event and finding that one of my fellow volunteers was a friend's aunt, and a regular DWCon attendee turning out to be the colleague of a non-Discworld friend. And then there was yesterday. Wingnut started to read the mill's visitor book as we were getting our free tickets for the tour. He spotted one visitor, a professional miller, from the Netherlands in April. He also recognised the name of the village and the mill. "Hey, wasn't that your family's windmill?" No, it's not.

It's the other windmill in the village. And yes, I've met this man because he mills at "our" windmill too. Cue the Disney song.

Just when you think you've left London behind, a bit of London turns up unexpectedly. On Tuesday, Wingnut was approached by an old man wanting to know if he was English. It turned out that the old man was from Bethnal Green as well! And had gone to the school down the road from us, where he'd watched German planes fly over from the playground and he'd heard the V2's in Victoria Park and all that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, he also turned out to be "saved" and had a burning desire to tell us about this. We must be wearing stamps on our foreheads because the day before we'd been picked up by a Samoan taxi driver who's sermon of the day was "go forth and multiply." Which he'd done, going by the evidence.

Wingnut has been treated to various Wellington standards, starting with the weather... "So this is why they call it windy Wellington." Ah yes, happy memories of struggling to stay on my feet.

The rain sent us into the national museum, Te Papa. Wingnut really liked the Maori section because he felt it still had a connection to Maori now. The objects were presented in a way that made them part of a living history instead of dead objects in a sterile museum.