when a man is tired of london, he is tired of life. - dr. samuel johnson

Well, I guess someone ought to be ordering me a tombstone then. Of course, I'm not tired of London per se, but I'm tired and I'm in London and I'm pretty ready to leave London and that's pretty close. My plane leaves Heathrow tomorrow at 8 AM, so I've got 12 hours to pack and sleep before I'm out of this country and back in the land of Freedom and Opportunity.

Other than a quick jaunt into the Imperial War Museum on Saturday, to peruse some microfilms (they were useless) and a stroll into the National Archives on Monday to poke through some Colonial Office documents, I've been spending my last few days here...walking. Mostly because I don't have anywhere specifically left to go, so I just get off the Tube at one point, and walk around just looking, I guess trying to get the full London experience one last time. So, here are a ton of pictures of my daily walks!
This is the view from the Waterloo Bridge, looking out at the City.
These are some pictures from the Imperial War Museum when I was there on Saturday (making up for when my camera glitched that one time). Here are some cool planes in the main room.
This is a British sub-launched nuclear missile. The cornerstone of their defense system in the 80s, scarily enough.
This is the tank that General Montgomery ("Monty") rode in during the Desert Campaign in WWII where of course he distinguished himself by defeating Rommel at Alamein.
This is a V2, the foundation of modern rocketry as well as the ICBM and one of the most terrifying weapons used in war. These were pretty much only aimed at civilian targets and the whole point was that you never could tell when they were coming since they moved so fast...
This is a WWI Sopwith Camel, today most well known as the plane Snoopy flies to fight the Red Baron.
And this is a V1, or Flying Bomb, or "doodlebug". The foundation perhaps of today's military drones, its basically a self-guiding bomb.
I didn't grab too many pics this time (didn't want to tempt fate) but of course I had to grab a shot of this: the original "peace in our time" document between Neville Chamberlain and Hitler.
Sunday, I started my day by heading over to the Charles Dickens House over in Bloomsbury.
There wasn't too much to take pictures of, but there was this pretty cool exhibit on "A Tale of Two Cities" that featured this guillotine (model)
...as well as the original Golden Arm, that's apparently mentioned in like Chapter 6 or something. Makes me wonder if somewhere there's a Fitzgerald Museum with that huge eyeglass advertisement from the Great Gatsby.
After that, I popped over to the British Museum (again, since I missed a lot of it before).
A lot of spectacular stuff looted from other countries, as usual.
The Elgin Marbles! You've gotta love centaurs punching people in the head (or at least I do anyway)
Some broken Greek gods. I heard someone nearby complaining loudly, "All the heads are in Greece! You've gotta go to two separate countries just to see the whole statue! How dumb is that?"

I walked down towards Hyde Park, and found this near Speaker's Corner - the Marble Arch, it's called.
Also, weirdly nearby was this statue of a horse's head. No idea what that's all about.

It was also Sunday, which meant that Speaker's Corner was filled with its usual group of crazies. I heard some fun arguments about religion, and some nutter trying to claim that "doing good for people was useless" and "inter-racial breeding was destroying the world". She was in her 60s I'd guess, and sort of cute in an old English marm kind of way, at least until she started yelling.
Walking over to Kensington Gardens, I got a glimpse of Kensington Palace, where many members of the Royal family have lived, including Diana and Charles.
There's a statue of Queen Victoria in front of it, since this is where she was born and lived until she took the throne.
With plenty of time left in my day, I thought I'd head over to the National Army Museum, which was nearby. It was quite interesting - where the IWM focuses on the twentieth-century, this was just about the British Army, but from 1066-1980s. A lot of cool stuff, especially around the Napoleonic era - the Duke of Wellington and all that. They even had the skeleton of Napoleon's horse! I am disappointed that there wasn't more medieval stuff, though...nothing about the Crusades, or knights or any of that.

Today I just went for a major stroll through the heart of London, up and down the Thames. Here's a little map. All told, I walked about 8 miles, which was pretty fun actually.
I started at Hyde Park Corner, where you have this great Wellington Arch celebrating his victory over Napoleon. Very triumphant.
...and of course, a statue of the great man himself. I don't know too much about his role in the Napoleonic Wars, but frankly, I think he might be a little overrated. I mean, he won Waterloo which was the big one, but I don't know that he has that much going for him besides that. Certainly not enough to get your own piece of clothing AND food item...
Still, here's his house - there's a museum in it I wanted to go to, but apparently its closed on Tuesdays. Pity, apparently there's a bunch of stuff he looted from Napoleon as well as treasures leaders from other countries sent him after the war.
I walked down Green Park, and ended up once more at Buckingham Palace, which is really quite cool guys. Royalty gets all the cool stuff.
Walking down by the Thames, I discovered an old Egyptian obelisk some dude stole and brought to London; it was being repaired but I did get a shot of one the cool Sphinxes flanking it. And in the background we have the London Eye and Big Ben, for added London-ness.
This is Southwark Cathedral, seen from across the river. It's pretty cool looking, and I got to see it closer up when I crossed later.
This is London Bridge, which is horribly boring and ugly, but pretty classic in terms of what bridge it is and the fact that there are all those cool songs about it. Well, just the one. And its more of a nursery rhyme.
Compare that, though, to the awesome might of TOWER BRIDGE
And of course, parked right by Tower Bridge we have the HMS Belfast, which served in WWII and the Korean War. It's front guns can fire over 14 miles - this thing could take out Big Ben from where its sitting in about half a minute.
I ended up at the Tower of London, which is so cool-looking - I regret that I wasn't able to go in, but there was a 45 minute line just to buy tickets which were also really expensive. One day...
More Tower of London. Note the trebuchet in the lower right, although it's missing a counterweight...

Here's the Tower Bridge, rising over the walls of the Tower of London...
And this, of course, is the Traitor's Gate, which is where those who were going to be executed were led into the Tower...
A shot of Tower Bridge from the middle of it.
And there's the Tower of London from across the river. Pretty formidable, I've gotta say.
Here's an interesting statue - it's called The Navigators, and I'm not entirely sure when it was built, but its sort of crazy steampunk-ish and sitting in a pool.
Turning a corner, I came across the Golden Hinde. Seriously. Anyone who knows me well will know that my favorite pirate has always been Francis Drake, and to suddenly run into his ship was a delightful surprise. Let me ask you: in what other city could you suddenly be surprised by A. an Egyptian obelisk and sphinxes and B. a pirate ship? This is why you don't read guidebooks, people!
Right nearby was the original Clink Prison, and I snapped a shot of this rather creepy display at the front of it. I didn't bother to check it out since they were pretty snooty about charging money and I didn't like the tone of their ads.

Made my way back, and now I'm just writing this up while also packing for my long journey home early tomorrow morning. It's been a great time here in London, and I've definitely enjoyed it; hopefully you've enjoyed reading this blog on my London adventures.

Last minute research

We're coming up on the endgame here, folks. I leave for the States Wednesday morning, so I've got all of four days left to still do research. And of course, I've found a bunch of stuff - at three different places. I spent today at King's College London, where they've got a great military history archive - not as good as the Imperial War Museum, but there's a couple of collections of generals' personal letters and such that I'm looking at. I'll be there tomorrow, too (after that they close for a month or so, so I'd better get everything I can tomorrow...)
After that:
Saturday, I'm at the Imperial War Museum, where I've got about 6 documents to look at.
Sunday's my day off.
Monday, if I didn't finish the Imperial War Museum, I'll go there again, or to look at the last few things in the National Archives.
Tuesday, I finish up whatever's left, pack, do any last-minute looking around that I can
Wednesday, I leave.

Pretty hectic - it's no different from my normal schedule (wake up, do research, sit around, go to bed) but it seems crazier because its a bunch of different places, and finally, I'm at the point where if I miss something there's no going back to it. Wish me luck.

busy day, sunday

Yesterday (Sunday) was quite a busy day, busy enough that I didn't bother to find time to blog about it.
I started my day at the Tate Britain, which does a sort of historical overview of British art. It was really cool - they had a great exhibit on "Collections", which was all about artists who arrange things in specific ways and how that changes our perception of them. They also had an awesome exhibit on William Blake, one of my all-time favorite artists, which was based on a show he himself held to exhibit his artwork in 1809 that was an utter failure. They had most of the pieces he showed, with his somewhat eccentric comments next to them.
Here's one of those pieces, taken from the Tate's website: it's Admiral Nelson, as in the Column guy, leading the Leviathan figure from the Bible. Small wonder no one understood him much at the time. (complaint: does the Tate shop sell prints of cool works like this? No. do they sell prints of every single boring Impressionist painter? Yes.)
After that, I went to the Evensong at Westminster Abbey, which, let me tell you, was spectacular. The inside of that building is fantastic; too bad I couldn't take pictures while I was in there. The choir was really nice too and it was really a treat to just sit there and take everything in. Here's a picture of another side of this building. Standing between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster is a great way to get a crick in your neck from craning it around trying to look at it all; it's just a beautiful spot.

I ate lunch in this little park by the Thames; that's of course the Houses of Parliament in the background, and a small monument celebrating Britain's abolition of the slave trade in the foreground. Also back there, maybe only semi-visible in this picture, is a reproduction of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, one of my favorite pieces by another one of my all-time favorite artists. It's pretty cool because the story of the Burghers of Calais is actually about them surrendering themselves and their city over to Edward III, who was King of England.

After all that plus a little wandering around, I decided to have dinner at another great Sherlock Holmes related place: the Sherlock Holmes Pub over near Trafalgar Square.

Right in the restaurant portion of the pub they had this reproduction of 221B Baker Street, complete with a rather creepy-looking model of Sherlock. It wasn't easy to get a picture of, because its behind glass and the lighting was pretty bad, but if you look closely there's all these really cool little details from all the stories littered around; for instance, the note reading "Red-Headed League Disbanded" on the mantle.

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted for dinner, but after I had eliminated the impossible, what was left had to be what I ordered. I decided on the "Hounds of the Baskerville" (it was either that or the Copper Beeches), which is actually toad-in-the-hole, a dish I've wanted to try since I first read about it in Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World. It's sausages and Yorkshire pudding, with vegetables and potatoes, so its simple and really quite delicious.

Guys London is really really cool.

and in the middle of investigation

Warning: this blog post contains nothing but references to popular culture

As everyone may or may not know, today was the 40th anniversary of the photograph taken for the cover of The Beatles album Abbey Road. Why do I know this? I saw it somewhere online. Yay Internet!
So of course, I made my way down to that famous crossing to see what there was to be seen. Let me note one thing: London on the weekends is pretty terrible. Two of the main Underground lines were closed for maintenance, there were about a million tourists everywhere, it was really hot and I had to walk about 15 minutes from the closest Tube station still operating. Still, I made it there all right.
This is the studio itself. It's pretty boringly nondescript in every way. People have livened it up a tad by adding graffiti all over the gates, mostly their names but occasionally references to songs or bands or drawings of cartoon characters.
This is the famous crosswalk itself. You can see the crowd gathered - it got pretty packed very quickly. Also note the large amounts of TV cameras. I'm pretty sure I'm on some sort of TV station today, but I don't really have the patience to figure out which one.
At one point, a group of Beatles impersonators showed up dressed like the album cover, and it became a sort of mob scene, which was weird but entertaining. I like this picture because it sort of looks like it could have been taken in the 60s (well, except for the modern cameras but you get what I mean)
Again, people totally packing in here. I'm not including myself because I am stuck in this crowd on accident and I'm just taking pictures because hey, why not.
People waving peace signs and the album itself.
Here's the Paul impersonator standing in front of the studio. He really looks very little like Paul, which makes the huge mob crowding to take pictures even funnier.
Traffic got completely backed up, since they didn't think to reroute it, and this bus stopped dead and everyone got off for about half an hour.
This was cute - a bunch of people brought guitars and played songs and everyone sang along. It was a really adorable moment, because it was a few hundred people all just singing together - very nice. Also, no one knows the words to many popular songs, no one can sing the harmony parts, and everyone always wants to skip ahead so there was a lot of musical confusion.
A semi-inflatable version of what I think is supposed to Paul McCartney? with a live person inside moving it showed up as well.
But in the end, I got what I came for: my very own Abbey Road crossing picture. Note: this picture was actually taken much earlier, before the huge mobs, but it was still pretty crowded and there was a lot of trouble with cars wanting to come through. (note: this is the first picture I have of this trip that I'm actually in.)
After that whole mess, I wandered over to nearby Baker Street, to visit another famous address: 221B Baker Street, home of the World's Greatest Detective and the World's Greatest Mouse Detective.
A nice little sign there. There's a museum, but I didn't go mostly because I didn't have any cash on me and my card was acting up (long story). Still, pretty cute. I might go back if I have time.
Right outside of the Baker Street station, there's this great statue of the man himself. I really approve of all this literary reference stuff in cities, we definitely need some more of it.

And, on the advice of a certain someone putting together a literary calendar, I even managed to snap a shot of the famous Criterion Grill restaurant, which as you recall, is where Watson was dining when he first heard of Sherlock Holmes. It's still around and is quite expensive, so I did not manage to dine there.

Exciting times! Expect more to come; I've got big plans for tomorrow.