Lots of catch-up

If I've been quiet and largely incommudicado recently, it's because I've been quite busy. Hopefully, I'll have time to flesh this out later, but for now,

Wednesday: Had lunch with David and got really excited about various obscure things. Later, I met a book historian who lives in this building! Then I scared her away with my enthusiasm for this fact.

Thursday: Rocked the mean streets of Madia Vale and ate a home cooked meal (!). Missed having a kitchen.

Friday: Ate Indian food, browsed secondhand bookshops in Bloomsbury and observed that it is, indeed, a neighborhood well-suited to people who spend a lot of time in their head. In the evening, I took a quick trip to the British Museum and saw the solid gold statue of Kate Moss that they've recently unveiled there. It is unmitigatedly awful, but the Rosetta stone is nearby and that cleanses the palette, and the Damien Hirst piece, rows of life-size plastic skulls painted with psychadelic swirls and installed in a cabinent in the Enlightenment Gallery (which I <3, btw), is much better. In the Assyrian galleries, I stood in front of the giant doors from Nimrod's palace to show scale while a Korean tourist took a picture.

Saturday: Went to Cambridge with the Penn-in-London contingent. An extraordinarily perfect fall day, clear skies, highs around 70. We took the train from Kings Cross, then a cab to Bridge Street, where we hired a punt to take us up and down the Cam. After lunch, we toured a handful of the college grounds, and I fantasized about walking across the perfectly green, level lawns. There is something about monumental architecture that I find deeply calming, and Cambridge has an awful lot of it. It may be the perfect place, as far as I am concerned. We went to King's College Chapel for evensong and an organ concert, then had dinner at the pub where Crick and Watson supposedly hashed out the specifics of their DNA discoveries. I saw the chronophage.

Sunday: Took a long walk in the City on my own, then over to the South Bank and the Tate Modern, where we saw the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern. Then the London Eye (splendid, and yet overrated), and a dinner

I took a lot of pictures, not just in Cambridge, and am working on sorting them and uploading the most interesting to flickr. In the meantime, perhaps the most dorky photo ever, so dorky that I am not even going to explain it: