The Wandering Osteologist: From Chaucer to Darwin: cathedrals, castles, and really big rocks.

The last couple of weeks have been action-packed in terms of both data collection and touristy excursions, so I've got a lot of ground to cover in the blog today! Well, okay, "action-packed" might be a strong term for my particular variety of data collection (but the MINUTE the skeletons come to life all Brendan Fraser Mummy-style and I have to break a display case to pull out a 12th century broadsword to defend myself, I'm totally going to describe it as action-packed. If I survive the skeletal rampage. I have doubts about my ability to wield that broadsword - it's been a while since LG and I took that weight training class...).

Henyways!

The big news is that my parents and sister came to visit me a couple of weeks ago, and we took a couple of great day trips out of London: one to Canterbury, to see the cathedral of Chaucerian fame, and another that took us to Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Bath. The fam did plenty of tourism on their own as well, as I still had a few days of work to finish up at the British Museum. They came to visit me for lunch one day and were impressed as I pointed out a few of the quirky things in the collections I had learned from the curators (see pic below). Okay, fuzzy jackal slippers aside, I think they were most impressed by my 30% discount in the museum gift shop.

Close up showing the gods wearing jackal-headed slippers.

Granite shrine of Egyptian deities. You can find this slab hidden in the corner behind the Rosetta Stone.

Impossible to get a good pic. I walked by the Rosetta Stone every day on my way to lunch while working at the British Museum. How awesome is that? (Pretty awesome, that's how much!)

British Museum, entryway

Our first day trip was an excursion to the town of Canterbury to see the great cathedral there. A church of some sort has stood on the spot for over a thousand years, with most of the current cathedral rebuilt in the 15th century. After the murder of Thomas Becket, the cathedral became an important pilgrimage site, hence its immortalization in the canon of English literature with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And given the number of English degrees in my family, Canterbury was a natural destination choice for us!

Canterbury Cathedral, interior


Altar, Canterbury Cathedral

Memorial for Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, murdered on this spot in the cathedral on the orders of Henry II. I was mildly disappointed that the paintings of Becket strewn about the place look absolutely nothing like Richard Burton. (Great movie - go watch it.)

Mural, Canterbury Cathedral

I don't know why, this statue just really tickled my fancy. The place is full of marble effigies of people lying on their backs in peaceful repose with hands clasped in prayer, and then there's this dude, rocking out the totes casual pose for eternity.

With Dad, Canterbury Cathedral

After our tour of the cathedral, we split up - mum did some shopping in the center of town, Jen went to the Roman museum, and Dad and I went to Greyfriar's Chapel and gardens, the first Franciscan monastery in England. Dad and I also wandered into Eastbridge Hospital, where leprosy-free pilgrims were able to bed down for the night, and the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, which had several random displays, including a Victorian curiosity cabinet as well as objects brought back from early explorers to distant lands.

Western gate - entrance to the city used by pilgrims to the cathedral during medieval times

On the walk to Greyfriar's

Dad @ Greyfriar's

Greyfriar's Chapel and gardens (looking rather autumnal)

Dad made me wear the pith helmet in the explorers room @ Beaney's. He kept threatening to buy me one when I first told him I was going to Africa, so finding this one was like a dream come true, apparently.

Tiny Tim's Tearoom! I read about this place in one of the guides and the alliteration just made my day. I * may* have repeated the name numerous times during the trip... and then bought a lovely cheese scone when we found the place.

The next big family excursion was a proper guided day trip that started out with the Salisbury Cathedral and Magna Carta, then on to Stonehenge, and finally on to Bath. You used to be able to walk in and around the stones at Stonehenge, but too many years of idiotic tourists chipping off bits of the stones means that now everyone has to keep a wide berth and walk a circuit around the stones on a pathway. There were extremely heavy dark clouds until literally the last part of my rotation around the circle, so I quickly snapped a sequence of pics before the sun was lost again.

This little plaque is on one of the streets near Salisbury Cathedral, denoting a place where William Golding once taught. I took this picture for Priya: "sucks to your ass-mar." (What? It's a literary quote.)

Salisbury Cathedral. Almost every big church I've seen in England has scaffolding around it, with restoration or conservation efforts ongoing. Really puts on damper on the sweeping exterior shots.

Salisbury Cathedral, courtyard

Salisbury Cathedral, interior

So this was going on next to the display of one of the surviving copies of the Magna Carta

Stonehenge! Already ancient when the Romans found it.

Twas a little windy on Salisbury Plain. I call it 'Henge Hair.

I have about 50 bajillion photos of these rocks. You're lucky you're only getting three.

On to Bath!

The only photo of all four of us from the entire week! In front of Bath Cathedral.

Roman baths, with the cathedral in the background.

Skeleton of a Roman soldier. Multiple bones are oriented incorrectly, although you can only see one in this photo...

Underground tunnel for the hot water in the baths.


Roman baths, ground level.

Town of Bath.

Jen finds the street that leads up to the Bath university campus where she spent a summer abroad back in college.

After forlornly waving the fam off to the airport, I moved to my new lodgings in Chiswick. It's a lovely area, and definitely seems to be where all of the young Londonites with kids live. To whit, on the main drag there is both a Baby Gap and a Gap Kids, but not an adult Gap. Also, places like "Jo Jo Maman Bebe" and more cafes than you can shake a stick at.

View of the Thames in Chiswick, my new nabe

St Nicholas Chiswick church

Sunday I took advantage of some absolutely gorgeous weather (which turned out to be probably the last nice, warm day we're going to see) and went to Kew Gardens. Kew is an enormous park with several galleries and exhibits strewn throughout. My favorite was the Marianne North gallery - she was a 19th century painter, botanist, and world traveler who trekked all over the globe to paint flowers, plants, and landscapes. It sounds like she had a pretty remarkable life, especially considering the time period. She was a contemporary of Darwin's, and at his suggestion went to Australia to paint the flora there. She designed and arranged the gallery at Kew herself, and it's a visually stunning space - wall to wall rows of closely packed paintings.

Pumpkin pyramid display because it's autumn!

Museum No. 1, Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens Temperate House, viewed from the treetop walkway

Kew Gardens path

Kew Gardens treetop walkway

Kew Gardens Palm House

Monday I started work at the Natural History Museum with the Poundbury collection. The bones are in typical archaeological state, which is not great, and I'm back to playing the rib game. (The rib game is not nearly as fun as it sounds - it consists of digging around in all of the bags of fragments for pieces of ribs and then trying to refit the various fragments, hoping I have enough to reform the complete rib. Like trying to do a puzzle with maybe 60% of the pieces. It's most often a game of diminishing returns.) I work in a chilly basement lab all by myself all day long, which is quite a change from the last few months where I've either shared my workspace with other people or they wandered in and out throughout the day. Doesn't bother me though - I just put in my headphones, crank up my tunes, and get down to work!

Friday I played hooky because I had a groundling ticket to see Macbeth in the Globe. Groundlings stand in the center of the theater for the entire performance, which sounds a little crazy, but it's great because the actors are often down in the pit with you, or you can lean on the stage. The standing room part of the theater is also open-air, so I invested in a spiffy poncho as it was raining and no brollies are allowed. The rain ponchos all have Shakespearean quotes on them. Mine said "Let the sky rain potatoes / Let it thunder to the tune of Green Sleeves!" (The Merry Wives of Windsor). Getting there fairly early, I managed to secure a spot where I could lean against the wall to the seated section and was mostly out of the rain. The performance was just awesome - the actor playing Macbeth was great, and Pippin from the LOTR movies was Banquo! And, for any Coupling fans out there, it took me forever to place the actress playing Lady Macbeth - she played the female version of Jeff in the dream sequence in the very last episode!

Rocking out my rain poncho as a groundling for Macbeth!

Rainy stage in Shakespeare's Globe.

Shakespeare can still pack a full house, even on a rainy day!

Before going to the Globe I visited St Brides Crypt museum in the morning, which was interesting but not nearly as cool as the name implies. The best thing there was a display of an iron coffin, used for a very brief span of time in the early 1800s (because of the expense!) to deter all the grave robbing body snatchers, or "resurrection men" as they were known, from stealing bodies to sell to surgeons for anatomical dissections.

St Bride's Crypt museum, iron coffins: "safety for the dead"

Saturday I finally made it to Westminster Abbey and listened to the dulcet tones of Jeremy Irons as he narrated the audio guide. For some reason I had always pictured in my head an actual graveyard where all the famous people are buried, not actually inside the church itself. I have no idea why, but there it is. Turns out it's like, oh, Poet's Corner is literally a corner in the church. I must say, this was one place where I actually listened to all of the extras on the audio guide about the history and music of the place (and not just because of Jeremy Irons). It was just all very interesting. I ended up buying one of the Christmas cds of the Westminster Choir, with a mellifluous range from medieval to Victorian tracks.

Westminster Abbey

Medieval mural, Westminster

Westminster Abbey

Private gardens, Westminster

After touring the Abbey, I wended my way all the way up to UCL (not quite an hour's walk) to go to the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of Egyptology. Both were small, but had some interesting bits to them.

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL

Egyptian beaded net dress @ Petrie Museum

Sometimes it's tricky to know what in the world things are supposed to be... "Hm, maybe these are hands." "I dunno. They kind of look like bunches of vegetables." "Okay, we'll just put both on the card." Petrie Museum of Egyptology.

Sunday my friend Jason rented a car (a tiny bright yellow Peugeot. ha!) and we headed out of the city to visit Down House, the home of Charles Darwin. I must say I completely nerded out while there - it was extremely surreal to stand in the room and look at the chair where Darwin sat while writing the Origin (and so many other things!). Jason and I agreed the house displays were very well set up, providing both a good introduction to Darwin and his life and research while also providing interesting tidbits of info that we didn't know. (There was another great audio guide here, this time narrated by David Attenborough.) It was another rainy day, but we nonetheless decided to walk Darwin's Sandwalk path around the grounds that he walked three times a day, every day. Looking at all of his notebooks and writings and habits, it is easy to see that Darwin was first and foremost a very meticulous, methodical man. In addition to being absolutely brilliant, of course. All in all, it was a great pilgrimage to the home of one of my scientific heroes.

Down House, home of Charles Darwin

Greenhouse @ Down

Jason with the man himself

Surreptitious picture of a little lizard guy in one of the displays.

Darwin's Sandwalk. He walked this path three times a day, every day! I was going to look contemplative, but it was too rainy for introspection. Unfortunately, I was struck only by raindrops and not by any great insights. Ah well. Still lovely!

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES WAS WRITTEN IN THIS VERY CHAIR IN THIS VERY ROOM!!! AHHHHH. (I'm still kinda nerding out about it.)

After having a Sunday roast in one of the taverns in Downe village, some of the locals told us about the church where Darwin's wife and two of their children are buried, so before leaving we went over to have a look around. Next we headed out to nearby Hever Castle, childhood home of Anne Boleyn, which was later bought and restored by the Astors in the late 19th century. The grounds are absolutely gorgeous, and the castle had some great displays about Henry VIII and his (six) wives.

Hever Castle, childhood home of Anne Boleyn

Hever Castle, with its "formidable moat, full of fearsome koi" (direct quote, Jason Hodgson). This has led to somewhat of an argument, as I deemed it "tiny and knee-deep at best."