Donna and her dad had left for Barcelona on Saturday and Donna was already soaking up the sun with her sister on some Barcelona beach. We have figured out how to use an application called Viber to make long distance phone calls cheaply. I have been on the phone with her Dad, but so far I have only successfully texted Donna.
Checking in caught my attention, because an offer for $400 came on the screen, if I would postpone my flight to another time or another day. It was tempting, but I am not that hard up for the cash. It was a sign that the flight was full and eight seats beyond capacity. All 400 sat squeeze nine across, and fortunately at least I had an aisle seat, with a cute old Indian woman in her sari next to me. All would have been well, but she liked the air-conditioning blowing on her head, and I got the residual cold, shivering all the way to London.
The flight was significant for one thing (besides taking me to London). I watched Penn and Teller's film Tim's Vermeer. I had read David Hockney's book on the Camera Obscura, gotten a camera lucida as a gift from my son and was very interested in the use of mechanical objects to enhance painting realism. Tim had figured out a brilliant way to reproduce tone exactly by way of mirrors. He also took more than two years to rebuild Vermeer Room, which I thought a little eccentric. Nevertheless the patience that he took for more than 280 days to reproduce that painting was admirable. It also gave me a real appreciation of what Vermeer did as an artist. I know that he struggled financially, and only produced a small number of brilliant piece during his life. This film really really shows how only long and tedious work, as well as a certain technical brilliance, can produce a painting of that quality. I can now see how just one painting by Vermeer could take him more than a year to finish.
Oh London...
Despite an hour flight delay we arrived pretty close to on time about 7:10 A.M. I borded the rush hour tube and headed for my flat near the Tower of London. An hour later I squeezed out of sardine-like
transit vehicle at about 9:30 A.M. I went into a nearby bakery to ask directions. It took the cashier about 20 minutes to find the address- about 2 miles walking. He was nice enough even to print it for me.
Queen Elizabeth Street was a stone's throw from the Tower Bridge. I took a shower, got organized, grabbed my camera and started walking. I logged about 15, 417 steps today. I walked north through the small city of London past the London wall and Finsberry Circus, left on Old Street , Islington, to Charring Cross, then Leicester Square. One of the more interesting sites- for me anyway- was a place that used to be called the "bone hill". That morphed into, Bunhill, a grave site for over 1000 years with more than 30, 000 bodies buried until they stopped in 1850. I believe that John Dunne is buried there, as well as the founder of the Methodist church, the author of Pilgrim's Progress and many other prominent people. The one noticible thing was that almost every grave was seriously eroded and one could not even read a full inscription from one.
I grabbed a nice bite to eat in Soho and proceeded back to the flat with a meandering group of tube rides.
I came back to the flat and proceeded to fall asleep on the couch at about 6 P.M. Boy, is my schedule out of whack! Brice woke me at about 10 P.M. when he came in.
The photos below are quite large, so you can zoom in on them for more detail. This is about 10 of about 100 that I took.
No comments:
Post a Comment