Last weekend, Kate, Glenn, and I went to London. Glenn was giving a talk at LSE on Monday, so we decided to go a couple of days early and make a little vacation of it. And I was very excited to see my friends Julie and Murray, who live in London and whom we first met 30 years ago at Churchill College.
Julie teaches and does research at Imperial College in, . . . well, I'm not quite sure what area. Her Ph.D. from Cambridge is in Chemical Engineering, and she has papers with titles like "Novel Application of Computer Vision to Determine Bubble Size Distributions in Beer." Pretty cool. (She seems to have a number of beer-related publications. To my recollection, though, she was far from the top beer aficionado at Churchill.) Murray also did a Ph.D. at Cambridge, starting his career in research and moving later to become managing director of a firm which handles the growing and transportation of fruits and vegetables worldwide. They are both kind and generous and funny and smart, and we enjoyed our weekend with them tremendously. We were not expecting to see much of their three daughters---now grown and out of the house---but were pleasantly surprised. Their youngest, Frankie, came along with us for much of Saturday. She is studying history at University College London. And their middle, Josie, who is finishing up her medical degree, joined us for dinner on Saturday. They were absolutely charming and delightful hosts as well. (Their eldest, Emily, recently married, does not live in London, so we missed her.)
The main activity on Saturday was visiting the Churchill War Rooms. These were underground utility rooms near Parliament re-purposed as a bunker for Churchill and his advisers from which to prosecute WWII during the London Blitz. Apparently, after the war was won, everyone simply left everything where it was and locked the door on their way out, returning to their normal offices and homes. As a result, the War Rooms are full of original maps, telephones, furniture, household items, and equipment, now on display for us to see. The maps even had doodles and drawings in the margins, as well as carefully-placed pins and notations marking fronts and routes. It felt like a very authentic glimpse into what life was like in that bunker and how the war was prosecuted from the British side. 
On the way to the War Rooms, Frankie suggested a detour to see the recently-erected statue of suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She joins other important figures remembered with statues in front of Parliament, but is the first woman given this honor.
Murray made some delicious chili for us on Saturday night, and we spent the evening relaxing in their new flat and enjoying the view from the balcony. Here is the whole gang visiting the roof of their building. Look at all of those cranes punctuating the skyline!
Sunday started rainy but cleared up and became a beautiful day for visiting the observatory in Greenwich. We took a fast boat from near their flat to Greenwich, walked up a significant hill to the observatory, toured the museum there and enjoyed the view of London, and then had a lovely lunch at a market in Greenwich. I really enjoyed the trip, especially the museum. At first I thought it was just a coincidence that the Prime Meridian would happen to be running through an observatory---what did star-gazing have to do with measurement and artificial gradations of the earth, after all? At the museum, I learned that astronomy and all kinds of measurement have always been intimately connected, so it really wasn't a coincidence. The museum, in particular, told the story of measuring longitude, using either detection of small lunar movements or accurate time-telling, in conjunction with celestial movements. It had originals of some of the very accurate clocks that were built to solve the challenge of measuring longitude.
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| Prime Meridian |
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