Monday was the day of Paul's second medical appointment, so we didn't have the whole day free. Paul couldn't remember where he had put his ski anorak, so we went out shopping in Croydon to buy him another. This was very successful, and he bought a very nice warm one. I have since been regretting not getting a similar one myself.
Paul went off to his medical appointment, and I went to the Museum of London for the Dickens Exhibition. I did find this quite interesting, though I imagine its planned audience would be people who know relatively little about Dickens. It was fascinating to see the original manuscripts; I wondered how the publisher could read them, because words were so scratched out and overwritten. His desk and chair from Gads Hill were there, and lots of other intriguing artefacts like the door from Newgate prison. It wasn't a huge exhibition, which was just as well, because my back was complaining about all the standing about I had been doing and was very painful.
On Tuesday we had a major disappointment because we went up to London early to join the queue for the Leonardo exhibition, only to be told there were no more day tickets and we would have had to be there before 7am to get one. Actually, this wasn't accurate, my sister later told me she arrived at 8.30 and queued until 1, and was able to get a ticket for 7 pm.
So, no Leonardo for us. We got on a number 15 bus, which to my great joy was an old Routemaster, and were able to sit upstairs and take photographs, something you never do when you live in London.
This is the view down Fleet Street from the Royal Courts of Justice at Number 1, The Strand.
There are some wonderful old buildings in Fleet Street, and you can get some good views of Saint Paul's as you go up Ludgate Hill, though it's hard to avoid all the other traffic.
The sun was in the south so wrong for pictures out of the left side of the bus, so my pictures of the Tower of London weren't very good. We got out of the bus at the Tower and walked across Tower Bridge. These are the modern glass buildings on the south side of the river
The bulbous one on the left is City Hall, and the tall unfinished one is the Shard of Glass which I find quite ugly. HMS Belfast, the Second World War warship, on the right of my photo, is closed until Easter after the walkway collapsed.
We were heading for the Design Museum and walked along the south bank of the Thames, getting wonderful views of Tower Bridge.
We saw an interesting exhibition of various design icons like the Vespa
or the Anglepoise lamp, the bentwood chair, the Mini, the red London phone box and so on. I hadn't realised what design icons our road signs were, with a special readable font created for them.
There was also a Terence Conran exhibition, and as I looked at some of it, I reflected on how many of the things he designed had been part of our family home.
We went back to Croydon where we had a real blast from the past. We got tickets for the Croydon Warehouse Theatre, where we used to go a lot in the 1980s and 1990s. Since we left the area in about 1999, we haven't been back. We went to their Christmas show, which was Don Quixote, and was not as good as some we have seen in the past. We did, amazingly, meet a group of people we knew, some of whom we hadn't seen for 25 years.
On Wednesday I was giving a talk on computer security, so I spent the morning in my old office going over my material, the middle of the day giving the talk and the afternoon discussing it. Then it was back on the train to Manchester again and the miserable grey weather.
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