Howling Frog Books

We saw Kim off at the Tube station after a breakfast at Pret a Manger.  We'd decided to have a booky kind of day.  First, though, we decided to explore the Waitrose shopping complex we'd discovered the day before (because it houses Skoob Books, so we'd scoped it out on the way home).  Waitrose is awesome and we bought a lot of chocolate to take home, and a couple of croissants to make breakfast more exciting.  We went back to the hotel room to dump the chocolate and set out again, off to the British Library, which we thought opened at ten.  It's not far at all and we had a nice walk up to St Pancras station and the Library.  The doors were already open and we went in, but it turned out that the exhibits of library treasures didn't open until after lunch.  So we said hello to the King's Library, and went into the shop and bought more books than we intended to.  This turned out to be a theme of the day.... Will look familiar to Blake fans The heart ...

It was Sunday, and we thought we'd like to go to a church service.  It wasn't easy to choose a place, but eventually we settled on the 10am service at Westminster Abbey, which was a Matins service -- not a full one with Communion and a sermon, but about 40 minutes of music and scripture reading.  So that was lovely, and we got to sit quite close in.  They were clearly expecting many more people for the full service later on. We exited through the cloisters The Abbey is flying a Ukranian flag! A public library!  Is it still? Probably not still a public baths Then we walked, through showery weather, down to Tate Britain, one of the major art museums.  This was not the Tate Modern, but one that goes through British art history in chronological order, and also has a giant Turner collection.   We went through many rooms full of very famous paintings, but focused on a room of William Blake, some Hogarth, and two large rooms with lots of extremely famous pre...

On this day we needed to split up.   One of Kim's goals for this trip was to see Windsor Castle, and I'd never been there, but Mom had.  So she decided to stay home and explore the Russell Square neighborhood, which is crammed with history.  She visited the Charles Dickens museum, collected blue plaques*, and wound up in the British Museum. Kim and I ran off to Paddington, where we caught a train to Slough, where we transferred to a smaller train that simply goes back and forth between Slough and Windsor, ferrying tourists back and forth.  It was a very hot and sunny day in Windsor! I really like these trains The castle is massive, and is kept in good repair -- none of it is falling down, as has always been the case with every other castle I've visited.  It's the main residence of the royal family.  The part visitors see -- where no photography is allowed -- are the official State Rooms, which mostly Charles II put together.  So there are sitting ...