James Tucker in Cov

Well, work's been brutally hard, lately, and the weather's been really rough. We have been going on some trips around the London area, including Rochester, which is only about 45 minutes by train from home into Kent, and on the Medway river. Being one day's ride from London, Rochester's one of those Norman towns like Lincoln or Durham that have a huge cathedral and castle built right beside each other in the centre of town. Rochester's castle has nothing on Durham or Lincoln- not the views, not the size. But it is older, and virtually identical to the Tower of London, though largely in ruins.
It's also just a nice town, and we went on a nice day. There were morris dancers, and a variety of Charles Dickens-related stores, as apparently a number of Dickens tales are set in Rochester. The organ was going most of the time we were in the cathedral, which also supplied a nice garden to sit in. Actually, come to think of it, most of the castle was just an open space with people lounging around and playing football. It's a good place to go on a sunny afternoon, buy some used books, and just sit around and read. Unusually, we can away with no clear idea as to the quality of the pubs in Rochester. But then, we already knew we were going back.

There was a while, after we discovered it, but before we got food poisoning there from a bad bagel, where we spent a fair bit of time in Whitechapel. The east end is being colonised as an arty/hip sort of place, and Whitechapel/Spitalfields/Brick Lane is the centre of that. This is Jack-the-Ripper territory.
That aside, it's a pretty interesting place. The whole area's history can be summed up by the fact that there's a building that started as a Huguenot Temple, was converted to a synagogue in the 19th Century, and is now a mosque. We visited another old townhouse that had had its backyard converted into a second local synagogue, which has been decaying for a while now. It's perfectly proportioned, and so seems much bigger than it really is inside. And from the outside, you'd never know it was any different from the other houses on Princelet Street.

I do plan on getting to more of the East End, the docklands and the rest, but this is an interesting place to start.

After getting back to London from Toronto (more on that later), Laura and I were fighting to stay awake. With a nice day, and wanting to stay local, we wandered over to Greenwich and dropped in to the National Maritime Museum. We saw Nelson's uniform from Trafalgar, complete with bullet hole, and the stern of the HMS Implacable, which a great-great-grandfather of mine served on when she was a training ship. I was pretty dazed, but the wave tank and underwater exploration kit they had there was some really good museum interactivity. Also, there were scale models of ships, which makes my day most of the time.