The New Year fireworks at the London Eye certainly lived up to the "spectacular" label - great fun with all the crowds on the Embankment, and more police to the square metre than I thought possible - no doubt aimed at deterring bad behaviour from the harmless drunks or the less harmless types that London has suffered from this year. The most dangerous thing we came across was the abundance of horse poo on the roads from the wonderful police horses that calmly stood amongst the seething crowds.
Getting home was a major mission due to the Tube strike, and the decidedly strange way that the police had blocked off streets and funnelled all the crowds in one direction. This caused a rather claustrophobic jamming of everyone into confined routes, until at one stage in a narrow street leading up to the Strand I had to say to K&D that I would have to wait in a little space in front of a pub for the crush to dissipate, as I could not cope with being jammed in to such a degree. Fortunately after a while the police held the oncoming crowd back to allow the street to clear so we could get through.
Today we went to The Science Museum which is the sort of place I could imagine Kevin spending days at - there was one marvellous working model of a steam-powered factory, similar to the one powered by a steam engine on display that used to power 1700 looms by an ingenious combination of pulleys and gears - my Uncle Howard would probably just have spent his whole time staring lovingly at this one item. I felt a real museum piece myself as I watched children manipulating a model of a slide rule (as used in my high school days) as if it was from the same genre as Babbage's mechanical calculating/computing machines. Other delights were the actual lancets used by Jenner to inoculate a little boy with cowpox pus, followed by smallpox pus (where was ethical approval in those days - was the little boy even asked his opinion ????), as well as Babbage's brain!!!Tomorrow is Hampton Court .....................
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