Away from Alpacas

Great weekend in London – on the train Friday morning, first stop the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery, well not quite the first stop as we walked from Paddington to our hotel on Edgeware Road and then walked all the way to Trafalgar Square with a short pit stop for coffee and cake and a whiz round the Selfridges Food Hall which makes foodies like me extremely envious. It was all so gorgeous.

I sort of liked the Picasso, I find some of the more violent paintings quite difficult and prefer the still life and some of the portraits of Olga were stunning. More walking as we tried hard to find a pub that wasn’t completely stuffed with people enjoying a post work drink. In fact my calves still ache today. Gave in and sank gratefully into a taxi to take us to the Prince Albert gastropub in Camden. We have been there before but this time I booked a table online and it sends out invites by email to all the people dining with you, very impressive. Middle son Alex is celebrating his birthday so we were armed with presents. I took knitting magazines as Alex is part of a Stitch and Bitch group and I thought they might like them. The group is going on a knitting holiday to Prague. Is that a good excuse to try lots of beers or what.

Our hotel room was way too hot even though Chas turned the air conditioning to arctic and, annoyingly, the windows did not open. Stuffy old night with the most incredible number of wailing sirens. Ah well we country folk are used to quiet and copious amounts of cold air. We went down for breakfast but there was a big queue so set off on foot again whereupon Thomas, eldest son, rang to say he had just passed his driving theory test and did we fancy breakfast. Someone was on our side as we immediately found a brasserie, opposite Baker Street tube, which did a mean Eggs Benedict, my favourite breakfast with a marvellous orange and carrot juice, all scrumptious. Now full of eggs and butter we strode off for University College London for the Parents Day. The place was full of helpful people wearing sashes and badges but it was very difficult not to get lost. I had booked us in to listen to Professor Pete Coffey talking about ‘stemming vision loss with stem cells’. This project was fascinating and all about age related macular degeneration and they are going into Stage 1 and 2 clinical trials next year. Coffey was a great speaker with a mean streak. He stuck up this slide of what you see if you have AMD and there was a distinct intake of breath from everyone in the lecture theatre. He then giggled, so mean. Our student Joshua turned up at the beginning of the lecture whispering accusingly that we hadn’t answered our phones…sorry, all turned off in case they rang in the lecture and caused us grave embarassment.

Next on the list was the UCL Zoology museum which was packed to the ceiling with things in jars, skeletons, shells, fossils, a mammoth tusk, elephant skulls and an amazing skeleton of an anaconda draped round a branch. Joshua is studying biology so he gets to examine these specimens closely. Some of the stuff is very weird, particularly the sightless wormy jobs, I don’t want to dig any of those up ever. It was a reassuringly noisy place as loads of kids were there doing stuff with the curators. Onward to the Egyptian museum. I liked this but Chas completely glazed over. It is true there were an awful lot of pots, room after room of them but there were lots of interesting tools for boring out stone vases and these sweet little jugs for measuring gold dust.

It was nearly time for the apocalyptic lecture ‘Seven Years to Save the Planet’ by Professor Bill McGuire of UCL”s Earth Sciences department. He was good, the audience was stunned and we found ourselves gazing at a man in despair at the idiocy of politicians and their lack of attention to this crisis. Read his book – same title as the lecture.