October 2005
paper boat
here is a boat from budapest photo’d by peter
Hell Fire Club
jane went to a ladies’ church convention yesterday in london so i looked after the girls. kezia and i started by going to McDonalds and eating bacon butties and ice-cream, then we went to our friends house to pick up esther.
after that we went to West Wycombe where we went down the caves which are associated with the Hell Fire Club.
here’s kezia in the dark waving my torch about
the caves themselves are mostly man made and really amazing, especially when you learn about the kinds of secret things people got up to down there. the official website is here which lets you follow the tour through the caves.
here are kezia and esther outside the front entrance:
after going down the caves we walked to the top of the hill to see the church and mausoleum, collected conkers and had great sandwiches in the cafe.
once again, it’s interesting that all the action in the caves happened mid to late 1700s which was the time people were being buried in bunhill fields. it’s like i’m trapped in some time warp at the moment !
bunhill fields
i went to a meeting last week next to Bunhill Fields cemetry. Apart from being a really quiet place away from the bustle of the main street nearby, it’s also ‘home’ to a number of notable characters, including:
john bunyan (writter of Pilgrim’s Progress)
poet William Blake
Daniel De-Foe (writter of Robinson Crusoe)
there are many other ‘notable’ persons in there too. it’s interesting to look at the dates and compare them to when the Monument was built (following hte Great Fire of London in 1666). i had no interest in history at school, but it’s weird to be stumbling on all this stuff in the last few days and see they cover a similar time period (give or take a century).
even weirder is that we’re doing an Isaac Watts hymn in church this morning. The message of Jesus hasn’t changed in 2000 years so i guess i should be surprised that hymns singing about it are still going strong after just 300 years !
But it is strange to be singing songs that were written by a man whose 263 year old grave i walked by a few days before !
dummy
two versions as i wasn’t sure which worked best
the monument
The Monument is one of those funny places which people just forget about. i had a meeitng a few minutes walk from it and i was a bit early so i paid my £2 and went in
there’s 311 steps on the cantilevered stone staircase which seemed to go on forever
right at the top of the Monument is a drum and a copper urn from which flames emerged, symbolising the Great Fire. The whole thing is 202 feet high – the exact distance between it and the site in Pudding Lane where the Great fire of London began on 2 Sept 1666. The Monument was built to commemorate the Great Fire of London and to celebrate the rebuilding of the city.
thanks to 300+ years of public access the viewing platform is covered in graffiti
of course the thing that once stood high above the city is now lost amongst the taller building around it, like the new gherkin building
but there’s still a fine view of Tower Bridge and the river
face and automatic hand dryer
hand dryers always have brilliant instructions on them. this one is particularly good. it’s nice how the words are in CAPITALS AND UNDERLINED. the title is quite strange too – what if you had automatic face ?
caption competition
you people have been much better at making up captions for things than i am, so please can i have some suggestions for this one.
is a bollard blowing up a balloon ?
cow
this cow just appeared near my office with a mysterious sign round its neck.
