I have determined that my walking shoes are the least comfortable for walking of the three pairs of shoes I brought. If that's not ironic enough, the best walking shoes have turned out to be the pair with the slight heel! Go figure.

Thursday I went first to Sir John Soane's Museum. Soane was an architect in the late 18th-early 19th century who collected all sorts of things including some beautiful Canalettos, some William Hogarth paintings (the Rake's Progress series of eight and the Election series of four), and a few Turners. The guards were extremely accommodating, even opening up the panels behind the paintings in the Picture Room to reveal more paintings on panels that opened up to even more paintings and drawings (over 100 in all!). Soane designed his home as a museum and as a place for architecture students to learn the classical principles of design. The basement is full of classical busts, urns, and fragments from Greek and Roman sculptures and buildings. A bit of trivia: Soane designed the Dulwich Picture Gallery where one of The Hyde's paintings, Geraniums (if I remember correctly), hung for an exhibition in 2006. Another bit of trivia: the red telephone booths that you can still see around London were based on the design Soane did of his wife's tomb. (He was known for his use of shallow domes.)

From there I walked to the British Museum. It has changed a lot since my last visit. The new Great Court is lovely. The Rosetta Stone is behind glass now (probably with my daughters' and many others' fingerprints still on it--oops--I did NOT give permission for their crime). Ginger, the man who died 5,400 years ago and was naturally preserved in the dry sands, is still in the fetal position and I still wanted to cover him up with a blanket. I concentrated on the many, many Egypt, Assyria, and Greece rooms for this visit because there is just not time enough to see it all. I learned about pediments, friezes and metopes. And I must admit that, although the British should not have stolen all that they did, it was VERY neat to be able to see it all up so close. If, for example, the pediments, etc. were still on the Parthenon when we visited the Acropolis last year, we would not have been able to see the wonderful detail. So thank you Mr. Elgin, I guess.

We had a nice dinner with all of the staff and professors from the institute where Gord is teaching. They seem to be a very nice group. One of them is a novelist who is going to email me a reading list of contemporary London authors. She has just come out with her third novel, I believe, and she has also written a book of short stories, two screenplays, a couple of plays, and an opera (she didn't tell me all of this--I "googled" her--she struck me as quite humble actually but very entertaining). So forget reading only British authors while I am here, I think I may just concentrate on those from London.