Two days' worth

This is going to sound like "the dog ate my homework..."; I did blog yesterday, but Blogger seems to have completely eaten the post! No draft, no finished post, no Bloglines entry... Weird. It was just about another very lovely I Knit evening, but Yvonne has posted one of the pics I took of her in her unfeasibly quickly completed jacket...

While at I Knit we hatched a Plan. We'd originally intended to take the afternoon, do lunch and go to Borough Market, but I double-booked myself and could only get away at 3. So Yvonne and I met up at 3:30 anyway, did the market (I have a haul of poussins, pomegranate molasses, some extremely fine sweet-pickled gherkins, a couple of things which are presents, some tiny baby peppers (think about 1.5" high), red endives and strawberries). Delicious. It really is a stunning market - it's been a while since I went there, and I only went once and right at the end of the day. When I was living in London, Dalston Market was my nearest one and that was very fine, but Borough is something else...

After the market, Yvonne introduced me to the delights of the shop and tranquility of the refectory of Southwark Cathedral (where that last photo was taken), and some knitting was done.

Then we went on a wander towards Waterloo, taking in the sights of the Golden Hinde, Vinopolis, the Globe (another very nice gift shop), various bits of the South Bank including Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, the OXO building, where we looked longingly through the window of Annie Sherburne's shop, which thankfully wasn't open at the time, and on to Gabriel's Wharf, which was fabulous. Near Blackfriars Bridge there were these pillars jutting out of the water - you can't see all the seagulls perched on them in this picture... We wondered briefly what they were for...

and then found the answer: the London, Chatham and Dover Railway bridge...

Increasingly aware of the weight of our shopping and the distance we'd wandered at the end of a hard week, we staggered on through the Southbank Centre, where this colourful crowd was preparing to set off on a Free Tibet cycle ride to the Chinese Embassy near Regent's Park,

and on to Waterloo and the train home.

Thanks, Yvonne, for showing me your patch of London, and I'll definitely be back to many of the places! It really felt like a holiday despite only leaving work an hour early...

Around the block

There were signs of spring in the village this week:

Daffs at the Hall (thanks, Kate and family for planting those; they're really cheery for everyone walking past, and you can't see them from the house...)

Across the road, blossom on the tree by the church:

And some forsythia.

And here's some more forsythia on the same day, in a slightly different setting: the pods at the top aren't seed-pods - they're the topmost people-pods of the London Eye.

Wandering along the South Bank, you do see some strange things: yes, it is indeed a "living statue" in Charlie Chaplin/Hitler make-up, a policeman's uniform, a tutu and a truncheon...

Or Big Ben seen through the legs of a semi-skeletal Dali elephant...

And a photo I've been wanting to take for a long while - Boudicca, implausibly dressed in diaphanous robes, by Westminster Bridge and Portcullis House.

She looks great - three storeys high... Until you see her from a distance, and realise her relative size in the landscape. Which is, I guess, why the Iceni never stood much of a chance.

There's an urban myth that Boudicca is buried at Kings Cross; it's a nice metaphor for the hopelessness of trying to get from East Anglia to London on mornings like last Monday, when the process took 5 hours... A chariot with knives on the wheels would have been seriously welcome; and quite possibly quicker...