Puttering in the Study

Battle of Britain Spitfire

I pulled out this 1/72 Airfix Spitfire I've had at least twenty years to finish this weekend while we were seeing Dunkirk.  It represents N3277 of 234 Squadron, which was flown by P/O Richard Hardy when it was forced down in Cherbourg after aerial combat in the English Channel on 15 August 1940.  The aircraft and pilot were captured, and Hardy spent the next five year in a German POW camp.  He was freed in 1945, and died in 1997.

I know I had a later model Spitfire when I was 10-12, but I don't think I've built a RAF aircraft since then.  I enjoyed reading up on the aircraft and learning about the very innovative features it had, specifically the elliptical wing, which had a few interesting twists (literally) from an aeronautical engineering point of view.

Sir Isaac Newton

Shakespeare has company from the adjacent Science shelf tonight. Thanks to Bill Bryson for making this an easy call.

Shakespeare goes up in the library

Every so often I get back to work on the study ceiling.  Yesterday I finished thinking through another medallion, and today I put it up.

English Literature

As I've posted previously, I'm choosing a single figure from each category of books to go over that "stack." The stack this time was fiction, which sits on the left end of the wall that already has Frederick Law Olmsted (landscape architecture) and Andrea Palladio (architecture).  The other walls already have Pope St. John Paul II (religion), Constantine XI (world history), Thomas Jefferson (American history), George C. Marshall (military history) and Chester Nimitz (naval history) on one side, and Tom Landry and Roger Staubach (football) on the other. Think I'[m joking?  See here.

For years I have been thinking about who to put up to represent my "fiction" stacks.  The English literature stack, which contains the best of my collection of fiction has my favorite authors and series, including C.S. Forester's Hornblower books, a shelf full of Bram Stoker and Dracula commentary, H.P. Lovercraft, Christopher Priest, and many others.

But when I thought over who is the single really preeminent author, I decided you just can't not pick Shakespeare - his prose is just mesmerizing, and has had such an effect on the English language.   So yesterday I selected a portrait, prepared the file and marked it up to transfer to the wall.   Then I spent a couple of hours this afternoon putting up the guide marks, and finished the medallion and the name tonight.

It had been long enough that I'd forgotten how to prepare the image, and which paints went where, and during application I change three of the four paint colors - meaning everything but the wall color - to get the contrast right, but that means the next one will take that much less time.

Liverpool

Oh did we ever love Liverpool! Our tour guide had a master's degree in the Beatles (you can get that at university in Liverpool) and we saw the outstanding Beatles Story, where we got to experience the old Cavern in all its dark and cramped glory.

 On the way out Parker got to see the world's tackiest party barge (a sinking Titanic).

On the city tour we saw the downtown club scene (including the original and current site of the Cavern) and the locations of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.   The song Penny Lane, interestingly, isn't named for the street, but for the bus stop on the street, which was where all the locations can still be seen.

Dublin

We apparently didn't see Dublin Castle the last time we were here, so that was new, and we got to spend some time at Trinity College, seeing the Book of Kells and one of my favorite spaces, the Long Room in the library.

After that we got a chance to hit a couple of bookstores, and then yet another bus ride back to the ship.

Cobh (the port for Waterford Crystal)

Yeah, yeah, it's Ireland and very historic and unnaturally green.  So how do we get to where they make Waterford crystal?

We really enjoyed the tour of the factory, where we got to see all the amazing work they do, and picked up an ornament for the tree (no, not the monster Jamie is posing with!)   Had a stop later near an old castle, and C&P and I had a nice walk in the rain.  

Then back at the pier noticed that the Crystal Symphony we were on in November 2001 was just pulling out of the port at Cobh (incidentally the last port call made by Titanic as shown in this, the last photo taken of the ship before its sinking, taken from the same location).  So naturally I got a picture of it with our summer 2002 twins Parker and Collin.   One day they'll do the math on this picture and be really grossed out, but until then, it's just an interesting photo.

 

Windsor Castle

For our last day outside London before boarding the ship we went over to Windsor to tour the palace.  As usual, the tour was tremendously well-organized, and I liked it so much I bought two books on the history of the place.

Again, we had dinner at the Byron Proper Burgers in Windsor before returning to our hotel near Heathrow.

 

The White Cliffs of Dover

When we realized that our ship would be passing through the Channel in the middle of the night, Jamie and her parents insisted that we take the boys to see it, and I'm glad we did, even though it was a two day trip that saw us on the road from London to Maidstone the first day (that night - the only one we didn't spend in London - was the night of the London bridge and market attacks).

The boys loved the visit - they looked for rocks and shells along the path and argued the whole way about what things were. 

 

Stonehenge

If there's a site where there is more made to do about less, I'm not aware of it.  I don't mean to talk Stonehenge down, and they have a really nicely maintained site (now that they've moved the highway out of the actual site) but it's just weird seeing it from the highway, and there's just so little to actually see.

The most important thing I learned was that our conception of the site as a once-complete circle with identically sized and finished monoliths is probably wrong.  The "back" of the circle has smaller stones and there's strong evidence it was never actually finished.

Stowe Gardens & Byron Proper Burgers

If I have a bucket list, a visit to Stowe Gardens is probably on it.  Stowe is one of the masterpieces of landscape architecture, and since it was within reach during our recent visit to the UK. we were able to spend a day at it last month.

We toured the house (now a boys' school) and I was able to hit all three of the walking tours shown on the map - four if you count the walk from the visitors center.  I had all three boys for most of the first, one for the second, and I did the third solo, which made everyone happy (the picture at right shows just how thrilled Grayson was after finishing two of the walks).

Once we got back to London, we just had to go have dinner at the closest Byron Proper Burgers, which also made everyone happy.