The Ruffled Crow

Today spanned the worlds of art, literature, and music – pretty much in that order.

In The Studio by Richard Muller, 1926

My son came down from Birmingham to spend the day with us and quite the day it was! We met him up at Waterloo train station and scooted over to the Thames where Mrs Crow and I had our first Scotch Eggs. Yeah, I’m hooked and I am very curious as to why they haven’t caught on in the US. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re a mostly hard-boiled egg wrapped in meat or veg and encased in a breaded shell then deep fried. Awesome eats!

Continuing down the canal-side walk we stopped into Tate Modern Museum. Young Master Crow is much more the afficianado of modern art than I am, but we did find many of our likes and dislikes aligned as we toured the collections.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream

It was a short jaunt further Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s a reconstruction of the Elizabethan era Globe Theatre and presents one or more plays daily. Quite the space and the gift shop actually has some pretty cool stuff! Including a Shakespeare Insult Generator, but of course you lot of panderly nook-shotten quatch-buttocks would just use some online one rather than a real book. So sod off you bunch of sneaping swag-bellied stock-fish.

Nearly a dead ringer to the album cover isn’t it?

On the Thames side of the path from the theatre (see what I did there? I almost have an accent, eh?) is a river bus pier. Mrs Crow and I were looking forward to taking a river bus and as we had planned to visit Battersee to visit the power station there it was the perfect opportunity. Why would we want to visit a power station you ask? The title of the post should be a big clue. We weren’t able to get the perspective the album cover had as I’m fairly certain the building has been removed since, but despite the groans from Young Master Crow, and an indulgent ‘oh, alright’ from Mrs Crow, we recreated the cover the best we could.

To round out the day with YM Crow we had a nice up-scale pub dinner and rode an overground train for the first time back to Waterloo station. It was great to spend the day with the kid in London and we’re looking forward to a few more days with him when we hit Bristol and Brum (that’s Birmingham to you yanks. uh, us yanks) next week.

Observations from days three and four: The cell phone folders favored by older Americans are nearly ubiquitous here.

Toilets tend to have buttons rather than handles.

There are medians on most busy streets and pedestrians regularly cross to there in defiance of the crossing signals.

In many hotels, you must slip your room key into a little slotted thing on the wall or the lights won’t work. They go off when you remove it. (it took me literally ten minutes to figure that one out)