(no subject)
As usual on the third weekend of November, we have been in London. The main reason for the trip is to attend the annual dinner of the math society, which took place on Friday evening. There were lots of old friends and colleagues there and it was a very happy occasion.
We stayed for two nights with our friend Gill who lives in north London, close to the Arsenal football ground. We didn't actually see that much of her because her husband had been taken into hospital with some sort of intestinal complaint. Gill was obviously preoccupied with this, and was fretting that he might have bowel cancer. We did our best to reassure her that this was very unlikely, and sure enough it turned out that it was just a digestive upset, nothing too serious. But they kept Roger in hospital for various tests for the whole of our visit, so we didn't see him.
On Saturday morning we had arranged to meet some other friends at the Royal Academy to see the Rodin exhibition. This was definitely the highlight of the weekend, a magnificent collection of all Rodin's greatest works including The Kiss, The Thinker, The Burghers of Calais and The Gates of Hell, with an excellent audio guide to lead one through the exhibition. I kept going back to the first of the galleries, which contained an early Rodin sculpture that I had not heard of before, The Age of Bronze. The pictures to the right (lifted from somewhere on the web) show a small-scale reproduction of this work- nice enough, but it doesn't begin to capture the power of the original life-size bronze statue. If you are in London between now and the end of December you should definitely see this exhibition.
On Saturday evening the plan was for Gill to cook dinner for us. But since she had been at the hospital for most of the day we offered to take her out to dinner. We went to a little Thai restaurant just round the corner from her house and had a very good meal there.
The journey home yesterday was fairly grim, in a very overcrowded train on which all the seats were reserved. We didn't have reserved seats (my fault for leaving the booking until too late), but we sat in a couple of empty seats hoping that the people who had reserved them would fail to turn up. Fortunately they didn't, and we were spared having to stand for the two and a half hour journey. Others were not so lucky, and had to give up their seats to those who had booked them.
Now that I'm home again I am going to start on the major project of renovating the house bathroom, which hasn't been redecorated for about 30 years. Step 1 is to chip all the tiles off the walls. That should keep me busy for the next little while.