Today we traced the footprints of the philosopher and writer Samuel Johnson. He lived in the 1700's and wrote the most acclaimed dictionary of his day. So we started at his house.
Oh, but first. I don't know if anybody out there is a Dr. Who fan. I'm not particularly, but I have a passing understanding of it.
Anyway, I saw the Tardis today.
For those of you who aren't sure what you're looking at, it's the big dark blue police box in the middle of the picture. In the Dr. Who storyline he has one, and uses it as a sort of time/dimensional travel machine. So that was neat.
Okay, Johnson's house.
It's tucked back away inside another block.
This was my favorite part of the entire house. I'll try to explain it right. This is a floor of his house. It's one long room with the staircase on one side of the middle. Can you see that?
Okay. You can see the stairs through the open door. Look at the line in the wall just to the right of that door, and look up and down the line.
Do you see the line has hinges on it?
Here's the really neat thing. That whole wall in front of the staircase is a huge door! It and the two normal sized door frames and doors in it can swing open towards where I stood when I took the picture. It would effectively block me off in a little room, and I could walk out either of the normal sized doors.
It's a way of partitioning off his big room into smaller ones, with the use of swinging walls. You can't see it, but the wall facing the door-wall is also a door-wall that swings the other direction to close off the other half of the room. If both doors were closed, you'd have a landing where the stairs came up, and then a room on each side - three spaces in all.
Very neat. If you didn't understand, I'm sorry. I'll try again - let me know.
After that, we went to the Old Cheshire Cheese. Rebuilt 1667. It's supposed to be the oldest pub in London.
We walked in the front doorway and it smelled like a chicken coop. Not in a bad way, but the association was there. Then I realized the floor had wood shavings sprinkled over it, the same kind we out in our chicken coop. That was why. They were clean shavings, don't worry.
I'm still not sure what wood shavings were doing all over the floor though.
We were in a weird little hallway, so Miriam went to investigate while I stood in a corner. There were weird whistling and beeping sounds that were honestly creeping me out a little.
Then I realized there was a parrot just inside the door.
No, I am not making this up.
We made eye contact, and it responded with a cartoon slide whistle sound.
Then Miriam came back. Apparently the ground level was a bar, and the food was further down.
We started down the stairs, which were very old. I had to duck going down. We went through a series of small arched rooms with tables, down more stairs, past more arches, and down more stairs until we came to the underground bar.
That's a picture taken from the stairs. Anyway, we asked and even though it was apparently a little late, they were still willing to serve us a "cream tea." Apparently they don't call it afternoon tea. Also, the man agreed to give us hot chocolate instead of tea! We didn't even have to pay extra, though we were both very willing to do so.
So he gave us a little buzzer and we went back to the domed rooms to find a seat.
This is what Miriam brought back.
Oh, and it was very good! Two little cucumber sandwiches, two little tuna sandwiches, two raisin scones, a dish of cream, a dish of jam with a strawberry, and a slice of lemon cheesecake.
I assure you, we had a very, very good time eating that cream tea!
Then we went to St. Bride's church. They have the tallest steeple in London, and claim to be the inspiration for tiered wedding cakes. Look at the picture, you'll see what I mean.
Their is the church that Dickens and Pepys and Johnson and a host of other English writers came to. It got hit with a bomb during WWII, like most of this area, and during reconstruction they discovered that it's actually built on top of other church foundations, dating back to pre-Roman times.
So they built the church back but left tunnels through the crypt that you can walk through.
Okay, so who wants to go through the creepy tunnel first?
Actually, it's more like a museum.
In the middle of the museum, there's a little underground chapel, set inside the 11th century walls.
I clunked/tiptoed to the front of the room and got a shot of the front of the chapel. Can you see the little white labels? From right to left: 12th century, 11th century, Roman times. The Roman label is the hardest to see. It's at the far left of the picture, near the top of the frame. Actually, it's positioned on the mirror that is angled to show the tiled floor there. Sorry, you can't really see it.
This was a story from a newspaper in the museum. I really liked it.
After that, we walked around through some really nice housing, and then found a statue of the man we'd been tracking all day.
This is Samuel Johnson. He wrote a dictionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment