We’re getting ready to enter a really hectic period. We have travel planned, followed by lots and lots of visitors. I’m basically looking forward to it, but there is an element of dread as well. Ann Evan and Terry Stoeckert visited this week and it was great to see them. Having guest distracts me from writing or painting and their visit was no exception (although part of the problem this time was trying to get it together before we begin two weeks of travel). I’ve got to figure out balancing being a host for people I am anxious to see and still doing the artistic stuff that was my goal when I came here.

Ann and Terry were very relaxed visitors–no feeling that they needed to be out trying to see as much as they possibly could–so I let them go out on their own to see the Tate Modern and the Tower of London while I prepared for our trips. We did do a couple of great things:

Greenwich: Saturday was a lovely Spring day in London. A good day to be outside. So we decided to go the Greenwich, which is a reasonable ride from our flat. It was a bit mobbed and is a nice spot to visit. We saw the Cutty Sark, one of the last tea clippers that was retired and became a training boat for the Royal Naval Academy for many years. Very nice. But the highlight was the Royal Observatory. Created by Charles II (who we were familiar with from “Nell Gwynn”), it is on a spot picked by Christopher Wren on top of a hill with a magnificent view of London. The purpose of the Observatory was to try to figure out how to solve the problem of longitude, which would allow ships to know where they hell they were. I guess the idea was that if the stars were studied enough, you could somehow know where you were by looking up. It turned out that the answer was clocks. By looking at the sky, you can figure out the time where you are and the latitude. But it order to figure out the longitude, you had to know the time of the place where you started. By comparing the time where you are with the time where you started, it is possible to figure out where you are. The problem was that pendulum clocks could not keep time on the ocean. So Parliament offered a prize of ￡20,000 (an ungodly amount of money back in the late 1700s) to whoever could design an extremely accurate clock.

So the most interesting thing about the Observatory was the clocks. As you know if you read “Longitude” by Dava Sobel, this is the story of a man named John Harrison, a carpenter who was fascinated by clocks and set about to win the competition. He created four incredibly accurate clocks, each on an improvement on the previous one and, by the fourth one, had created a clock that lost virtually no time on a sea voyage to the British West Indies. The powers that be hated the fact that a non-scientist had figured this out and that it turned out that the answer wasn’t astronomical. They initially refused to pay Harrison the award, until King George III intervened. It is a great story (and a great book), which would take to  long to tell in detail. The really cool thing is that the Observatory has the actual clocks that Harrison built and they still work. It may sound stupid, but getting to see them was a thrill.

“Reasons to be Happy”: We went to the Hampstead Theatre and saw this play, written by Neil Labute, an American playwright of some note. It is the story of a divorced couple in which a crisis develops when the guy begins seeing his ex’s best friend, who is divorced from one of his best friends. The exposition is a bit long to explain these tortured relationships, but, by the second act, it gets going and was enjoyable and insightful. Interesting set and the usual good performances by some young actors. I particularly liked Tom Burke, who played the ex-husband trying to chose between his ex-wife and her appealing best friend, all the while trying to decide what he was doing with his life. In a lot of ways, he was the straight man who the other three characters played off and he played his part consistently low key and thoughtful, without getting the pyrotechnics that the other characters enjoyed. A few of the individual scenes were wonderful, although the play as a whole was a little uneven. It was the first play we’ve seen there that wasn’t wonderful, but it was still very good and a nice evening. (To make it better, we discovered a good restaurant near the theatre which I think will be regular spot.

Off to Copenhagen: As Ann and Terry left, we left for Copenhagen. Judie was at the Money 2020 Europe Conference and I went along for a ride. I’ve actually just returned and I may try to get in a blog about it before I leave for America tomorrow morning.