03 September 2017

Another week gone...

The downstairs neighbour has started work on his garden 
- after three men cut branches from trees for one day, it looked like this -
Several days later the decking and the shed are in place -
...until we have a Grand Finale -

 At T&G's garden, the rose is finally planted -
and the dig-sift-replace work has rounded another big corner -
Clematis seen on a walk, heading to the "old man's beard" stage -
 ...a walk during which I investigated this sideroad - presumably this is where the brickmaking for the 1880s development of Whitehall Park took place -
Last look at the little exhibition at City Lit - I loved Lucy Bradshaw's piece, which is "simply" a sawn-up door -
One moment there's a great flurry of pigeons wheeling round your head, and the next moment they've all landed on one of their usual roofs -
At the Science Museum late, some food prepared for eating in space was on show - that's a beefburger in the bag (add water to rehydrate it) and on the left, at the chef's insistence, is a metal can encasing the bacon sandwich he developed - a very luxurious bacon sandwich, thanks to Heston Blumenthal (no pushover, he) -
 This tide-predicting machine from the 1870s is in the mathematics gallery - turning the handle (at the side) for 4 hours produced all the tide timing for the year -
 "William Thompson gathereda large amount of tide data from around Britain's coastline. Then he used the mathematical technique known as harmonic analysis to break down the complicated tidal motion into a series of simpler components. Finally, he used this machine to recombine them for future tides."

Creative activities included wiring up a flashing light with "electric paint" -
 The TV programme Tomorrow's World was being filmed right next to Tim Peake's space capsule -
The museum is so different at night - no schoolchildren, for a a start!
More walking, this time in the hinterland of Muswell Hill. These double doors are on a steep street, and alternate houses have a single door ... I couldn't figure out how that worked ...

 Round the corner, some doors were for the ground floor and others for the upper flat -
 Elsewhere, many had original glass -
 and the sculpted tree gave these houses a fairy-tale look -
 Love those olde-worlde signs -
Remember how Swiss Army Knives used to have a tool for getting stones out of horses' hooves? Where was it when it was needed ...
But Lady Luck came to my rescue - I found this handy bike combi-tool in among the plants in my garden recently, and it has a tool for getting stones out of corrugated soles. (Alas, judging by the state of the heels, these most comfy shoes will soon need replacing.)

As for my own garden, it's looking a bit neglected -
Let's reword that - it's looking "quite mature". (And even mature things - gardens, people - benefit from care and attention.)

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