While last weekend didn't start on the best note - Friday's 17hour stint in the office, punctuated only by a trip to Sainsbury's to get dinner - things were looking up on Saturday as i boarded the West Anglia Great Northern KingsX express, literally trembling with anticipation of another trip to London.

Met up with Kylie and Anthony at Tate Britain,

where we checked out the fine works of JMW Turner in the Clore Gallery. A highlight for me was a small exhibition upstairs "Turner and the Sea", comprised mainly of sketches and watercolours.

Some were pretty minimal:

This was my fave:

A far cry from the elaborate grandeur of his more complete works:

Juxtaposed Turner with more contemporary offerings of Tracey Emin, John Piper,

and Paule Vezelay, the George Eliot of visual arts in the interwar era:

(Acknowledgement to Tate website for jpgs.)

Moseyed across the Thames, admiring the iconic Battersea Powerstation

then enjoyed a splendid dinner with K&A's housemates Neil & Kirsten, and a few quiet drinks whilst being entertained via the decks, and related antics.

Sunday, Kylie and I ventured forth to the National Gallery, which enabled me to do the tourist thing around Big Ben, Trafalgar Square etc.

My child-like exuberance was obviously contagious as even Kylie, a seasoned Londoner, got into the silly photos act:

The National Gallery is incredible. We really only made it through the pre-Renaissance stuff, with a couple of highlights being Lorenzo Monaco's 'Coronation of the Virgin',

and Carlo Crivelli's 'Annunciation with St Emidius'

Ran around to find Turners 'Dido building Carthage',

before being ushered out at closing time:

into the sunshine! (first sign of this for weekend):

Adjourned to pub for reflective pints then to all-you-can-cram-onto-one-plate-then-into-your-mouth-via-a-wok stirfry place - very yum. Made a quick trip to MJs house having precisely calculated that this would afford me enough time to get the last train back to Cambridge. That would have been great if the Tube was still running along the Northern Line to Kings X. Which it wasn't.

Consequently, sprang up early from living room floor, jumped onto Tube then train and was in office by 9:15, my earliest arrival there yet.

The One-Hour Cambridge Tour

Dad came for a quick visit to Cambridge last week, and was able to partake of the three great tourist activities therein:
1. Complaining about the weather (fair enough, it was raining)
2. Pulling strange face when first tasting warm beer (admittedly I still put my tinnies in the fridge at home)
3. Getting photo in front of Kings College:

Inspired by the resounding success of my first overland cycling adventure, and feeling even more capable on the Sunday, having implemented a 100% reduction in brandy consumption from Friday to Saturday nights, I ventured north to Ely, famed for its cathedral, the so-called Ship of the Fens. (For a town whose main claim to fame is a big old cathedral they've got a pretty rockin website - follow the History and Tourism link and you can even sign Ye Olde Guestbook). Turns out it was an island until the Fens were drained in the 17th century - incredible.
NB. Thanks to google for the maps. And thanks for inventing GoogleEarth, which has swallowed up about 26 hours of my supposed work time in the past two weeks.

Anyway, the ride to Ely was not as picturesque as the previous day, due to an abundance of cars and lorries. For example, this would have been a great shot, had the car not got in my way:

Despite my best efforts at self-sacrifice on the A10 arterial motorway, I made it to Ely in time to check the Cathedral from the outside:
And the inside:

Very nice. Thanks to the Anglican church for ensuring that Protestant tourists can have experiences as sublime and awe-inspiring as those enjoyed by Catholics all across continental Europe. Here's Ely cathedral from the air as seen with the aforementioned thief-of-my-productivity, GoogleEarth:

After admiring the cathedral, I checked out the Ely riviera on the banks of the River Great Ouse,

met a rather unfortunate looking duck,

rode back down the A10,

and enjoyed the dusk by the banks of the Cam with a couple of cold ones.

Phew - what a busy day!

I've been a bad blogger - spending too much time doing real stuff and not enough time writing about it in cyberspace - if you can call running hundreds of dynamic FE simulations 'real stuff'. But there has been some blogworthy activity & I will endeavour to catch up on it over the next few days.

After the action-packed weekend in London, the following was spent more quietly in Cambridge. Though the Friday night BBQ that concluded with several glasses of brandy at 3:45am would not best be described as quiet. Having recuperated from that I ventured forth on my bicycle to explore some of the Cambridge hinterland. This is approximately where I went:
It was a most splendid ride, along winding country lanes, similar to those frequented by Toad of Toad Hall during his caravaning phase. Saw the American War Memorial & Cemetery, some cute little towns, farmhouses, churches, etc. even saw some wittle wabbits (live ones!) dashing into a hedgerow. An example of the lovely pastoral scenery of Cambridgeshire:
Me on the open road:
It's, like, really bucolic, eh! (Risked hospitalisation to take this one whilst in motion)
This is the Cam, near Grantchester (see map above) - it is a pool in which Lord Byron supposedly swam. He was a poet - you can find out more about him if you like.
Here's the Cam, a bit further downstream in Cambridge.
A splendid day indeed.

Trip to London last weekend. After the disturbing events of Thursday, departure was postponed until Saturday. Met up with MJ upon arrival and went to Tate Britain.















Too much there to check out in one visit, but managed to see the paintings from Tudor to Pre-Raphaelite eras and most of the expansive Turner bequest.

Dinner in Angel w MJ, Pete and Fiona then on to a party, then forged on to the Telegraph in Brixton...














...where a good time was had by all.

Sunday was a beautiful day, so we were up nice and early for a bit of fishing in the pond:


































BBQ at Clapham Common that afternoon to celebrate Anthony's birthday in the sunshine:















Then hit the Tate Modern the following morning before heading back to Cambridge.



















I was most impressed with the Tate Modern. It's very thoughtfully curated, based on the themes of Still Life/Object, Landscape, Body and History. I expected to find this type of 'educational' curation a bit pedagogical for my liking but it is an excellent way to present the collection which rates up there with the Centre Pompidou and MoMA. Didn't check out the special exhibitions - a bit too pricey to justify running around them in the 2.5 hours I had.

All in all an excellent modern art experience, one of the coolest I've seen, along with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. And of course the MCA in Sydney.
NB. These links are worth checking out as modern art museums invariably have cool websites.

Here's one more photo from London - St Pauls and the Millenium Bridge:

Went to a BBQ last night at the house at which I first stayed when I arrived in Cambridge. The bitter cold and pouring rain might have turned away more fickle BBQ fans, but not Joel and Vee, who came up with an excellent solution:



Admittedly, there was quite a lot of smoke in there, so we all shed a few tears.

I was not impressed with the poor weather at all, but managed to make light of the situation.

I now have an official page on the engineering department website.

As promised, some Cambridge pix. These date from two weekends ago, the last time the sun shone here. Saturday was the May Bumps, where rowing boats chase each other up the river in a bid to bump the boat in front:














It's the only way to conduct a rowing race on a river of such limited width.

The following day the watersports continued as I went punting:














To be honest I didn't do much punting, and when I did the results were particularly underwhelming, thanks to significant prior imbibement of beverages (we were in a punting/drinking race and my contributions to the team were focussed on the drinking side of operations). Here is one of the opposition punts shortly before we capsized it:















A very pleasant day indeed. Poor weekend weather since then has been more conducive to museum-based rather than river-based activities, with a tendency towards less associated beverage consumption. Visited the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and the Kettle's Yard Gallery today in a conscious stride beyond the neo-classicist monolith of the Fitzwilliam Museum that has dominated my cultural endeavours in Cambridge thus far.