The beginner's guide to London, England.

Partially stolen from a comment I made over at TRT's place, and based on my extensive experiences in the place, i.e., about four trips, the last of which was in 1998. Presented as a public service announcement for Bob, who apparently might need it in her new foray into things both medical and educational.


Disclaimer: this will probably annoy people who actually live in London and know it several million times better than I do. Ah well, you get what you pays for, and in this case I'm dispensing advice for free.

So, without further ado, I give you:


The Knowledge (rev. 2.o)

1. Street numbers in London make perfect sense at all times. They start at 1 (or another number), and count up one side of the road. At some point (perhaps at the road's end), they turn around and come back. Occasionally numbers are skipped. Sometimes they count upwards on both sides, even on one and odd on the other, like in other cities. This happens just frequently enough to be annoying, but not so much that any Londoner either realizes it, or will be able to help you to find things when it does.

2. The streets in London are laid out on a nicely geometrical grid system. Nicely geometrical, that is, as long as you accept that a) the Earth is curved, b) it's curved a lot in tiny areas scattered randomly throughout the city, c) the term "nicely" can be interpreted in many ways, and d) "geometrical" can refer to a number of different non-Euclidean states. Oh, and it also helps to accept that the first sentence in this paragraph is wrong. I blame Ralph McTell.

3. Finding addresses in London is easy, as the founders of the city and many subsequent generations of inhabitants, local politicians, urban planners and general smart-alecks have conveniently divided each street into several contiguous sections, each with a different name. If you can actually find the street you're after, there's barely any of it to look in for the address you want, so it's a bit like cutting a deck of cards twenty or thirty times and then guessing at which stack contains the Ace of Spades. You're bound to find it pretty quickly. Unfortunately, you have to go through the other 29 bits of street with the wrong name first, but it would be churlish to complain about that, surely?

4. To counteract the effect described in point three (i.e., one street, many names), London is also helpfully filled with many streets each having the same name. These are differentiated one from the other with arcane codes like "WC11 left 5 right 3", "E17N22BINGO!" and "SE-11YouSankMyBattleship!". They are also quite usefully separated by several miles of intervening neighbourhood, so if you're at the wrong Bank Street, it becomes pretty easy to tell after you've been wandering around it for a bit.

5. Another useful aspect of street naming is that very cleverly, the same name is often used for different streets (closes, crescents, avenues, places, squares and so forth) in close proximity to one another. This makes it easy to get into the right general area, and damn near impossible to actually find the address you're looking for. You're liable to end up sleeping on the grand piano in some minor royalty's town home, when what you were really looking for is an uncomfortable cot in the hallway of the Oozing Wound Clinic at the local hospital. But that's ok, Londoners are used to this kind of thing, and tolerate unexpected guests reasonably well.

6. The last point, and this is an important one, is that the public transit system is excellent. Which means that when there is a bomb scare as the theatres let out (frequently), and absolutely all of the taxicabs are occupied by people just a bit quicker on the uptake than you are (inevitably), there is still a wide and bewildering variety of buses available, almost all of which don't go exactly where you'd like them to, but nevertheless will get you tantalizingly close before rounding Nelson's Column or some other picturesque piece of architectural paraphernalia and zooming off in just the wrong direction, about five seconds after you realize that it's gone just a little bit too far away from your destination to be useful. This public transit system is the envy of the world, and has been emulated in such meccas of excellent transit experience as Delhi, Manila, and the South Pacific island of Pingelap.

7. There is little else that you need to know, except that all of the Tube lines go to roughly the same places, eventually, as long as you're willing to spend an average of four and a half hours, change trains six times, go up twelve escalators and down fourteen, and take at least one taxi. Speaking of which, the blokes driving those oh-so-quaint black London cabs (some of which are coloured maroon, confusingly) actually do know where everything is, so maybe you're better off taking the taxi first, as long as you have 300 pounds or so in spare change to pay the fare.


There, wasn't that helpful? In a future installment: getting to and from London by rail - so many options, so little likelihood of getting the right one. Heathrow airport, I shall leave for an entire episode all its own. There will be pain and anguish and foul language and moaning and gnashing of teeth, oh yes.

The new school curriculum lesson plan, according to Junior Ricardipus #1

Which he completed as part of his homework assignment: "what would you do if you were the teacher"?

I would take attendance. I would teach how Earth looked at the time of the dinosaurs. I would let the class play games in the morning, and in the afternoon I would give them no homework.

Why wasn't school like this when I was in Grade Two?

I shall keep this on file, as I'm sure his mother will be able to use it, once she's a teacher.


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In other news, the F430 Spider has disappeared and was replaced yet again by its friend the 599 GTB Fiorano. And downtown, a Maserati Biturbo Si, circa 1987, I believe very similar to one that Jeremy Clarkson drops a skip on. Oh yes, and a while ago, a Maybach 57 S, driven by some guy in an expensive suit buying a coffee at Tim Horton's along with the rest of us plebs. It may be the most expensive car I've ever had the opportunity (opportunity, folks, not inclination) to kick. And one of the most boring looking, to boot (so to speak).

Oh yes, I almost forgot: last weekend, within half an hour of each other, a Ferrari 308 GTB and a Testarossa, probably a 512 TR, both red. This weekend - nothin'. So far.

40

Well, it seems my little September the 19th mystery was either too obscure, or too boring, for a lot of people.

In case you missed it, and in case you care, the answer was "40". As in the title of the song. As in the difference between 2007 and 1967, the year Ricardipus started busting funky moves and making snide remarks. As in the reason it has become necessary to modify my profile so that it no longer reads "slightly under 40 blah blah blah".

Anyway, thanks to those who figured it out (with generous hinting). Oddly enough, it was Tilly who got it first - a blogger I remember hearing of years ago when I first started reading Zoe's blog, but whose blog I'd completely lost touch with. Hi, Tilly *waves*.

So, now that I'm officially Over The Hill™, I can look back on things and realize that my completely selfish and useless goal of owning an objectionably expensive and gas-guzzling sports car is likely never going to happen... shame really, 'cos they've got an awful lot of them for sale at this website I discovered. Or maybe I could borrow the shiny, red Ferrari F430 Spider, or its friend the white Lamborghini Gallardo, both of which reappeared transiently at the construction waste transfer dump a little ways away from here (I still suspect mob activity: expensive Italian sportscars and the construction and "disposal" industries... hmm. Maybe The Sopranos has been colouring my thinking. On second thought, I think I'd better not ask to borrow either one.)

Anyway, it should be clear by now that this new-found age of mine has done absolutely nothing to give me wisdom, clarity of thought, or new levels of eloquence, and as a result you end up with the same old bumf in this post. I'll just leave you with the following photo of a happy-go-lucky, 30-year-old Ricardipus surveying the wilds of North Wales, not considering for a single moment that his hopelessly muddied-up, colour-tweaked, posterized and otherwise violated countenance would end up posted on the internet as the coda to what has, by any method of measuring, turned out to be a really, really lame post-birthday post.

September 19, 2007

Disclaimer: any religious references in the following are there because U2 put them there. It's got nothing to do with me, ok?



One, two, three, four

I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song

How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long
How long, how long to sing this song?

He set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm
Many will see
Many will see and fear

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song

How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long
How long, how long to sing this song?

One week...

...until next Wednesday. But also one week (roughly) since the beginning of school for the entire Ricardipus clan, except for me. Been there, done that, got a couple of diplomas and no, I don't have to teach medical students any more, thank goodness. Been there and done that too, for five years of graduate school. My sole investment in the new school year, apart from shuttling various and assorted Junior Ricardipi here and there, is in avoiding all of the frosh (translation: freshmen, first-year students) trampling around the downtown campus these days.

But now that Mrs. Ricardipus is off at teacher's college, our home seems to be filling up with binders, exercise books, various important-looking notices and other assorted bits of paper, and textbooks with titles like Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World, Elementary and Middle School Mathematics, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, and the odd novel like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I might actually read myself. Oh, and American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, which is also apparently part of the curriculum. It's a graphic novel featuring, among other things, a farting monkey. People who read it may, one day, be teaching your children, you know.

And me? Well, apart from unfortunately having discovered the shoot-em-up fun that is Cube, I'm just plugging away at the usual slog, helping people with grant applications for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (due Monday; thank goodness that will soon be over) and generally failing to answer Black Knight's confusing question about DNA splice junctions (oh, go look it up - actually, don't bother, it's probably not worth it). All in a day's work, really.

2 weeks...

...and it'll be Talk Like A Pirate Day, again.

Also, today is Junior Ricardipus #2's fifth birthday.

And, since I seem to be posting random thoughts, here's a picture of the handsome little budgie who's been flying around our neighbourhood recently. He seems very healthy, although a trifle puzzled as to how to get the seed out of the tube feeders we have up for the finches. His beak is just the wrong shape. There's plenty of other seed around though, so he should be ok, at least until winter comes.

Labour Day Weekend

The end of the summer is here and next week will mark some milestones. Next week, Mrs. Ricardipus will be back at University for the first time in a long time, learning to be a teacher. The junior Ricardipi will therefore have their first experience with after-school daycare, and Junior Ricardipus #2 (who goes to Senior Kindergarten this year, two or three days a week), her first experience with all-day daycare, on those days she's not at school.

All of which will mean that I will have to pull up my socks, and take on more responsibilities for getting the juniors to school, occasionally from school, and distract occupy them while Mrs. R'pus is doing her own homework. Fair enough, really - she's put this career on hold for a lot of years while I sorted my own out.

So we packed the last weekend of the summer full of activities - the zoo on Saturday, where we saw all manner of animals as usual, including some surprising activity from the Dholes. Usually, they're just lazing around.

Junior #2 was very pleased see the Przewalski's horse foals, who are lurking around in this picture:

And there were those endearingly silly baby Ostriches, who were still eggs last time we were there. They're about three weeks old now, and the size of a bushel basket, roughly.

Plus I took the usual raft of photos of flowers and things:

More here.

And yesterday, off to Wonderland again where the two adults have discovered the water-slides... wheeeeeeeeeeee! Tag-teaming looking after the kids, and rushing off to the slides. It seems like a guilty pleasure, somehow.

Today, off to the local park and (I hope) relaxing at home a bit. Before all hell breaks loose tomorrow.

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In other news, the hummingbirds have been around the back yard, as they often are for a day or two in early fall, loading up on nectar for the long flight to Mexico. And there's been a blue and white budgie joyriding around the neighbourhood, which is not something you see every day.