Playing tourist with visitors

Remembrance Day today, November 13... The past week has seen poppies sprouting on jacket collars and today is a day of parades and services. According to the BBC, the poppy tradition was actually started by an American woman - Moina Michael - who wore and distributed poppies after reading the "In Flanders field..." poem by the Canadian doctor John McCrae; although the tradition has not stuck in the US, it has spread throughout much of the British empire. It's particularly moving here, where relict churches, in particular, provide vivid daily reminders of the last war.

This week started with a glorious Sunday - brilliantly clear with that special quality of light that is reserved for autumn. Eric, Susie and I decided to take advantage of it by exploring my end of the harbor and then downtown Bristol, from the 1st Sunday slow food market (where we bought pasties for lunch and sausages from the farm where Alison, Mark and I stayed a few years ago) to the waterfront, where we spent most of the afternoon at the M Shed, a free museum about Bristol. It is new and very nicely done, with lots to explore and a lovely rooftop deck with panorama views of the floating harbor.

We were too late to visit the SS Great Britain, so we wandered slowly back to my house, admiring the ever changing play of colors as the sun angle changed with the (too early) onset of evening. The colors even inspired me to play with Photoshop's filter options (a good way to spend way too much time on the computer!). 

Monday was rather dreary and seemed like a good day to visit Bath's Roman Baths and other indoor attractions. The Roman Bath museum is fairly new and extremely well done - I wish that Pompeii were developed in the same way, with some wall reconstructions and video reproductions of Roman life. Rather hard to believe the extensive developments here in such a far-flung corner of the Roman empire! Particularly attractive were the outside public baths, lit with torches, surveyed by statues of famous Roman emperors, and watched over by the looming Bath cathedral above. But I must say that my favorite insight into life here in Roman times lay in the curses scratched into lead sheets and left for Minerva at her temple... Curses that ranged from rants against people who had stolen clothes from the baths to more serious reports of stolen slaves, sometimes complete with a list of possible perpetrators (just to help the goddess out). We completed our day with a visit to the Jane Austen center, the Assembly Rooms and Fashion Museum, and finally tea at the famous Pump Room. And then while we were waiting for the train back to Bristol I received a text message from Isolde and Hannah inviting us to meet them at The Apple, a cider bar located on a boat that just happened to be located nicely between the train station and my house. From there we went to the Llandoger Trow pub (of Treasure Island fame) for dinner, to round out the tourist day!!

I was consumed during the rest of the week with preparing for my Faculty of Science lecture on Thursday, but Susie and Eric managed to explore many parts of Bristol and to go to Stonehenge (the most notable part of their trip being an encounter with a pheasant hunt, complete with dogs and guns, as they walked the footpath from Amesbury to Stonehenge).  But Friday afternoon we made it to the SS Great Britain (which, I must note, was launched on my birthday day in 1843...) The ship started as a luxury passenger liner, and then carried emigrants to the Australian gold rush, troops to the Crimean War, coal to San Francisco and guano to Great Britain. The ship eventually foundered near the Falklands, where she acted as a storage hulk for decades before being salvaged and returned to Bristol on July 19, 1970, towed in by the John King tugboat, which now lives at the M Shed and does tourist trips around the harbor, as mentioned in my sailing post. Another interesting connection that I hadn't realized is that the Gibbs family of Tyntesfield and guano baron fame actually owned the SS Great Britain and used it for their guano trade (after it ceased to be useful for passenger transport).