London visit, museums, and a cinema trip

We went to London on Friday morning of last week, and stayed over until the next evening. Carla was attending a conference on tarot card reading all day Saturday, so I went along with her for the two days as we planned to do stuff together the day before. We wandered around for most of Friday, mainly in the Temple/City area, and visited The Temple Church (famous for the it's Knights Templar history), Dr. Johnson's House Museum (he wrote the first English dictionary) and Sir John Soane's Museum (bizarre!) and lastly the fantastic Muesum of London. We did that in mega quick time as we got there in the last hour of opening time. I really liked the display on the great fire of 1666. We spotted a few other things of interest as well whilst wandering around, such as a possible sunken Roman bath. In the evening we met up with our friends Julie and Pat for an Asian-fusion meal - I managed the chopsticks this time!

I had a long wander around central London the next day, and popped in and out of a lot of interesting little shops. My pal Sarah was in town so I met up with her first and I showed her a couple of film/TV collector shops: Vintage Magazine and The Cinema Store. We spotted ex film director turned restaurant critic Michael Winner and his Mrs. get out of their expensive car! Later, I met up with my pal Gary in the afternoon and we went to the Empire Leicester Square cinema to see "Back to the Future", recently re-issued for its 25th Anniversary and on the back of the blu-ray release. Very pleasing to see it on the big screen at last! The film remains an all-round two hours of top entertainment from Spielberg and Zemekis, film makers working at the top of their game. A very enjoyable experience helped by seeing it in a digital cinema.

I popped down to the lovely Stratford-upon-Avon recently for a two day work related conference - on all things mapping/GIS. That went ok, and it was nice to see the town again. The improvement work to the canal basin and theatre area has nearly been completed. The tourists will be happy!

I'm loving watching Terry Jones "Medieval Lives" on DVD, an irreverent look at the individuals that lived in the era. He covers people such as knights, peasants, minstrels etc. This gives Mr. Jones carte blanche to dress up in every episode, in fun little 'Monty Python' style animations as well! Another top TV show that's turned up on BBC4 is "A History of Horror", expertly presented by lifelong horror fan Martin Gatiss. Episode 1 was excellent, covering the horror classics of the 30's and 40's - can't wait to see the others. Also, we saw recently the latest offering from Ridley Scott, "Robin Hood". Not bad at all, although the accents were a bit muddled. Looked great though!

I see that American Football has returned to Channel 4. My goodness, it's been a while since that channel covered NFL. Back in the late 80's the sport was *essential* viewing for me, as C4 screened a fab clips show of that week's games on a Sunday teatime. I also see they got Gary Imlach back as well.