Day 4 in England: Mudlarks and Southwark

The day's agenda:

• 8:30 mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust
• walk across Millennium Bridge
• Borough Market
• Southwark Cathedral
• Tate Modern
• original location of The Globe

Probably the most unhinged thing that I did while planning our trip was make this map. It consists of EVERYTHING that I want to do in England. Like... EVERYTHING. All the forts along Hadrian's Wall. Every castle. Every museum. Isaac Newton's apple tree. All the barrows and standing stones that Google could tell me about (I've since purchased a giant map of the sites of Ancient Britain that will come in handy for my next trip!). All the thrift stores and bakeries and curry stands. 

So when I was planning out our days, if we had a specific place that we were definitely going to be on a specific day, like our tickets to Six or our special tour of Stonehenge, I could then look on my map and easily see all the stuff I wanted to see near that area, or stuff that would be on the way to or from that place. 

That's how our mudlarking excursion on this day would lead right into spending the rest of the day in Southwark: they're neighbors!

Mudlarking is now officially one of the best things that I've done in my LIFE. For a two-week trip, England now holds quite a lot of my most favorite memories!

This two-hour mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust was fortunate in timing, early enough that after it was over we still had nearly the entire day to spend in Southwark; it was less fortunate in regards to the fact that I, personally, got absolutely pig-filthy while larking around in the mud, and had to spend the rest of the day looking at Jackson Pollock paintings and buying fancy doughnuts in pants with muddy knees.

Our tour met at the Millennium Bridge obelisk, where the tour guide took us through the history of England from Neolithic times, showing us mudlarked finds to illustrate her history. We saw Neolithic artifacts, bones, pipes, fossils, and pottery from the Roman, Medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan and more more modern periods, all of which helped us know what to look out for when did our own mudlarking. Bartmann jugs from Germany are tan with a speckled brown glaze, even if you don't get part of a face. Clay pipe stems are older the thicker they are, and they used to be essentially disposable so there are literally millions of them on the banks now. Medieval pottery is also quite thick, and often--but not always--has a green glaze. Roman roof tiles could have evidence of charring from the Great Fire, or, rarely, could have the imprint of an animal's paw. Willowware, my favorite, began in the Victorian period but never stopped being produced so could be quite modern. 

We were in the location of the former Trig Lane, an area that has been in heavy commercial use since at least Roman times. In the 70s an excavation uncovered an entire Medieval quayside that proved its popularity for small boats... which probably explains the thousands of pipe stems on the shore! Tobacco was expensive but clay pipes were cheaply made, so often the pipes were considered single-use, packed with just a bit of tobacco and discarded when done. Pubs would have pipes for patrons to use, and it was considered sanitary to nip the tip of the pipe stem off with every use so that your lips wouldn't touch where someone else's lips had been. 

Here are some of the pipe stems I found:

Look how narrow! A wire was pushed through the hand-rolled clay to create this channel.

The "best" finds are the longest pipe stems, or ideally a complete pipe with an intact bowl. Later pipes had maker's stamps that can be used to date them. The teenagers with their sharp teenager eyes found some pipes with partial bowls, but I was ecstatic with every single utterly basic pipe stem fragment that I found. 

Below, I've got a fragment of a Bartmann jug, a bit of pipe stem, a piece of Willowware, two pieces of Medieval pottery with the green glaze, and a piece whose provenance I can't recall, but I do remember our guide showing me that it's the lip of a vessel, with a gap through the middle where the edge of the clay was folded under:

The college student has some lovely bits of Medieval pottery... and a sheep's tooth!

There were a LOT of animal bones on the foreshore, speaking to the area's history--where better to slaughter animals than a riverbank, where the blood can just wash away? The teenager immediately dove right in and settled into making decorative piles of bones. She thoughtfully even brought the nicest ones to me to admire!

You can sometimes find cut marks in the bones, because of COURSE the best part of a bone is the delicious marrow inside!

To show you the treasures that we were walking on, I zoomed in on this photo in Photoshop and circled every artifact I could see. Most are pipe stems, of course, but I also saw part of a pipe bowl, a piece of a Bartmann jug, more Willowware, some pottery I can't identify but that has embellishment... and, of course, consider that I barely know what I'm looking at, so what other treasures did I miss!

This is why the advice given by serious mudlarkers is to settle down and spend time closely examining one small area. I was WAY too excited to do that, and was pretty much in roomba-mode the entire time. 

More finds!

Some Roman and some Willowware, along with a couple of pieces I don't know.

Here's our tour guide helping the college student identify some of her finds:

One time, she picked an object out of my hand and threw it down the shore. "Asbestos," she said.

Another time, she told me that what I had thought was a marble was actually a MUSKET BALL!!! It was too good for me so she kept it, and I didn't realize until hours later that I hadn't even taken a photo of it! So guess who bitched for the ENTIRE rest of the England trip about the time our tour guide stole my musket ball and I didn't even take a photo? 

She also handed out this ID guide for us to use. No musket balls, but it did help quite a bit with the pottery:

We mudlarked our way steadily east--

I love the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern in the background!

--until we came to our turnaround point, Queenhithe, where you can see this Anglo-Saxon dock at low tide:

You're not allowed to mudlark in that area, so we started mudlarking our way back again:

I did not keep track of time AT ALL, and finally our guide had to tell us that we were the last people left on the shore, and the tide was coming in quickly. Oops!

After climbing back up the Trig Lane Stairs, we took a quick peek at St. Paul's Cathedral--

--then walked across the Millennium Bridge to Southwark:

I was most excited about seeing Southwark Cathedral, but my family of hungry raccoons was most excited about Borough Market!

Here's a couple who went to Borough Market on a day that was a LOT less crowded than the day we went...

I'm super jealous of them, because we barely had space to move of our own volition in Borough Market! In each aisle there was a crowd going one way and a crowd going the opposite way, and you just sort of nudged yourself into one of the crowds and let it carry you along. 

We still ate, though! We bought a loaf of bread--

--pain au chocolat--

--more bread--

--veggie pies--

--and the teenager even found the specific doughnut place that's gone viral on Tiktok:

Sitting on the filthy ground in a parking lot, with our backs to some construction fencing... you know, as you do!

And then FINALLY, when even the most crowd-tolerant of us had grown frustrated and claustrophobic, we went to look at Southwark Cathedral!

Statue of Minerva in the foreground

I didn't go inside even though I'd have liked to have seen John Gower's tomb, but I DID spend quite a lot of time pretending to start my Canterbury pilgrimage from here:

Shall we ride donkeys to Canterbury together? We can entertain ourselves by telling tales!

On a previous trip to England, my partner and I had LOVED the Tate Modern, so we were both excited to see it again. I think we were all really worn out from the mudlarking and the traipsing through Borough Market, though, because none of us were really into it on this trip. We wandered a bit and saw some famous artists--

--but the only thing I was really revved up about seeing was this genuine Gee's Bend quilt!!!

I don't think I've ever seen one in real life before! Aolar Mosely pieced and quilted the above log cabin quilt, and her daughter, Mary Lee Bendolph, pieced and quilted the basket weave quilt, below:

I love how the techniques are similar enough to speak to each other, but the look is so different. 

You can graduate the homeschooler from the homeschool, but you cannot graduate the homeschooler from sitting herself down at the preschool art table every place she sees one:

For a change, we didn't close this museum down--instead, we went to the Marks and Spencer Simply Food for more noms--Cadbury Popping Jellies! Chocolate-covered ginger Borders! Rekorderlig Strawberry-Lime ciders! Haribo Tangtastics!--then sat and people-watched and passed judgment on the traffic while we ate popsicles. I don't know why I kept getting the Twister because I didn't really like it, but it kept looking so delicious on the package!

We were all more than ready to take the bus back home, but fortunately the last stop on my wish list was just down the steps from the bus stop, across the street from a construction site, and on the other side of a locked gate...

It's Shakespeare!

This private courtyard between two apartment buildings is the original site of Shakespeare's Globe. We'd walked past the reconstructed Globe, just a few blocks to the Northwest, a few times that day. I'd looked into getting us tickets for a performance, because Matt and I saw Hamlet there 20+ years ago and it was EPIC, but I didn't think the kids would like the current show and that would spoil the whole concept of Shakespeare for them.

Right now they're doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the kids would have freaking LOVED. Grr!!!

Aww, look at us clinging to the bars like old-fashioned zoo monkeys. We wanted IN!!!

This day felt sooo long, and I was frankly also VERY excited about our bus, because it was the same bus that stops right by our AirBnb, which means NO transfers!!! It was a 45-minute trip, sure, but with no transfers we could plop ourselves down on the top level of our double-decker bus and sightsee (or, let's be real here, nap) the whole way back.

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Dozen Teenagers Went to Homecoming and Solved a Murder

At the end of the school year, I was SUPER stoked when my teenager asked me to help her host a party for her ballet classmates. Y'all know how sad I've been that my kids no longer want birthday parties with all the trimmings, and I've been missing those themed parties with decorations and food and activities and kids. 

You'd think, then, that the teenager would be thrilled to have the expertise that she'd asked for, but that kid had the nerve to proceed to shut down ALL of my excellent party ideas. DIY paint-by-numbers and tea party food in the front yard? Too much work. Bounce house? Too babyish. Drive-in movie? Too public. Paintball? Too competitive. Murder mystery?

The teenager (mostly) stopped glaring at me, and instead asked for details.

Spoiler alert: this murder mystery was the BEST party idea ever for teenagers. It wasn't expensive or difficult, and maybe it's the fact that these are kids who live for the stage, but they were SO into it! It was delightful to watch them have such a delightful time, and everything went perfectly.

I purchased the Horror at Homecoming mystery, teen version, from Night of Mystery. This particular packet has everything that teen ballerinas could possibly want in a party--not only is there a murder, and a mystery to solve, but the framing device is a school Homecoming dance, which means that the kids get to dress up... and they get to dance!

You're supposed to be able to host the game AND keep the identity of the murderer a surprise even from yourself, but since I was hosting this for the kids, it was very helpful to be able to read through the entire packet and familiarize myself with all the secrets. Because I know all the kids attending, I could also rig the game a little to play to their various strengths--some kids enjoy being the center of attention and some don't, some wouldn't mind having to read stuff out loud and some would, and most importantly, none of the sibling sets would appreciate having their character mired in a love triangle with their sibling's character. Yuck!

The murder mystery packet is a LOT to sort through, and you have to have a firm guest list before you can really start, so my teenager had to actually pass out the invitations a month before the party. We gave kids about ten days to RSVP, then I made my teenager spend a few days nagging the holdouts for answers, and only then did I assign characters to kids and make the "official" invitation packets for her to pass out to the guests. Each invitation packet had the invitation, some murder mystery basics, that kid's character sheet, and a school newspaper with important info. To that, I added a couple of notes that the guests should plan to arrive within ten minutes of the party's start time, and that if they realized they couldn't make it, they should contact my kid ASAP. And then I proceeded to have a couple of months' worth of anxiety dreams about the murderer or victim, neither of whom would know how important their character was ahead of time, simply not showing up to the party!

There were no no-shows, hallelujah, but I had my college student on hand at the party as a swing, just in case. And there was a kid who ended up giving a last-minute yes, but fortunately I had a spare character to give her. Whew!

The only materials that you *have* to have to run the party are a million printouts, including a couple of sticker sheets for name tags, and envelopes. But we wanted the party to look as much like the cliche version of a school dance as possible--and I've really missed party planning!--so we might have gone somewhat ham, as the teen ballerinas say. We bought a bunch of serving ware and photo backdrop crap from Dollar Tree, I got out all my stash scrapbook paper to make all the kids' envelopes and accessories look mitchy-matchy and fancy, and my partner did a ton of design work to turn the print-out photos of "evidence" into real-live actual pieces of evidence that looked awesome.

And it turns out that Burger King does not care how many crowns you take from their store. We got enough for each kid, and my college student and I spray painted them all gold.

The plan for the party's pacing is so smart, with each guest receiving a sealed set of "objectives" when they arrive, and then another set after the murder. The objectives include certain things to say or do to certain other guests, and certain ways to respond if a guest says or does some certain thing to you. I LOVED this, because it got the kids immersed in the game right away, got them acting and interacting, and gave them plenty to do in between the dancing and snacking and chatting.

But it made me anxious about timing, because some of the objectives are important to the plot, so I felt like I needed a way to know when people had completed them, which wasn't something included in the game. 

My kids still have one instant camera and several packs of instant film left from that hot minute in their childhoods when they were obsessed with instant photos. We've actually made regular use of the camera and film throughout their years homeschooling, but I decided that I would not be sad to have the rest of that film used up, so I crafted a Homecoming decoration to go next to the photo backdrop:

I found a foam board in the closet, and used scrapbook paper and twine to decorate it for Homecoming. I added another set of character name tags to the board, and left enough room for an instant photo above each tag. The idea was that when a kid had completed all of the objectives that she was able to complete in the first round, she should take her Homecoming photo and add it to the board. As an added bonus, this board, with all the cute pictures of all the guests, made an absolutely adorable souvenir for my teenager to take home afterwards.

After the murder, I'd planned to reskin the board to highlight the victim and label everyone else as suspects, but in the excitement of the murder and the kids trying to solve the mystery I completely forgot! 

Regardless, the kids all used the instant camera a ton, and they all took home plenty of cute instant photos of themselves and their buddies. Totally worth bringing it!

I wasn't completely opposed to hosting the party at home, but since it *was* meant to be a school dance, we thought it would be cool to host it somewhere that had more of a school dance look, so we rented the gymnasium in one of our local community centers for an evening. Because it was a city space it was rentable for a terrific price, and we had a full kitchen available, bathrooms that we didn't have to clean, a ton of room, tables and chairs, a speaker system, and just enough of what I'm assuming were volleyball or badminton net posts standing in a corner that my partner could set up the twinkly lit dance floor of my dreams:

We even made a custom Mayhem High Homecoming dance playlist, because that's the best part of party prep!

Here's a secret: the kids loved the songs and did a ton of dancing, but just between us, all of the work to think out how to mark out a dance floor and getting my partner up and down a ladder to set up the twinkle lights for the dance floor and compiling a playlist and figuring out the speaker system was actually just so *I* could dance:

Actual footage of me dancing, taken by my dancing partner who is also dancing...

My partner needs to take me clubbing a LOT more often than he does.

So, you guys. The parties that we host always go pretty well, mostly because all of my kids' friends are wonderful people, always thoughtful and polite and participative and sensitive to making sure everyone around them is having a nice time. But this was the BEST party we have ever hosted, the absolute funnest party ever, and again, all because of these kids. Teenagers are a whole other species, you might be aware, and you can never quite tell how they're going to respond. If these kids had been mortified about the idea of acting, and didn't want to dress up and pretend that they were at a Homecoming dance, and thought the idea of solving a murder was boring and didn't want to try to figure it out, this would have been the worst possible party. 

But instead, it was the BEST party! All the kids were totally in character, acting their sweet hearts out. They came ready to attend the Mayhem High Homecoming dance, and danced and ate snacks and cheered for the Homecoming King and Queen and gossiped and stabbed each other in the back and danced and blackmailed each other, all in character, all seeming to have a marvelous time:

The kid whose first round objective informed her that she was the murder victim played her part up to the murder like a freaking rock star, then fell down dead right when she was supposed to, to much shrieking and mourning:

She played the second act in the role of her ghost, and earned the prize for having the most money left at the end of the game primarily by guilting people into donating to her funeral, I'm given to understand.

Because I knew all the secrets, I watched the face of the kid who was the murderer as she opened the envelope that revealed that secret to her, and damn, that kid's face did not change expression at ALL. I wish I had half that poker face! She then proceeded to play out the second act by dropping so many red herrings and false clues that only one kid successfully pinned her as the murderer by the end of the game.

All the other kids played their parts like champs, so in character that it turns out many of them had made up backstories and thought up extra details and fleshed out story arcs--it absolutely worked to completely confuse the "official" plot of the mystery to such an extent that I'm not surprised that only one kid ended up guessing the real murderer, but OMG they seemed to be having the BEST time.

In the end, everyone got to fill out a ballot to accuse the murderer, state how much money they had left, and vote for their favorite characters in a couple of categories. We revealed the murderer with much fanfare, and gave out prizes for correct guesses, most money, best costume, and best acting. For party favors, everyone got a Homecoming crown (thank you, Burger King!) and we set up a candy buffet for kids to fill take-home baggies on the way out. 

If you're running a similar party for teenagers, here are my tips:

• Have extra materials on hand for kids who didn't do their homework. I printed extra character sheets and school newspapers and brought them to the party, because party guest prep work turned out to be everywhere on the spectrum between "my parents quizzed me on my character for a week!" to "I lost all my stuff the same day I got it." When a kid said they didn't remember their character, it was easy to just hand them the second copy of their materials without making a big deal of it.
• Have extra characters on hand. This is important to figure out in advance, because Night of Mystery, at least, has you purchase the game for a specific quantity of characters, both a minimum and a maximum. It was a bit tricky to buy a pack that had wiggle room, but not being able to accommodate a last-minute RSVP or unexpected kid showing up would have fueled my nightmares for the rest of my life. I had a couple of extra characters on hand that I could easily add to the game if an extra kid or two showed up to the party, and we were able to assign a character to a kid who gave a last-minute RSVP without fuss. 
• Have a fun framing device. A school Homecoming dance was perfect for the kinds of activities this group of kids likes, and it gave them space to also enjoy being at a party.
• Build in plenty of extra time. I wasn't really sure how long it would take the kids to complete all the parts of the murder mystery, so I set the party to last a full hour longer than my longest estimate, figuring the kids could use the extra time to just have fun together. That was perfect because it took the kids a LOT longer to complete the second act of the game, in particular--they got so invested in their backstories and character interpersonal drama and various shenanigans that they got VERY distracted from actually collecting the evidence, but since I'd built in all that extra time I could just let them enjoy themselves. The game finished with half an hour left before the end of the party, which was kind of perfect--the kids ran around the gym and took tons of instant photos and had a blast talking through the game while Matt and I got a bit of a head start on cleaning up.

This is the first party I've held at an alternate location since my college kid's first birthday party, and dang, if I had all those years of kid birthday parties to do over again, I might never have had a birthday party at home at all! Packing up all the crap to take with us did take a while, but we didn't have to deep clean the house and make the yard look nice. It was a little stressful to set up the entire party in the hour we'd allotted ourselves, but I wasn't setting up for the entire week before the party, either. It was also a little stressful to clean up on time and pack the car back up, but then I didn't spend the entire evening and next day cleaning my house all over again and washing a million dishes and taking out the garbage. 

Imagine: a Homecoming dance, a murder mystery, two dozen cupcakes, several pounds of candy, eleven happy party guests and one happy host, me on the dance floor, and I didn't even have to mop my floors.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I'm Not That Kind of Homeschooler

A few weeks ago, I participated in a workshop on youth mental health. 

I'll probably write more about that another time, but the short and snappy is that it's designed to help adults who work with young people recognize when those young people are facing a mental health challenge so they can provide support, offer resources, have those difficult conversations, etc. It's an important skill set to have, and I'll be able to utilize it in my professional and volunteer work, as well as with friends and family.

The training was a tough six-hour day, though, learning emotionally hard skills, talking through challenging scenarios, and having our own difficult conversations, and in the middle of it, I was pretty excited to eat the catered lunch of pizza and salad and small-talk with my table mates. One of my table mates was from my same town, so we chewed over the perennial topic of road construction and how to avoid it, and why our town doesn't have certain restaurant chains when it definitely should (Donato's is DELICIOUS!). Another table mate also homeschooled, it turned out, and also teenagers, which is a scenario VERY rare on the ground around here, so I was super stoked to chat about homeschooling with this person, until they said said that one of the reasons they were homeschooling was... and then they said something transphobic.

It wasn't even important that what they said was factually wrong on a lot of fronts. Drag queens aren't the same thing as trans people, drag queen story time isn't a drag show, and I bet my life that there aren't drag queen story times happening in Indiana public schools. Wrong people are just gonna wrong.

The important part is that in reply to this transphobic statement, I. Said. Nothing. I can pretty much guarantee that I looked horrified, because I FELT horrified and my family regularly chides me for not having a poker face. But I didn't SAY anything. I blinked a couple of times, sneaked a look at my other table mate (who was studiously ignoring us because this conversation was entirely Not Her Circus), took an awkwardly large bite of pizza, and then practically shouted "Thank you, Jesus!" out loud when the moderator said it was time to get started with the afternoon session.

It ruined the entire afternoon, which was already sucky on an emotional level. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, couldn't concentrate on the material as well as I had in the morning, took a couple of extra bathroom breaks, and bolted at the end of the day.

Later that night, I confessed to my family what had happened, and they tried to help me workshop some things I could have said, or could say the next time. Because this is the other thing: people say shit like this to me surprisingly often. I know why, too.

It's because I homeschool.

And it doesn't even come from people who don't know anything about homeschooling--those people ask me about socialization, and how will my kids get into college, and they're super easy for me to blow off. The people who casually say homophobic shit to me are ALWAYS other homeschoolers, and it's always because they've simply assumed that as a homeschooler, I'm also homophobic, transphobic, of a certain specific set of religious sects, with a certain specific political leaning.

Essentially, they think that because I, too, homeschool, that I, too, share their extremist beliefs, and that I am a safe person to discuss them with.

I've already gone through this shit with white supremacists, but the difference is that white supremacist beliefs are at least taboo enough that the white supremacist in my homeschool friend group did NOT see me as a safe person to share her extremist beliefs with, and I didn't know anything about anything until the gossip got around to me.

I am so over homeschooling being a dog whistle for bigotry, and I've got to figure out what I'm supposed to say the next time someone thinks I'm a safe person to share their bigotry with. Matt says I should just say, "I don't agree with that," but with what? The incorrect fact, or the transphobia/homophobia that prompted it, or the person's idea that I was a safe person to say this to? Do I just say, "You're factually incorrect, statements like that are prompted by transphobia, and as I'm not transphobic, I don't want to hear those things?" Or, "Your homophobic statement is personally offensive as well as morally wrong; also, both gender and our current understanding of biological sex are contemporary cultural constructs and therefore essentially false?" Or, "I homeschool so that my children have more time to build working trebuchets from scratch while they listen to Lord of the Rings on audiobook, not to keep them away from drag shows, which we sometimes attend in our free time?" 

That doesn't seem like something that any human would say, much less me, much less during the lunch break of a youth mental health workshop.

I definitely should have said something, though, even though I still have no idea what. If I keep quiet, then I actually am being a safe person to say bigoted things to, and the bigots probably walk away feeling great, while I'm the one feeling uncomfortable and stewing over it for weeks. So PLEASE feel free to spam me with potential social scripts!

Until then, I assuaged my guilt by making a small donation to the Fuck Bans: Leave Queer Kids Alone fund. If I'm not going to open my own mouth to support trans people, then the least I can do is hand someone twenty bucks to do it for me.

Anyway, Happy Pride Month, Y'all.

Day 3 in England: In Which I'm First in Line at the British Museum When It Opens, and Get Trolled at Buckingham Palace

 

The day's agenda:

1. British Museum, open to close
2. Buckingham Palace
3. Shopping

British Museum

Other than the fact that I still don't know why certain busses simply never came when Google said they were supposed to, nor do I know why occasionally the entire contents of a double-decker bus or an Underground train would simply get dumped off at a random stop and told to wait for the next bus/train/whatever, by Day #3 in London, I'm happy to say that we'd basically cracked London public transportation. 

So it was as easy as steak and ale pie to make it to the British Museum with plenty of time for the kids to get fun coffees to drink while we stood in line with the other tourists getting an early start on their museum day:

Tiktok has since informed me that we are having a "hot girl European summer," and that is why every single tourist spot in Europe is as populated as that one cattle car in the Lassie movie I watched several dozen times as a young child (It's definitely this one, and it got terrible reviews, but it sure kept lonely little Julie entertained during at least one long, boring summer spent all by myself in my air-conditioned Arkansas living room!). All we knew at the time, though, is that if we wanted to be in any tourist spot for a few minutes without existing nose-to-tail with a million other tourists, we'd better be in that tourist spot the second that it opened and enjoy our approximately twenty minutes of personal space before it got so fucking crowded.

Here, then, is my uncrowded photo of the Rosetta Stone!

Fun fact: You can own a super high-quality image of pretty much anything in the British Museum's collection, provided they've already photographed it for themselves. A decade-plus ago, I had to create an online account, request the image download, then receive it by email, but these days, you can just clickety-click and it's yours with a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. I've actually already downloaded images of most of my favorite things from the British Museum so I can look closer at them without fifteen thousand other tourists coughing in my face, so my photos here are mostly just for reference, and to remind me what I wanted to download when I got home. 

The Rosetta Stone isn't part of my teenager's History and Culture of England study, nor is it really even part of her Ancient History study beyond just "Hey, look! Rosetta Stone! Now listen to Mom monologue for the thousandth time in your life about how it was discovered and how cool it is and how much she wants to lick it!", but just the other day, my college student and I took a break from Night Vale to listen to this podcast episode on the Rosetta Stone while working on our puzzle--

--and although I'm side-eyeing the podcast's BYU provenance a tiny little bit just because their Honor Code is gross, we both quite enjoyed it and found it very informative! The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decipher the Rosetta Stone is now sitting pretty in my nook, waiting for me to finish the murder mystery and couple of smutty novels ahead of it in line.

After looking at the Rosetta Stone, and perhaps to preserve the children from an entire morning of watching me behave the way I behaved in front of the Rosetta Stone, ahem, Matt sent the kids off to tour on their own, and then he was the only one who had to follow me around all morning while I looked at stuff and said, "Yay!!!" Also, he did all the map-reading, which was very helpful when I started freaking out that I needed to see the Parthenon Marbles or the Lewis Chessmen or the Egyptian mummies RIGHT NOW OMG WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE IN MY WAY?!?

Parthenon marbles!!!

Lewis Chessmen!!!

Mummies!!!

I like investigating the conservation treatment that's been given to these objects. Back in 2014, they had to sew some of this mummy's toes back on!

Here's the location of one of my favorite scenes from that insightful documentary, Night at the Museum 3:

And this gave me fond memories of our family trip to Greece:

Centaurs always be doing crimes!

Since the teenager and I had spent so much time in Mesopotamia last year, I wanted to see the Mesopotamia galleries. And to my shock/mild horror/delight, I discovered that either the British Museum has stolen most of the most important art pieces of the Mesopotamian empire, or the teenager's AP Art History textbook creator had written their chapter on Mesopotamian art while sitting in this gallery, because most of the artwork covered in Gardner's Art through the Ages, Chapter 2: "The Ancient Near East," are here!

Y'all, I am apparently not as close a reader as I thought, because when I read about the Standard of Ur, I thought it was HUGE!!! Like, wall-sized! Ishtar Gate-sized! So even though it's incredibly impressive at any size, I could not stop cracking up at how small it is. 

The bull-headed lyres! If I'd actually been thinking about it I would have realized that these treasures obviously had to be somewhere other than Iraq, and the British Museum would have been an obvious guess. But how fun to be surprised!

The Royal Game of Ur! You of course have to play it for yourself, because the universality of certain pastimes like board games is an important lesson of history. Here's a good download, although an excellent art history project for any age would be to recreate the game board from scratch, copying the historical embellishments or designing your own. Younger artists can use 1" graph paper to assist, but older artists can practice their ruler measuring for some sneaky hands-on geometry reinforcement.

The British Museum actually has over 1,000 artifacts from this excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, and it's fascinating to browse the listings. Check out this headpiece! These rings found with the queen! This creepy as hell goat demon! 

Exposing the teenager to the Epic of Gilgamesh to such an extent that she became a Gilgamesh fangirl is one of my greatest triumphs as a homeschool parent, greater even than the older kid's acceptance into a really, really good college, so I was also super stoked to find some Gilgamesh representation in the gallery, as well:

The museum also has Gilgamesh tablets that aren't on display, but now we know what Humbaba is supposed to look like... if Humbaba is made of sheep intestines, that is.

It's true that my teenager and I insert gay subtext into everything that we read--90% of the fun of reading is finding the gay subtext!--but we had a particular amount of fun pointing out all the gay subtext in the Epic of Gilgamesh, because it's not even subtext. 

Tangent: sections of Gilgamesh are incorporated in the local public high school's Honors English curriculum, but apparently they take out all the gay stuff, and all the good stuff, and apparently just all the stuff that gives the story context, because one of my acquaintances included Gilgamesh, along with the Bible and Oedipus Rex, in a Facebook rant about her kids only getting assigned works written by white men. Like, 1) I don't think any of those authors were white as we'd currently define it, and 2) considering all the incest and gay sex alone in those works, not even counting the sex with gods, I feel like they all have perspectives much more interesting and complicated than just simple heteronormative masculinity. All of those are terrific works to speak to the current cultural connotation of whiteness and male-ness! BUUUUUT who knows if you'd know that if you read those works only in excerpt and out of context, so her point about the public school's presentation of them probably still stands. I dunno for sure, but I can say that the one year my kid spent in that school's Honors English program, she read The Odyssey IN GRAPHIC NOVEL FORM.

ANYWAY, I was delighted to point out to my teenager, when we swung by the Mesopotamia gallery again later that day, that this Gilgamesh exhibit is part of the museum's LGBTQ collection and her interpretation is, therefore, supported by the United Kingdom:

Here's the direct link to the museum's LGBTQ collection info.

I'm really interested in hoards and ship burials and barrows and random stuff kicked up by plows or picked out of the muddy banks of the Thames, so I was also really excited to see the Sutton Hoo, Iron Age, and Roman Britain galleries. Bonus points: England legitimately owns this stuff. No looting or stealing from colonies or acquiring from looters and thieves was necessary!

Here's the full extent of what Gordon Butcher found (we're leaving that asshole Ford out of it).

Tangent: my older kid, when tiny, was entranced by this Roald Dahl retelling of the discovery of the Mildenhall Treasure, specifically the version illustrated all dark and creepy by Steadman. Dahl loves to write children's editions of the Heart of Darkness, and this one, especially, tells a tale of how big and powerful people can indulge their cynicism and greed by screwing over the innocent, naive, and powerless--intoxicating reading for kids who are growing to realize that life isn't always fair and people aren't always, either!

The Sutton Hoo helmet is probably my favorite object on the planet, period. Sometime over a pitcher of margaritas I'll treat you to my full monologue on the subject, entitled Beowulf is So Cool and So You See Sutton Hoo is Equally Cool Because It's from the Time of Beowulf and the Helmet is Basically Beowulf's Helmet: Dragons are Real.

I had to wait for a time practically beyond endurance for my turn to moon over the Sutton Hoo helmet, as there was a school trip of children sitting criss-cross applesauce in their high-visibility vests three kids deep all around the display, all busily copying the helmet into their workbooks while their teacher walked around and encouraged them to "add more detail!" I peeked at a couple of workbooks to make sure that the kids were getting the awesome red eyes of the animal on the helmet's brow and the wing-like eyebrow pieces and the perfect mustache... and they were! When I was their age, my cultural heritage field trip was to the 19th-century gallows downtown. I haven't been back since Pappa died, but I wonder if they still hang a noose on the anniversaries of execution days?

Matt and I rejoined our kids for lunch, because hunger was a constant burden and nearly intolerable distraction from my desire to see All The Things during this trip. One of the reasons why I love packing food when we travel is how quick and effortless it makes meals, and constantly having to source pre-made food throughout England, specifically lunches, was the WORST. This day's lunch in the museum's pizza restaurant was bad enough, but a couple of days later, when it turned out that the lunch special that we'd ordered at the Natural History Museum was actually being served in honest-to-god courses, I literally left before the last course because it was taking so long. I was all, "Fuck dessert. Mary Anning is in the next gallery and I CANNOT NOT BE LOOKING AT HER FOR ONE MORE MINUTE." Thank god that on this particular day there was some drama at the next table over between a couple who'd sat at a table and a woman who came over a couple of minutes later to say that she'd also sat at that table but had just gotten up to place her order and so in fact it was her table, because eavesdropping is one of my favorite activities and it was a good way to distract me from the fact that the museum was full of things that I was not at that time looking at.

After lunch, it was back to looking at things!

Um, excuse me--stealing artifacts from your other former colonies is one thing, but this stuff was stolen from ME!!!!!!!

Interestingly, the artifacts in the museum's Hopewell collection seem to all come from the personal collection of Squier and Davis, who are the notable archaeologists who did the first modern explorations and excavations of the Hopewell mounds in Ohio. They're the ones who created the famous maps of the earthworks that are still used, and who wrote about other earthworks, including the avenue seeming to lead from Newark towards Chillicothe, that no longer exist. I've got a reprint of their seminal work in my to-read pile! It looks like while they were working for the Smithsonian they also put quite a few things in their pockets, though, ahem. I bet the Ohio Historical Society would really like to have their stolen antiquities back now...

My college student and I love museums the MOST, and we spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the Enlightenment Gallery while the other two kept the benches warm and quietly resented us. The gallery is meant to recreate the original look of the British Museum during its heyday of exploration, Eurocentrism, colonialism, and collection mania of the 1700s. So many cabinets full of little things! So many books and trinkets on shelves! Antiquities and fakes all mixed together! 

Even though much of Mary Anning's named finds live in the Natural History Museum now, many had previously lived, under the names of their purchasers, at the British Museum, and I'd been keeping a weather eye on the fossils in this gallery to see if I could find any... if by "weather eye" you mean crawling on the ground, the better to peer nearsightedly at the small print on handwritten labels, that is. But it all paid off, because I found one!!!

I cannot for the life of me find this fossil in the British Museum's online catalogue, but I DID find a print of an ichthyosaur that I'm sure is one that she found. The clue is that it was commissioned by Henry De la Beche!

I'm pretty sure that the other two thought that once the college student and I had looked at every single artifact and read every single label in this gallery, they'd have earned their sweet release, but come on, guys--the museum wasn't even closed yet! And then my college student mentioned that she'd visited the Chinese Ceramics gallery that morning and really enjoyed it, and I was all, "OMG I have not seen these things yet! Take me there!"

So she did!

This time, when a docent caught me crawling on the floor trying to read the tiny print of a label, he showed me how to use this online collection database. YAY!!!

Oddly enough, the other two members of our party managed to rally when the college student and I suggested that we hit up the museum gift shop before it closed. OMG, the museum has SO MUCH ROSETTA STONE MERCH!!! They also had this series of Sherlock Holmes "escape books"--

--that I am desperately regretting not buying. They were a combination of Choose Your Own Adventures with those murder mysteries in a box that I love, all narrated like a Sherlock Holmes story.

Finally, and only when it was a choice of "leave or get kicked out," did we leave the British Museum:

Do you see tiny me and Matt? Thanks for taking the photo that I requested, Teenager!

Next stop: Buckingham Palace!

Buckingham Palace

I'm glad that I just tacked this onto a day in which I was plenty excited about other things, because Buckingham Palace was... underwhelming. We dutifully took the photos and looked at the pretty things--

--but mostly it was just... tourists milling about? In front of a big building that's not even a proper castle?

And check out this bullshit!

I was trying to take a cute picture of my kid on the Victoria Monument, but I took it from pretty far away because I also wanted to get the entire monument in the frame. So when I got home two weeks later and zoomed in to see if my kid looked cute or not, look what else I saw!

Like, excuse me, Ma'am? 

Yes, fine, super funny. It's not even a great shot of the kid, anyway, so tbh rando tourist bunny ears kind of improve it. But then I was trying to find a photo that WAS a good shot of any of us, and just look what I kept coming across:

Props for the funny idea, but what kind of lord of chaos do you have to be to commit to doing that in every. Single. Photo? 

Eh, we were making weird faces in pretty much every photo--that's what happens, I guess, when you've just come out into the bright sunlight after spending the previous ten hours inside a dimly-lit museum--so the bunny ears are, if anything, at least an interesting touch. But, like, ONE photo, guys. It's only funny for ONE photo.

Shopping

Whenever we go into a shop, I develop a little bit of sympathy for what certain members of my family go through whenever we visit a museum together. I swear to god that I will die if I have to leave a museum before I have taken a long look at every single thing inside that museum and read its informative plaque--maybe even twice! And I swear to god that I will also die if I have to spend more than four minutes inside a store, any store. 

Like, I still want to GO to a store, especially a gift shop. It has little themed gifts and accessories! But I just want to look at the books, and the hoodies, the candy and alcohol if they have it, and then immediately leave. But for certain other people, the promise of looking through all the little shops at one's leisure is the only reason I didn't have to hold them at gunpoint to get them on the plane to England. 

So we visited all the little shops on the way from Buckingham Palace to Victoria Station. Lots of Coronation swag. Lots of tiny Big Bens. Many swords, and I have to remind the teenagers every single time we see a sword that we can't take it back on the plane... just wait until those teenagers have to sit around for 30 minutes a pop in two different airports while TSA figures out what to do with the giant rocks I'll have in *my* carry-on!

I only put my foot down when the kids asked to go into the American Candy store, because OMG how embarrassing for a family of American tourists to wander around mooning over the candy of their people. We finally decided that it would be okay if we just didn't speak inside the store, because how on earth would anyone peg us as American tourists if we didn't speak? Ahem. Instead, of course we just foolishly mimed our excitement over the marvelous fake Wonka bars and Pringles cans and bags of Warheads and other items that are apparently a front for a money laundering scheme, question mark?

Then there was some kind of "police activity" near Victoria Station, so all the busses, including the one we'd wanted to take, simply weren't going there, so we had to instead figure out how to get back to the part of the station where the trains are, then figure out which train would take us to Battersea Park Station, then figure out where the track for it was, then figure out how to get there, then figure out where the bus stop was at Battersea, then figure out what bus we wanted, then figure out when that bus came... I was so glad to get back to our AirBnb and eat leftover pizza!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!