Day 2 in England: In Which I Meet Chaucer, Eat a Disappointing Lunch, Cry in Front of Van Gogh, and Do Not Loudly Sing Along to Six (Although I Do Loudly Sing Along to Riptide)

OMG it had felt AMAZING to lay my head down at the ripe old hour of 7:00 pm (2:00 pm Eastern Time!) the night before, and I almost felt rested, even, when I woke up at 7:00 am and decided that I'd rather figure out Tim's coffee maker than get a little more sleep.

Hallelujah, for I figured out Tim's coffee maker AND his TV, and by the time the kids were up and about I was two cups deep, eating cold leftover curry on Tim's couch and watching "Breakfast" on BBC One. 

Plans for the day were as follows:

1. 9:30 tickets for Westminster Abbey
2. lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt under St.-Martin's-in-the-Fields
3. National Gallery
4. Trafalgar Square
5. 5:30 tickets for Six at the Vaudeville Theatre

9:30 Tickets for Westminster Abbey

I think we probably spent more money than we needed to on public transportation. Our AirBnb was pretty near Battersea Park Station and Battersea Power Station and I thought we'd use the train a ton, especially, since it zips right into Victoria Station. But I think this is the only day we used the train to get across the river, and only because the bus we thought we were taking to Battersea Power Station unceremoniously dumped everyone off a few stops early and we couldn't work out when/if the next bus was coming.

The 7-Day Travelcards that we bought were probably worth it this time just for the convenience, but next time I think I'll just add money to our Oyster cards and do Pay-As-You-Go. 

I won't even tell you the bus/train/Underground route that we used to wind our way through the city to Westminster, because if you know London you'll probably be horrified at our inefficiency and inability to read a map, and I did absolutely almost get hit by a bicycle because I looked the wrong direction before crossing the street, but eventually I got my magic moment, climbing the stairs out of Westminster Station and seeing Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey all sitting there, pretty as you please in the bright morning sun.

My teenager had an extremely busy spring (says the parent of every teenager ever), so I didn't get a chance to sneak in much work to preview Westminster Abbey or its historical connections. We're planning a longer study back at home, however, probably making good use of Westminster Abbey's own teaching resources for much of it, so hopefully we can both do a ton of context-building to make what we saw more meaningful. I mainly wanted to see Geoffrey Chaucer and whatever I could see of the chapel of Edward the Confessor without going on their special tour, and other than that I just wanted to look at all the pretty things.

Fortunately, there were so many pretty things!

It might be interested to adapt this People in Christian Art lesson to make it more rigorous for AP Art History, and then have the teenager complete the stained glass activity. 

I hadn't anticipated how much of my time in England would be spent crawling around on the ground, but I had to get my photo taken with all of my heroes!

I was more interested in the burials than the memorials, so I didn't get a photo of Isaac Newton's nearby memorial. It's pretty great, though, with a relief sculpture featuring fat, naked babies doing science. 

I love that his equation is his epitaph. 

I found my man Chaucer! After going "YAY!" a lot and getting my photo taken, I was all, "KIDS! DID YOU KNOW THAT CHAUCER ISN'T BURIED HERE BECAUSE HE'S A POET?!?" And they were all, "OMG Mom yes we know he's buried here because he worked here they didn't have a Poets Corner yet in 1400 you've only told us this 4,000 times please stop now." And then I was all, "RIGHT! IT'S THE BURIAL OF SPENSER THAT GAVE THEM THE IDEA! LET'S GO FIND HIM!"

I do kind of regret that I didn't sign up for the Verger's Tour that would have let me see inside the shrine of Edward the Confessor, because you really couldn't see a thing of it from the outside:

Here's a 15th century stone screen blocking the shrine from the view of us poor folks. 

Can't see him past Henry III, either. 

Fortunately, I COULD see Elizabeth I!

Here's the tomb/memorial to the little princes Edward and Richard. Is there anyone who isn't fascinated by the mystery of what happened to these little guys after they were abducted by Richard III? Considering that he had their uncle and half-brother executed just for being around them, and they were never seen again after the summer of 1483, their remains are probably these bones that were discovered in the Tower of London... BUT there were apparently the bones of two other children also discovered at the Tower of London at one point, so who are those kids?!? AND in their mother's tomb in St. George's Chapel in Windsor castle there are apparently actually four children's coffins... but only two of her children are named as being buried there, sooo... 

Random and awesome Westminster Abbey vibes:

He was only buried there until 1661 because that was when Charles II ordered that his corpse be disinterred and hung on a gallows and its head displayed on a pike. Lovely!

Lord Byron! It's weird that they included his place of death on this monument, because he's not even buried there. He's buried in his family vault in a church in Nottinghamshire, as is his daughter and my heroine, Ada Lovelace. I would have LOVED to have gone to pay my respects, but it's a lot farther north than we went.

The Coronation Chair is high-key gross.

Lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt under St.-Martin's-in-the-Field

One of my teenagers is hella emo, and we all like doing things that are sort of sketchy, so I thought a great place to eat lunch would be the Cafe in the Crypt below St.-Martin's-in-the-Fields. It's a cafe! In a crypt! You can eat right on top of tombstones in a crypt!

And to be fair, that part was pretty cool, but alas that we were starving, because the food was SOOOOOO gross! I got what was supposed to be a vegan ploughman's but what I think was actually a pimiento cheese sandwich on just absolute acres of dry bread. And then Matt's very mayonnaise-forward sandwich came with an incomprehensible mountain of steamed cauliflower, which, there isn't technically anything wrong with a bland mountain of steamed cauliflower, I guess, but we decided that we probably all needed the vitamins so we rationed it out between the four of us and then we all had to eat some bland steamed cauliflower. 

But we did get to eat our cheese sandwiches and steamed cauliflower on top of tombstones like I'd planned, so there was that.

National Gallery

I wasn't super revved up about the National Gallery, but I figured since we were right there (and it was free!) we might as well pop inside. And thank goodness we did, because it was awesome!

It was surprisingly difficult to look up a list of must-see exhibits in any of the museums (it's almost as if they don't want you to visit their museum just to see the iconic pieces, but instead to explore and discover and let yourself be surprised, ahem), so fine. We explored and discovered and every time we turned a corner we were surprised by something marvelous. 

I was surprised and thrilled to see Van Gogh! Real Van Gogh, even, and more immersive than Immersive Van Gogh! I guess I should have expected to find something of him there, but I hadn't, and I was delighted to tears to stand in front of his chair. 

Tangent: The National Gallery website is a terrific resource for a homeschool art history study. You can download the artwork at a decent resolution for studying and making flash cards, and many of the webpages for specific artworks also include extra resources to build context and depth of understanding. The page for Sunflowers, for instance, also features a 30-minute lecture on the painting and Van Gogh's life--I've watched it, and it's great! I learned that Gauguin was a terrible person, and now I'm also pretty sure that he and Van Gogh were lovers. Like, *something* happened in that yellow house, and it sure as hell wasn't all in Van Gogh's head!

I immediately requested two of these books from the public library. Can you guess which two, lol?

Trafalgar Square

When I was finished crying over Van Gogh and surreptitiously taking photos of books in the gift shop (it feels so rude to photograph something specifically because I'm not going to buy it there, but maybe that's just my social anxiety talking), we had a little time left to sit and take in the vibes of Trafalgar Square:

It was a perfect day, with sun and blue skies and a light breeze to show off the mild temperature, just the way it would be every day of our trip. Every day, Matt or I would comment, boomer-like, on the beautiful weather, but we never seemed to jinx it, and my teenager was vocal about never getting the grey fog and gloom that her little emo heart had been promised. 

There were some excellent moments of people-watching in Trafalgar Square--a guy sitting on a bench steadily working his way through a massive bag of KFC; a couple taking turns filming each other's reaction shots for their socials--but my favorite was this busker, who did a beautiful cover of "Riptide," and then, when it was clear that everyone had loved it, did it again!

5:30 Tickets for Six at the Vaudeville Theatre

Six at the West End was one of the dream items on my lifetime wish list, and now I've accomplished it! 

2019 was a magical year for musical theatre, with Beetlejuice, Be More Chill, AND Hadestown all premiering on Broadway (along with my sweet little cinnamon roll of a terrible musical, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, bless its heart) and Six debuting in the West End. 

I long to see all of them, but Six is the first!

The Vaudeville Theatre is a short walk from Trafalgar Square (my travel planning is, as always, a thing of beauty), and I was extra stoked that Six had an extra-early show on this day, because jet lag is real, y'all. But a 5:30 show meant that we could be cozy in our seats in the air-conditioned theatre by 4:45, have a drink of water and a leisurely time in the bathroom--

Notable bathroom signage

--listen to the Tudor-sound covers of pop songs (after humming along absently to one harpsichord number for a couple of minutes, I asked my teenager, "Is this... Havana?" Reader, it WAS!)

Weirdest thing that happened on this day: We were sitting calmly in our seats waiting for Six to start. Some of us might have been quietly napping, even. Ever alert to Other People's Business, however, I was instantly awake and engaged when a very polite kerfuffle began a few rows ahead of us. A couple had arrived at their seats to find two people already sitting in them, and instead of making a fuss, had simply gone and told the usher. 

So then the usher came back and asked the people sitting in the seats if he could see their tickets. Finding all this digital reservations and tickets and booking numbers and crap on my phone was a continual nightmare the entire trip, so I felt for the woman as she fumbled with her phone, but hallelujah she did finally manage to produce her tickets and show them to the usher.

And then the usher was all, "Ma'am, these are tickets to Back to the Future: The Musical."

To be fair, Back to the Future IS currently playing in the West End... but not, you know, in this theatre. Or at this specific show time. So then the usher and the people in the seats had a fascinating back and forth in which the usher tried, and failed, to ascertain what show, in fact, the people thought they had purchased tickets for vs. what they were trying to see. Did they buy tickets to both Back to the Future and Six but got the showtimes mixed up? Did they intend to buy tickets for Six but accidentally bought tickets for Back to the Future instead? Vice versa? Also, how had they even gotten into this theatre in the first place, considering you had to scan your tickets at the entrance? Did they have Six tickets that they scanned but then accidentally pulled up their Back to the Future tickets when they went to find their seats? Does the Back to the Future theatre even have the same seating arrangement?

None of this was resolved, and instead the usher managed to persuade the couple to leave their seats and come with him to figure it out elsewhere. And then the new couple sat down and to my knowledge, even though everybody heard the whole thing, nobody proceeded to gossip about it AT ALL. So I felt like I couldn't, either, but then it's pretty much all I talked about for the next week, and I'm still curious.

If you have any information, please leave a Comment below!

The production did a clever thing by announcing that you could take pictures during the encore song. I'd imagine it cut way down on bootleg photos during the rest of the show.

I was so excited during this show that I'm pretty sure that my soul left my body at times. It was amazing, and if you ever want to meet up sometime for chips and salsa and a pitcher of margaritas, I'd love to tell you all about it. The teenagers are also familiar with the cast recording and have their favorite wives, so it was fun to compare our opinions about the performances and who we liked best. We all agreed that we're not really the power ballad sort, so our favorites were Anne of Cleves and Anne Boleyn, with Anne of Cleves 100% stealing the show. 

My teenager has a decent background re: Henry VIII thanks to being a homeschooler and, frankly, from listening to the Six album so much, but this will be another area of interest that we hit harder at home for her History and Culture of England study. It fits in perfectly with both of her major themes of Place-Based Study and Creative Interpretation. To add to the latter, I kind of want to show her The Tudors, but from what I remember it's actually super porny--but so was Henry VIII, I guess! Let me know if you've got more ideas for creative interpretations of the Tudor period that don't involve quite so much on-screen sex.

It hadn't really felt like a super-packed day, but it had definitely felt like a LONG day, so tbh we were all pretty thrilled to take the Underground and the bus back to our AirBnb for an early night. Matt picked up pizza, and I ate, watched British TV, and fell sound asleep within the hour.

Next up: the British Museum and Buckingham Palace!

• 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!

From the Natural History Museum to the Cliffs of Lyme Regis: A Mary Anning Unit Study for High School

My poor homeschooled teenager has never in her life gone on a vacation that wasn't educational. Heck, even when we went to Disney World I made the kids take a class there, and that was after we'd spent months watching videos about ride engineering and making stop-motion animations, etc. 

Two weeks in England, then, is obviously the spine for a one-credit high school class entitled The History and Culture of England, a cross-curricular combo of Social Studies and ELA, with a little bit of science and art sneaked in just for funsies.

statue of Mary Anning at Lyme Regis

With visits to the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and Lyme Regis, one of our topics of study for this class is Mary Anning, the fossil hunter and entrepreneur whose uncredited work supported much of the paleontological scholarship of the Regency and early Victorian eras. 

If you're studying a historical figure, a good intro activity is to collect several children's biographies and read/compare/evaluate them. Picture books are often surprisingly informative, and comparing several means that one can gather a larger amount of information than can be found in just one book. Picture books are also intended to be fun to read, and they're quick to get through, so on the whole it's a very unintimidating activity that provides a good starting point for further study.

Here are the children's books about Mary Anning that I collected from my local public library:

• Dragon Bones, by Sarah Glenn Marsh
• Lightning Mary, by Anthea Simmons
• Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter, by Sally M. Walker
• Mary Anning's Curiosity, by Monica Kulling
• Rare Treasures: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries, by Don Brown

Of these, I think that Dragon Bones is by far the best and Lightning Mary is by far the worst. 

An adult biography that's interesting to read (or listen to via audiobook) is Jurassic Mary. And after that, one can watch the indie film Ammonite to find the small references to factual parts of Anning's life and discuss how/why the creators chose to diverge from the known facts in other parts. Tack on an essay or a creative response like a cartoon or work of fanfic and that's a pretty solid little ELA unit right there!

Because Mary Anning and Jane Austen were contemporaries, roughly (Jane Austen was once extremely rude to Mary Anning's father), another good text to add to the ELA component of the study is Jane Austen's Persuasion, partly set in Lyme Regis. Jane Austen and Mary Anning were of different economic and social classes, and it's an interesting activity to read a Jane Austen novel and try to piece in where these invisible tradespeople ought to be. Austen was revolutionary for her female voice, but she was still classist!

One ichthyosaur fossil definitely found by Mary Anning, and two more with unknown provenance but possibly also found by her, in the Natural History Museum in London

Since we visited London and Lyme Regis, Anning's position in time and place were both crucial to our study in a way that would probably be difficult to replicate at home. Lyme Regis' location in rural Dorset apparently made it a backwater during Anning's time, and people who made the effort to travel the one road into town or take a ship into the Roman harbor generally thought that the residents of Lyme Regis were a bunch of hicks. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd acted like a bunch of hicks, either, and just maybe part of my passion for Anning is because I think she, just like baby Julie in rural Arkansas, might have felt intellectually out of place in her cultural home. But even today, we could see how out of the way Lyme Regis still is just by driving there, down one VERY narrow country road and into a town with roads even more narrow--and this is after they'd historically been widened a couple of times since the invention of cars! Everything in Lyme Regis was either uphill or downhill, and none of it was far from the ocean.

The time period in which Anning lived also went from being a paleontological backwater, when paleontology didn't even exist as a science, nor did the word "dinosaur," to a thriving landscape of prehistoric creatures as the topics of study--many of whom had been discovered and prepared by Anning! It's pretty outrageous to read the list of names, all male, that crossed paths with Anning, learned from her, bought fossils from her, and then turned around and used her fossils and her knowledge to better their own positions. It's gross how many men bought a brand-new fossil from her... and then named it after themselves. We could see this at the Natural History Museum in London--although the signage now lists Mary Anning as the finder of a fossil when that can be proven, the original labels on the fossils often mention just the names of those rich guys who bought the fossils from her, and there are SO many other fossils that probably came from Anning, but it just can't be proven because the rich guys didn't even bother to write down her name. Who knows how much the scope of her work could be expanded if we just had an accurate count of how many fossils she'd found and where they'd all gone?

Fossil Marine Reptiles Gallery in the Natural History Museum in London

Ultimately, it's impossible to know the full extent of Anning's contribution, and the necessity for speculation, I think, makes her a terrific topic of study for high schoolers. So many historical figures presented to high schoolers to study are super well-known, with no room or need for further speculation. But true scholarship requires the presentation of ideas and opinions and theories, and the true work is in justifying it. And with Mary Anning's life and work, there's a lot of scope for speculation!