Somusing

In June and July we lived in Pocklington, East Yorkshire. In the middle of town is All Saints Church, the only church we got to know that I haven't written about here yet. We could see its tower peeking up as we looked out our front door to the left: Here is a little history from a brochure at the church: Christianity was brought to Pocklington in the year AD 627 by Saint Paulinus, who had been sent from Rome to preach the Christian gosepl in the north of England. Tradition says that he baptised people in the beck which still runs along the north side of the churchyard. There has been a Christian community here ever since. Nothing is known of the first church building here, which may have been little more than a thatched wooden structure. A few fragments remain from a stone church building which existed around the time of the Norman Conquest in AD 1066. The [present building] was begun some time before AD 1200 and was completed by about AD 1450. (More details ar...

It was fun to get to know London a little better. We only had a few days there but saw quite a bit, as Erin wrote about a few weeks ago. This is the Elizabeth Tower, previously called the Clock Tower, which contains Big Ben , the bell inside the tower, which reminds me of my grandparents Jensen's house in Pocatello, Idaho because they had a mantel clock that rang the tune of Big Ben every hour: Nearby was a statue of Abraham Lincoln (along with some other non-British people of note), down the street others of Richard the Lionheart and Oliver Cromwell: Erin didn't like this monument to the women of World War II, but I did: We didn't test out this claim, but we were careful not to let them read more of our minds than just how much room they might have: Near our apartment in Lewisham was this amazing bit of regulation limiting the number of dogs per walker to 4. I'd love to see the abuses that led to this rule! War memorial by St. Paul's cathedra...

During our week in London, we stayed in a vacation apartment just a little southeast of the city proper in Lewisham (Grove Park), across the street from the home of author Edith Nesbit , who wrote The Railway Children , Five Children and It , and many other books for children. Our apartment had a DVD copy of the 2000 movie adaptation of The Railway Children , so of course we watched it. It seems like I might have read the book when I was young, but I don't remember it at all. We enjoyed the movie very much, especially because it was filmed in lovely Yorkshire, which we had just left. I liked the movie enough that I found a free, public domain copy of it for Kindle and read it on my phone right after we saw the movie. (I don't have a Kindle, but I use the Kindle app on my phone quite often. I'd prefer to use Google's Play Books, but it has been hard-crashing my phone lately, and who needs that?) I like the book even more than the movie, which is to be expected, I gu...

After leaving Pocklington on July 31, we spent a week in London before flying to Prague for our second stay. Various groups of us went on a walking tour, watched boats on the Thames, went to the British Museum and National Gallery, went on the London Eye, went to the LDS church in Lewisham, "saw" the Prime Meridian, walked under the river, bought cheap clothes at Primark, rode trains and the Tube, went to Evensong at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, walked over the river on the Millennium Bridge, walked on a bridge over the train tracks on the Railway Children walk, and saw hundreds of feral parakeets around our apartment and in a nearby cemetery. Looking over the River Thames. Some of those feral parakeets from the bridge over the railway at sunset. Awesome Assyrian wall carvings at the British Museum. (There is so much cool stuff there! Like the real, actual Rosetta Stone!) Really old stuff (up to 5000 years old) the kids were allowed to touch...