London: Day 5

Day 5 in the UK.  Aeryn was wearing out and was sick of us and took off to the London Zoo.  I mean, wouldn't you be sick of us too? I was sick of me, and I'm my own best company.

Pooteewheet and I hoped on a train at Waterloo and made our way to Hampton Court.  About as far as you can go with an Oyster Card without having to shift to real train tickets is my understanding.  I was in Hampton Court over thirty years ago. If I remember correctly, parts of it were still sealed off because of the fire.  So I was able to see more of it this time, and even have lunch in their cafeteria.  Something nice about eating British food in a castle dining hall surrounded by others.  Not exactly the early medieval experience, but closer than not.

So much booze.  We talked to a tour guide outside for a while.  She was great.  Told us about the only time they actually felt the need to arm the battlements [during one of the rebellions under Edward I wrote about for my master's thesis, although that tidbit wasn't in any of my books].

My inlaws used to have a "time out kid" that had no face and was "art" in the corner of the room.  Apparently they were way more into history than I suspected. I don't know this guy's story.  Missed beer time?

A courtyard garden.  It had several of these statues.  I assume this one is the dragon St. George defeated as that was part of the Tudor iconography.

Sometimes realism isn't really necessary.  No one would have missed horse buttholes in their paintings if they hadn't been there in the first place.

One of the stairways dwarfing Jen.  Did she have a crutch yet in any of the other photos?  It's a permanent fixture for the rest of vacation.

Outside I found my way to the center of the maze.  There's an easy exit, so with no one around I went and found Jen and brought her back in that way.  I got more lost in reverse than I did coming in the proper path.  Regardless, this is a photo of a cheater.

Me trying to selfie in the maze.

Wasn't exactly rocket science.  I remembered that from last time.  But it's a pretty maze and you're obviously walking where many historical figures walked.

We managed to catch a mini-production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I think this was supposed to be both Queen Elizabeth AND Titania.  Doh...I'm out of order again.  We'll some back to the play in a few photos.

Me just prior to the play looking like I stole the place from Cardinal Wolsey.

Ouch.  I wasn't sure, but this may be a sculpture of Cleopatra, although that whole nipple biting thing vis a vis her is supposedly false.  Ah...yep.  https://bbookproject.com/2019/12/28/cleopatras-breast/

Apparently getting bit in the nipple by snakes leads to Snake Baby Cherubs. Who knew.

You could cook a lot of Scotts in these fireplaces.

Back to the play.  I was selected to play Oberon, King of the Fairies.

I joked that this may be my new LinkedIn profile photol

A selfie by Jen at the front of the castle.  We spent the whole day there.  Pretty much open to close, and we were even in the city longer than that, having some dinner before we hopped the train back Waterloo and Willesden.  We barely made the maze.  Didn't get to the larger restored gardens.  And didn't take a boat tour.  Not to mention, I hear if you're there at the right time you can catch a big name concert at the castle.  That has got to be wild.

The inevitable annoying post about a dream I had

Amusingly, if Pooteewheet vacates the bedroom, I dream.  I've been trying to correlate why, and I haven't gotten a good look at the Fitbit-type activity/sleep tracker she got for Mother's Day, but I suspect it has to do with how often my sleep is disturbed if she's thrashing around in bed.  Now, it could be that the thrashing is a result of my restless sleep.  After all, I don't have a Fitbit to watch for counter thrashing.  But given I sleep more deeply when she's not there - last night because my snoring potential was high due to grass cutting in the neighborhood - I'm going to blame her.

End result?  I don't dream much - at least nothing I remember - 99.5% of the time.  Last night, however, I had a dream I was in a castle.  It looked like something out of Spirited Away.  And like Spirited Away, it was full of lots of spirits, each of them in charge of something like the garden, the doorway, small animals, the wind, a graveyard, a garden.  Each of them was bemoaning the fact that human beliefs were changing and they no longer believed in animal spirits and spirits associated with non-human things.  Humans only believed in the ghosts of dead relatives.  After bumping into a number of them who were slowly changing into human ghosts, one of them approached me excitedly and said, "We figured it out!"  It explained to me that in addition to believing in the ghosts of dead people, which was incredibly boring to embody, modern people also believed in dire warnings.  That is, you could be sort of a ghost/oracular warning hybrid, ala Hamlet, if you made the warning part seem like they were having a premonition that fit with their belief that they "knew it was going to happen!" e.g. if there was just a small aspect of the haunting that made it seem light it might be arising from their own mind, leaving them an element of doubt about whether they were really seeing a ghost.  After that, all the spirits I'd bumped into became incredibly annoying ghosts warning me about how I might trip, I might take the wrong turn at the end of the hallway, I might eat the wrong food, I might open the wrong window (I was opening the wrong window), I shouldn't touch that lamp...thousands of inconsequential things.  And once they realized I could see them giving me advice, they would pop up more frequently, until I couldn't walk more than a few steps without getting a warning.  Spirits of the wood and walls and gardens who minded their own business for the most part.

That part was interesting.  The part where there was a computerized, automated wood lathing shop three stories tall powered by what looked like a few 286 computers, and Godzilla showing up to attack my castle so I had to move into a hotel room where the only access was through the kitchen. More confusing, less cohesive.

Feel free to psychoanalyze.  It's not about getting back to nature.  It's not about switching jobs.  Could be because I'm reading short stories based on Cthulu mythos, but there weren't any tentacled creatures haunting the edges prepared to turn it into a nightmare.