This was a day of dashing about-- of running into walls-- of running into people-- of running into people's luggage-- and of stubbing my toes all to pieces because my eyes were everywhere but where I was going. This was a day of maximum efficiency. Not a second of it was wasted, and nothing was conquered to my satisfaction.
Perhaps I had been looking forward to the Tower of London a trifle too much. I had really wanted to take a guided tour with a yeoman-warder; they were free, offered with the admission fee, but only given every hour. We would have had to wait fifteen minutes, and the other two were off and running before I had a chance to sell my heart's desire to them.
Kathleen was bound and determined to get us to Greenwich, so we purchased River Roamer Passes on Thames clippers, which was a cool experience. The clipper system is set up very much like a metro, except that the boat is less crowded and there's a nice, stinging salt spray to refresh one when feeling crowded. They should bottle that feeling up and sell it; it's priceless.
In Greenwich, we went to a Naval Museum. Kathleen had wanted the Naval museum, and Liz the Imperial War Museum, but as the Naval was closest, and we were down to an hour and a half before we absolutely had to begin the journey back to Oxford, we went with Kathleen's preference.
There wasn't much time to admire the collections on display, and not enough time to actually straddle the prime meridian, but we did get to see a lot.
Personally, I came to the conclusion that Admiral Nelson was a very small man while observing an undershirt of his. Skinny, but many men are skinny; he had to have had arms like pencils in order to wear the shirt the plaque says he wore. I also saw the dirty stockings he wore when shot. I thought them very legitimate looking.
Because I chose to leave my rain jacket wadded on my couch in disgrace, it rained; it rained quite hard, and for quite long, and I got quite wet several times over before reaching the relative safety of staircase no. 12. We did manage to make it in time for dinner, but only because we flat out ran through Paddington to make the high speed train.
