Week 5 | Recap

The last week in London.  More than a month since we left New York. It hardly seems possible.

Time is a thief.

I yearn for some of those stolen moments. It panics me a bit, how quickly this will go and I vow to redouble my commitment to being present. To become what my friend Kristen calls a #momenthunter.

Some days it’s easy. When we’re all on the same page, feeling damn proud of what we’re doing and awed by it all. Other days are challenging, when one [or all] of us is overly tired or stressed by a lost sale or deadline, annoyed by crowds and delays and heavy bags. Needing something we just can’t quite place or find. We focus on each other then, get tripped up by the energy we put off, snipe [me] and withdraw [them].

So I try to lighten.

To begin the week, I literally lightened my load. Packed up nearly 12 kg [that’s 26 lbs!] of stuff Grace and I no longer wanted to carry and hopped the bus for the nearest Royal Mail office. Which turns out was located at the back of a convenience store. I had no boxes, no tape, no Sharpie. It took nearly an hour to figure it all out. And but for a few pricier electronic gadgets I was shipping home, the cost of postage would have exceeded the value of the contents being shipped.

International shipping ain’t cheap folks. Pack carefully.

And I’m still yearning for less stuff, a lighter load. Exactly the motivation that led to this adventure.

 

The British Library | 09.30.15

Lest you think we’re on an extended sabbatical, we do actually manage to work. In fact, we attended an event at the OXO center held by one of our strategic partners on Tuesday evening and then I presented to the group at their employee meeting the next day. The work prep, moving to the new flat [#thehovel] and 1D concert porter services for the girl [chief bag schlepper when said child arrives back from Newcastle having spent the last 16 of 36 hours on a bus so she could see James Bay]. I was left with little time for sightseeing.

Well fed after the work meeting finished up, I needed to explore.

I walked nearly 2 miles to the British Library. Its exterior is plain, probably because it wasn’t created until 1973. Before then, it was part of the British Museum.

What lies within is anything but plain.

I saw a Gutenberg’s Bible from 1455, a singular copy of Beowulf in Old English, notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Magna Carta, the world’s earliest dated printed book, Mozart sheet music in the composer’s hand, letters from Austen and Woolf.

More than 200 items in total.

In one room. I repeat. In.one.room.

 

 

Grace eventually joined me to do some school work and finish up her college profile in Naviance. We sat next to the King’s Library Tower.  It’s a six story glass tower that houses the 65,000 books collected by King George III. It is considered one of the most significant collections of the Enlightenment, containing books printed mainly in Britain, Europe and North America from the mid 15th to the early 19th centuries.

This is what I had in mind when I thought about what #unschooling would look like. Learning in places of unrivaled knowledge and history and beauty.

And then jetting off to a 1D concert.

The last day in photos | 10.01.15

It has come. The last full day in London. Just how much can we pack in?

Itinerary | Westminster Abbey [closed due to a ceremony dating back to the Middle Ages in which judges arrive in a procession from the Temple Bar to Westminster Abbey for a religious service commemorating the first day of the legal year]. Churchill War Rooms. Trafalgar Square. National Gallery. London Eye. Buckingham Palace [no photos due to darkness – it was a long day].

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

 

 

It was in every way an excellent battle headquarters, with only one fault, namely its proximity to Winston! – General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of Imperial General Staff

 

 

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. – Samuel Johnson