17 July 2026

Miscellaneous items:

Irish dance is a big deal at the kids' school. Once I was waiting in the school office with two other moms who were trying to figure out how they were connected in the intricate web of that world. "You know G-?", said one mom. "My sister has a daughter to her son."

I worked the toy tombola at the school fair. A line of toys is arranged on a table, each labeled with a number ending in 0 or 5. You pay to pick a certain number of chances to pick numbered tickets from a grab bag, and if one of your tickets has the same number as the label in front of one of the toys, you get that toy. It was one of the most popular stalls and the line moved slowly when parents plunked down enough change for 30 chances or preschoolers fumbled with the folded tickets. Lots of kids ended up with nothing, and even the winners rarely won the toy they wanted, and there was a lot of crying. We had to be ruthless about not allowing switches. "It is important for them to understand rules!" said the German mother when I said the tears were starting to get to me. The table next door was doing the same thing but with various kinds of alcohol as the prizes, and there didn't seem to be any tears over there. "Do you have a parent with you?" said the volunteer doubtfully when a kid of about 11 won a bottle of wine. "Hm well make sure you give it to them!".

I went to the Salford Art Gallery, which has a model of a Victorian street you can wander through. We went to a museum in York that had something similar but in this one "it is always tea-time on a winter’s evening" and you get to carry a little lantern.

I'm at the Victorian swimming pool. I'm at the event space. I'm at the combination Victorian swimming pool-event space.

Health bath

Spiderssssssssss

On the walk home from school a few weeks ago, N saw a hedgehog stuck in a hole in someone's driveway. The driveway was gated so the next day, T and the kids went back and asked the homeowner if they could rescue it. T had to lie flat on his stomach on the driveway and got pricked through his gardening gloves, but he got it out. It nibbled some dog food offered by the guy who lived there and had some water, then scurried into a bush.

In closing, here is an ad for funeral services on a milk bottle.

16 July 2026

One more London trip. I was supposed to leave at 6:17 for the ten minute leg to Manchester Picadilly where I would get the London train. I took the 5:43 so I wouldn't miss my connection if the local trains were canceled or delayed. Which they were! Peversely, the satisfaction of having prevented greater inconvenience with foresight far outweighs the satisfaction of everything just working the way its supposed to.

Quick browse of some hipster bookstores and Brick Lane Flea Market, lunch at Wicked Fish in Spitalfields Market which I'm sorry to say did not show our local chippy in Didsbury in a very favorable light. Main event: the Dennis Severs House. DS was a transplant from California who bought a decrepit house in Spitalfields in the late seventies. Over the course of the rest of his life, he meticulously arranged it to look like the Hugenot family who lived there from the 1700s had just stepped out.

When I bought my ticket I booked a "relaxed" slot as opposed to "silent", when you can't even ask the round shouldered ear-gauged docents questions. I shared my slot with two guys in their sixties who seemed to be a local and his Dutch visitor. When our slot started a greeter came out to get us. He was wearing a dangly earring, fanny pack, and lace print jorts, and he had the grave face, deep voice, and plummy accent of a villainous butler. He gave a brief history of the house and told us the rules: no photos, don't touch anything.

At this point I have been through many houses with historical set-dressing. None of the others had real wine in the glasses, real chopped onions and cabbage in the pans in the kitchen, and certainly none used real candles for light. Many of the items hadn't been restored or recreated and were in their natural state of tatter. I hope the committment to realism did not extend to the pool of liquid in each of the chamber pots. An enormous 1990s desktop was tucked behind a screen, adding another ghostly layer. DS died in 1999, having been one of the first confirmed diagnoses of HIV in Britain. The greeter said that one of his friends still lives in the house. Every saucer and ragged silk coat was chosen by someone who must have had moments of terrible fear and loneliness, and had responded by creating something fragile and beautiful that defies time.

Commit no Nuisance

Coffee with former colleague B. I told her about the afternoon's agenda: visiting a former movie theatre-turned bingo parlor with exquisite Art Deco decoration of which the architecture critic Ian Nairn had said something like "Skip Westminister Abbey, but don't skip this." "But you have seen Westminster, right?" B asked. "Well Ian Nairn said I don't have to," I said. She gave me a look like she wasn't sure whether I was joking. "I mean," she said, "I do think it's worth seeing."

Let's see what merited a long stuffy ride on the Tube to, yes, Tooting! At 3pm on a Saturday, Buzz Bingo was quiet. Some aunties and uncles at the slots and chitchatting in the auditorium, I'm sure you would learn a few things about this thing called life if you spent some time eavesdropping. I asked a security guard if I could go up some stairs with ambiguous signage and he said sure. Other than that, no one paid attention to me except a lady who rattled off all the names this place had since it was built as the Granada in the thirties.

Can I say that any visitor to London is cheating themselves if they don't go to Buzz Bingo Tooting? I think if it would amuse you to say "Buzz Bingo Tooting," it's worth a look. Part of me regrets not dragging someone there with me for an evening to actually play bingo. There can't be many of these old movie palaces left in such good condition, there are certainly a lot in a sad state.

On the way over, I thought of B's nonplussed face and concluded that I couldn't properly appreciate Buzz Bingo unless I could actually compare firsthand with Westminister Abbey. To be honest, the hefty admission had given me pause. But I checked the service times, and if I went to Evensong, I wouldn't be able to walk around and see the whole building but I could see some of it and hear a good choir for free. When I went through the bag check, the guard said "It's about an hour, no photo or video" which gave the first sign that attending a service is not meant to substitute for a tourist visit. A few hundred people were herded into rows of chairs arranged in a place where it would have been very difficult to discreetly duck out if I hadn't moved my dinner plans and needed to rush off or, seeming more likely by the minute, if I started to succumb to the heat. I gawked as much as I could on the walk to my seat by Poet's Corner. No direct view of the choristers but there was a livecasting TV screen. Service was a civilized 45 minutes and there was a bit more latitude for dawdling on the way out. Based on my partial glimpse, I would now be more willing to buy a 30ish pound admission. Do you need to hear me say it? Yes it is more impressive than Buzz Bingto Tooting, but I would posit that BBT is the Westminster Abbey of repurposed movie theatres.

If you put aside the ick of upholstery on mass transit, Transport for London has the best upholstery

Leisurely dinner in J's garden punctuated by cheers from neighbors watching the Norway game. Lots of bats out, keeps away the bugs! Uber driver said it would be a slow night until the game was over.

Sunday, Columbia Road Flower Market which I'd earmarked as something to fill time before the museums openned, going to church again not something I entertained as a possibility. If I'd been up a little earlier and thus had a larger gap to fill maybe I would have enjoyed this more? It was all very pretty and full of people taking pictures of themselves eating delicious-smelling glutenous things. There was a store with a huge crate of white peaches in the window that turned out to sell diaphanous cotton dresses. I paid $4 for a prop peach which was lucious and perfect, although the 90 seconds between finishing it and finding a place to through away the pit felt endless.

No potato

To the V&A for the Schiaperelli exhibit, v. good.

It was starting to sink in that I might not be back here for a long time. Briefly considered flying visit to Hampton Court Palace, talked myself out of it. Decided to indulge in the luxury of wandering through the museum semi-aimlessly for a little while. Went to the Portrait Gallery after that, just managed to catch a 45 minute highlights tour which rounded out the afternoon nicely before ducking into St. Martins in the Fields while their choir was rehearsing, then back to Euston.

I got to the station an hour early, mostly so I could turn off the part of my brain scrambling to optimize every moment. Twist! My train was canceled. But! I was early enough to have some alternatives, which I was hoping wouldn't be too crowded since most of the other passengers on my train probably weren't at the station yet. Reversal! Lots of trains were delayed or canceled, and the "early" one I got on left even later than my original time. By now almost everyone from my original train was trying to squeeze onto this one, and there was some sharp words in the jostle for the unreserved seats. Eventually everyone got settled. Long bus ride home from Manchester Picadilly since my connecting train was long gone, but the promise of a sizeable Delay Repay refund sweetened the trip.

15 July 2026

London again, for my Order an Object appointment. The V&A just started this free program where you can search for up to five items from their collections and reserve a time to see them up close at the V&A East Storehouse. Appointments were booked out about six weeks in advance when I scheduled, and it takes a good whle to get to the facility from the rest of London unless you are already at the V&A East, which is confusingly a whole other thing. The form asks why you want to see the object and I put something like "Personal research", but I never got the feeling from anyone that I didn't belong there because I was just looking out of curiousity instead of a formal project. I rashly tried to squeeze in a pass by the Bermondsey Antique Market and arrived late which ate into my time, but I'd booked two hours which was more than enough to see my five things. The hardest part was deciding what to order. I knew I wanted to focus on textiles. so I decided to search for something from FInland:

Embroidery sampler

Something from Gujarat:

Silk tie-dyed sari

A lace sampler:

Belgian maybe?

A Worth dress:

Wedding gown from the 1890s

And a Poiret dress:

I checked in at reception and was given a pair of nitrile gloves and a magnifying glass. My minder explained how to handle everything, then led me through row after row of white steel shelving to a set of wide shallow drawers to see the wedding dress (better picture here). "And should I come get you when I'm done?", I asked. "I will be right here," she said with a gentle smile and sat down on a stool beside me.

Storage

I wasn't allowed to pick the dress up out of the drawer because it was too fragile, but I could gently lift and move aside the heavy layers of satin to see the horsehair underling and whalebone on the inside and the tiny stitches of embroidery and pearl beading. When I was leaning in to look closer, a fold of the dress brushed against my lip and I had a horrible moment trying to remember if I was wearing lipgloss, lack of grooming to the rescue!

Inside of wedding dress

The Poiret (here) also had to stay in its drawer. The edges of the velvet were hand-overcasted, if that's of interest to you, and there was a tiny metal weight (maybe a coin?) sewn into a little tab so the cowl neck would fall just so.

Study area viewed from above

When I'd seen my fill of the dresses, the woman brought me over to the study area where my sturdier items had been laid out for me. At the next table, a man with five Chinese dishes in front of him was scribbling into a notebook. Nearby, a vintage Bowie t-shirt was folded in waiting for another researcher. The sari looked as rich and bright as if it had just come out of the dye vat.

After I checked out, I wandered through the rest of the Storehouse which felt like a cross between the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and that part of Ikea where you pick up all your boxes. Even though it's meant to be storage, there are some items on display and a small exhibit on David Bowie.

Seeing and handling those pieces was a tremendous privilege, both from a technical perspective of viewing the construction and craft so much closer than you can when something's behind glass, and the emotional heft of holding something that was made over a hundred years ago and thinking about the unknown person whose hand made those delicate stitches, knowing that they had made something beautiful but likely never imagining that one day it would be in a museum. If I ever do it again, and I hope I will, I would maybe want to see something smocked inspired by Jane Brocket or something that had been extensively mended or remade.

Lunch at an Indian restaurant in the mall food court on top of the Stratford Tube station. Best dosa I've tasted in quite some time. Slightly on the thicker side so more of a tear than a shatter, and buttery to the point of vulgarity. Browsed ribbons and tried on a few hats at VV Roleaux. The Daunt Books in Maryleybone is the pretty one, but it was packed. Spent 45 minutes or so in the Wallace Collection, although now a museum where I wasn't allowed to touch anything felt rather poor sport.

I had dinner with a family friend who had spent some time in the system of tubes which, from the eighties through the mid aughts, channeled every Finnish person passing through New York to my father. She is a lawyer who spent most of her life in London but speaks perfect Finnish, is very poised and accomplished, and always speaks highly of my parents who made clear their desire that I try to resemble her in every possible regard. For all of these reasons I was inclined to resent her deeply until we first met, when on top of everything else she was thoughtful and lovely, so I am in the uncomfortable position of sharing my father's opinion about someone. Spent so much time gabbing that I had to rush for my train, but it was late. Achieved British train nirvana: late enough for me to receive a hefty refund but still made the last train home!