I spent Friday on a day trip to London with the cousins. My crazy plan of meeting on a train (I was coming from Cambridge and they joined the same train at Shelford) actually worked, even though it was way too early in the morning. The cousins have not turned into monsters in the couple of years since I visited them in Australia, even though the older two have become teenagers in that time. Little cousin S is as lovely as ever, friendly, intelligent, mature (and adolescence hasn't made her any less beautiful, either). Little cousin J is still a little reserved and awkward, but very likeable once he feels comfortable around new people. And littlest cousin B is still a great kid. I find my uncle and his partner easy to get on with too, so all in all it was great to tag along with their family outing.
We spent most of the day at the Natural history musuem (unfortunately
The gallery that was my favourite when I was a kid, the human biology section, hasn't been updated since then, and it really shows. What was state of the art computing in the 80s (I think it was the first time I used a touch screen interface) is now just drab and tatty, and the references to things that were topical 20 years ago don't help either. OTOH, some of the most recent galleries felt excessively noisy, with lots of loud sounds and flashing screen displays and the level of information rather dumbed down, even when you could actually concentrate on it with so much distracting background. I may just be too old to be their target audience, but for me the great the thing about the museum as a kid was that you could just explore and learn stuff at your own pace, rather than passively looking at an exhibit as if it were a TV programme.
They appear to have tried to make the exhibits more "accessible" by using a narrator with a horrible Dick Van Dyke Mockney accent (as opposed to the BBC English of the older exhibits). I mean, ok, I am completely in favour of making it clear that museums (and science in general) aren't just for posh people, but I don't think that's a good way to achieve that goal. It would have been more use to include at least some pictures of non-white people in some of the displays, especially considering the demographic profile of the various school classes we saw in the museum.
The afternoon ended up with one of those family things; we had planned to walk across Hyde Park to Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes memorabilia, but some of the kids were too tired to walk, and by the time we'd had a long argument about this, eventually resolved by splitting the party, we'd used up most of the time available. And the taxi half of the group thought they were supposed to wait for the walkers to go into the museum, whereas the walkers thought we were just going to meet up at the Tube station, so there was angst. But it was sorted out remarkably amicably considering all the quagmire of family holiday miscommunications. And even when the underground was messed up so that we missed our intended train and had to spend nearly an hour at Bishop's Stortford and people were getting visibly tired and cranky, they continued to be basically polite to eachother, which I found impressive. We had a lovely evening with supper and conversation and I taught the kids to play Fluxx, which they got on very well with.
Saturday I headed into town to spend the morning with
The party was just fantastic, exactly my idea of what a party should be. I started out being a bit surprised that I hadn't previously met
By Sunday the cousins (who had been to the London Eye and Greenwich as the culmination of a busy week) were fairly exhausted, so decided to have a fairly quiet day at home. We had a roast Sunday lunch, my uncle having provided tasty roast aubergines as a vegetarian alternative, and then I went into town for the LJ picnic meme. The LJ picnic was similarly full of cool people, including a really good number of people I know slightly and wanted to spend more time with (

In the evening I dragged

Unfortunately, geography was bitter because I managed to see so many good people this weekend, and took revenge in the form of horribly messed up trains. I had made a plan to get the last possible train home, but the Kings Cross line was out of action and with the usual weekend engineering works, this meant that the last reasonable train was at 10 o'clock. Mentioning transport problems in the Pembury meant being nearly buried under a pile-on of helpful geeks who used the internet to try to find ways to get us back to Cambridge and were eager with all kinds of details about how the rail system works. But there was no real way round it, we had to go. The worst part of it was that I had agreed to meet
It's probably bad manners to write about the other reason why the weekend was wonderful, so I shall resist the temptation, and just generally bounce about with people happiness.