London Weekly 58

This week was calm and slow. The weather was pretty bad, so we mostly stayed in. Steph and I played a lot of games together, and separately. I’ve been really enjoying the Steam Deck that I got for Christmas. The only thing we really had plans for during the week was a walk through Kew Gardens for the lights show, but I backed out at the last minute due to bad weather.

We still went to Brighton on Saturday. We had to detour to Farringdon due to work on the St. Pancras Thameslink station. We made it to Brighton nice and early and had a walk around town on the way to the hotel. We dropped off our stuff and went to the Royal Pavillion, which was amazing. This was George IV’s pleasure palace and it is both marvelous and strange. The outside is Indian styled architecture, the layout is British, and the interior decorations are meant to be Chinese. It was just so over the top as to be amazing

We then walked around The Lanes, which was a cute part of the city with small alleys connecting lots of shops. We got a hot chocolate and headed back to the hotel. We hung out in the hotel slightly too long and missed the peak of the starling murmuration. We saw the last third of it at the pier. Then we had dinner at a Filipino place that had good veggie options.

The next day we did some filming on the beach for Steph’s martial arts. With a short stop by the Brighton Museum I took Steph to the train station. I hung out for another few hours, and then watched the startling murmuration again from the beginning. Starlings started showing up around 3, and the murmuration really got going around 3:35, then peaked around 3:50, and trailed off until sunset at 4:15. I got some great video of it, and hopped the train back to London really quickly afterwards. I got back just in time to join the book club call, and we had a great discussion. This month we had read “You Are What You Watch.” The book was universally disliked, but the discussion around it was excellent. We talked about the contents and the format of the book, and took many tangents.