Freaky London

Lize and I have been in London for close to a month and a half now. Having hit up all the touristy sites in previous incarnations, we decided we would devote our time here to the weird and wacky side of England’s capital. Highlights so far have included

- A long walk through the countryside along a canal, stopping for a pub lunch washed down with “real” ale and ending in the quaint town of Denham where the locals have their Sunday afternoon tea on top of the churchyard tombs!

- Hampton Court – Big Tudour castle next to the Thames resided in by Henry VIII and the unfortunate Anne Bolyn and Jane Seymour. It was quite hilarious to stand in Henry’s privy and imagine the giant oaf who took six wives, removed Catholicism, tortured thousands and sent more to their deaths, squatting over a hole in the floor like all the rest of us. Some say the place is haunted by the ghost of Henry’s fifth wife, Jane Seymour. I will let this photo I took of a green "orb" speak for itself.

- Gig in a church – On a whim we decided to check out a young American musician by the name of Peter Broderick who was playing in a 16^th century church in Soho. He was sublime. Everything you hope a gig will be. Achingly beautiful melodies, subtle lyrics and accomplished musicianship. BUT there was a catch. Before Peter came on stage we had to sit through fourty-five minutes of what can only be described as postmodern, self-indulgent and narcissistic wankery disguised as music. We all get it. Everything has been done before. But that doesn’t mean anyone wants to listen to atonal noise. If art needs an explanation IT IS NOT FUCKING ART! If it fails to make you feel something or change your perspective IT IS NOT FUCKING ART. It would have been far more entertaining and might have sounded better if he had played the piano with his cock instead of just fiddling with it.

- Bletchley Park – During World War II this was the Brits’ top-secret code-cracking bunker. It is the site where chaps like Alan Turing set about breaking the toughest encryption device used by the Germans, The Enigma. The story of the Enigma is fascinating and you can read about it here if you are interested. Needless to say Stinge was enraptured and Extravagance was AWOL after the first five minutes. We spent the day being lectured to and ushered around one cold empty shed after another by an elderly gent who spoke like Stephen Fry on crack, resembled a portly Prince Charles and dressed like an eccentric Oxford Professor, replete with elbow-patched tweed jacket. The most fascinating part of the whole place was the Museum of Computing. As an early pioneer in the field, my Grandfather had a hand in setting up their collection in the 90s and it was wonderful to see some of the behemoths he spent so many years of his life building. Seeing how computers have progressed from monsters that filled entire rooms and could only conduct basic mathematical calculations to the nimble microprocessors of today was truly fascinating. What boggled my mind the most was the development of computer memory technology. The oldest computer in the world was on display and it used a valve-based memory, with each valve representing a single byte of storage. By looking at the position of the luminescence in each valve you could see what value was stored there (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, +, - etc). An early magnetic disk hard-drive was also on display (see photo below) and despite being a metre in diameter it was only capable of storing 22Kb (for non-computer nerds this is equivalent to one low resolution facebook photo)! Seeing sixty years of computer technology chronologically laid out and compressedinto a few rooms really drove home how quickly this invention has infiltrated and taken over our lives. Coming home on the tube that evening, surrounded by people on their iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, I wondered how long it would be before we ceased using technology and technology began using us. Maybe it already has…?