The East Coast got off comparatively lightly last night. We watched the news, and went to bed with a feeling of unease. The coastal defences have been raised and strengthened after the disaster of 1953, but this was due to be the largest tidal surge since then, and how do you know when you have done quite enough? The first house we ever owned had flooded in fifty-three, and with each successive move we have headed uphill. It was a relief to come down in the morning, and discover that the death of Nelson Mandela was still dominating the news, since by implication that meant that England hadn't suffered wholesale flooding. I suppose I had some clue by then, in that we weren't woken by the phone ringing in the small hours to tell us that my relatives had been flooded out of Wivenhoe.
We were almost caught out by the storms yesterday. We went up to London for a pre-Christmas jolly we'd been planning for a while, a look round some galleries and ride on the river bus. Was it still sensible to go, with storms forecast? But the worst of the weather at that stage was in the north, not predicted to reach the south-east until evening, and if we started cancelling things because there was bad weather somewhere else, we'd scarcely do anything in the winter. The last time I deferred a trip to London because of Met Office warnings, it was a bit windy and rainy, and that was all. And yesterday was about the only day before Christmas when we were both free and neither of us was booked to go up to town on an adjacent day, so it was the ideal date.
Most of the travel worked wonderfully well. We just got a train without hanging about at Colchester station, just caught our first river boat (admittedly that was from the pier by Tate Modern, and we knew what time it went), just caught our boat on the way back (that did entail a brisk trot when we could see the boat coming), and stepped straight on to a Circle Line tube when we didn't want to walk back from Tower Hill to Liverpool Street in the rain. Only the mainline train almost let us down on the way home, with services from Clacton and Ipswich suspended, and a broken down intercity stuck in platform ten. Information was scant, as it tends to be, and the 16.32 was shown on the indicator board as being On Time right up until 16.31:59, when it mysteriously disappeared from the board without further comment, like Trotsky being airbrushed out of Soviet history. Suddenly, after we'd been waiting for half an hour and were wondering whether to give up and decamp to a pub, a Colchester train was called. We caught it, got seats, and the journey only took just over an hour. Things got worse later on.
Soviet history was one of the things we went to see, since I'd noticed on their website that Tate Modern had a room devoted to Soviet era revolutionary posters. The Systems Administrator is fascinated by that period of history, and the art, so we called in to have a look, after a snack in the members' room so that the SA could admire the view of Saint Pauls I'd raved about. The SA agreed it was a good view, while being slightly less impressed than I was, because the SA's last job came with a desk giving a view straight out over the dome. Never mind, the aerial view of the river was appreciated, with the barges, tugs and river services coming and going. The posters were mostly reproduced in books the SA already has, but were a hit anyway, since it's always interesting seeing artwork in the flesh. The titles are amazing, exhorting the workers to unite against the Fascists, achieve prosperity through manual labour, learn to read, and of course at all times revere the greatness of Stalin (or Lenin, or whichever great leader is in power at the time). The mixture of languages and scripts is fascinating too, with German, English, Cyrillic, Arabic, and unfamiliar angular squiggles that must have come from somewhere in the Caucuses that neither of us could identify. We both enjoyed the Soviet posters. You will find them in room 5 on the second floor.
(My grandfather once decided that he was tired of Western capitalism, and went to ask at the Russian embassy how he could emigrate to the Soviet Union. Thankfully, the ambassador told him that they had enough Jews already in Russia, and advised him to stay in England).
The river boat was good too. For fifteen pounds we could have had a rover ticket and spent all day playing on it, going right down to Woolwich and up as far as Tate Britain, and we agreed that it would be fun to do that in the summer, when it was warmer, and wandering about outside more inviting. You get a splendid view of Canary wharf, and to approach the world heritage sight of Greenwich from the river is a joy.
There's lots to do at Greenwich, we discovered, so I think we'll be back. Yesterday we went to the National Maritime Museum, and started off with the temporary exhibition, Turner and the Sea. This was staged in a basement gallery I don't remember visiting before, which allowed easy circulation, was well lit, well ventilated, and altogether satisfactory. It's a good exhibition, which has reviewed well, and it's interesting to see how Turner's own style evolved over forty years, and how his work drew on previous maritime artists, particularly the Dutch who invented the genre, and how it compared with his contemporaries. Besides which, we are both interested in ships and the sea. It runs until 21st April, and is well worth a visit.
The rest of the museum is free, so we looked at the display on the navy around the time of the Napoleonic wars, which I think is fairly new. I remember reading something about it in one of the papers. It is heavily Nelson branded, as you can imagine, and there is something very moving about looking at the very coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded, although by now it has been cleaned, conserved and neatly pressed, and apart from the tiny entry hole over one shoulder, there is nothing to show of its history. The bullet lodged in poor Nelson's spine, though he lived long enough to hear the news that England was victorious. It is a good display, which covers more ground than just the life and career of Nelson. Most of my knowledge of the Navy in Napoleonic times comes from the novels of CS Forrester, but luckily they are pretty accurate about the day to day details, according to the SA, who has huge books by NAM Rodger on the subject.
Then we had a quick look at a smallish but interesting display about the Arctic convoys in WWII, and agreed that we'd like to come again to see the East India Company gallery. I've been harsh about the Maritime Museum in the past, when they hid away all their ship models, and seemed to be devoting their space and energies to displays on global warming, but maybe that was a period of transition. What we saw yesterday was very good, well laid out, with what felt like the right balance between artefacts and explanation, and a few playful touches to lighten the mood, like the quote from The Art of Coarse Sailing incorporated into an account of the Beaufort Scale inscribed on one wall (Force Eight: Public house sign blows down).
There looked to be all sorts of interesting things to do at Greenwich. We've been to the observatory in the distant past, but not the Queen's House, let alone the more obscure delights such as the Fan Museum (said to do one of the best afternoon teas in London). But time was getting on, and we were uneasily aware that bad weather was working its way down from the north and we had a train to deal with.
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