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I spent my last day in the U.K., after tak­ing care of some busi­ness mat­ters, wih my friends Skye and Natasha, Cana­di­ans liv­ing in London.

Skye took me to vis­it Bur­rough Mar­ket, near Lon­don Bridge. Housed in a con­fus­ing­ly laid out Vic­to­ri­an struc­ture, and milling with peo­ple, the mar­ket is a delight­ful chaos. There has been a mar­ket on the site, or at least near­by, for two thou­sand years. Bur­rough Mar­ket com­bines retail and whole­sale func­tions, and there’s a cer­tain amount of grime. This and the con­stant shout­ing of hawk­ers con­trasts with the anti­sep­tic qui­et that per­vades St. Lawrence Mar­ket in Toron­to. We had some fine Per­sian pastries.

Bur­rough Market

But the main item on our agen­da was Green­wich. Skye and I are both fond of a 2000 tele­vi­sion mini-series called Lon­gi­tude, star­ring Jere­my Irons and Michael Gam­bon. This tells two par­al­lel sto­ries, one in the 18th Cen­tu­ry and the oth­er in the mid-Twen­ti­eth. The first relates the strug­gle of inven­tor John Har­ri­son to per­fect a marine chronome­ter that would allow sailors to cal­cu­late lon­gi­tude at sea. The sec­ond tells the the sto­ry of Rupert Gould, who res­cued the sur­viv­ing chronome­ters from stor­age and got them to work again. The four sur­viv­ing chronome­ters are pro­found­ly impor­tant in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy, among the most sig­nif­i­cant objects in human his­to­ry. They are pre­served in the Roy­al Obser­va­to­ry, Green­wich, in the com­plex of muse­ums asso­ci­at­ed with the Naval Hos­pi­tal and the Obser­va­to­ry con­struct­ed by Christo­pher Wren. The Obser­va­to­ry pre­serves impor­tant trea­sures in astron­o­my, chronom­e­try, and nav­i­ga­tion, while the Nation­al Mar­itime Muse­um hous­es exhibits appro­pri­ate to an Empire built on sea pow­er. Like all of Britain’s nation­al muse­ums, there is no admit­tance charge. I wish peo­ple in Cana­da, who are accus­tomed to pay admis­sion to pub­lic muse­ums, would take note of this. While we have some fine muse­ums, I am gross­ly offend­ed by the atti­tude that imag­ines it appro­pri­ate for us to be charged a fee to look at our own stuff. It is as ridicu­lous as set­ting up a pay toi­let in your own home.

Christo­pher Wren’s Naval Hos­pi­tal at Greenwich

Green­wich Observatory

One of John Har­rison’s Chronometers

Natasha, Skye and I dined at a Pan­jabi restau­rant on the Kil­burn High Road. The cur­ry was bland com­pared with what would be served in Toron­to, which Skye said was typ­i­cal of Lon­don taste.

The flight home was marked by an unusu­al clear­ing of the skies over Kalaal­lit Nunaat, so I got a mag­nif­i­cent view of the Green­land Ice Cap.

My trip had been hur­ried, and I sel­dom stayed long enough in one spot to real­ly appre­ci­ate what I was see­ing, but, as always, I was hap­py to be back home in Cana­da. My cat, Enkidu, had sur­vived a week of being locked indoors with­out too much trau­ma. I was now con­demned to return to infe­ri­or fish and chips, but I could again eat cur­ry with the prop­er fire in it. I had picked up a bot­tle of Bel­l’s Scotch at Duty Free, pru­dent­ly pass­ing on the chance of pur­chas­ing a ₤6,000 Isle of Skye. I had the whiskey, some gen­uine Orca­di­an oat­cakes and cheese, a bot­tle of Orkney’s Red Mac­Gre­gor (“Five thou­sand years in the mak­ing!”), and a gen­uine Match­box lon­don bus, made in Eng­land in 1972, not a Tai­wanese knock-off. These will con­sole me as life returns to its tepid norm.