Swan Tower

The last set from the question post. Thanks to everybody who participated!


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stevie_carroll asked, Do you have an unlikely favourite place in London (out of your top whatever places in London as opposed to your very favourite place)?

I guess the question is, what makes a place unlikely? I love the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral -- not for any reason having to do with it being a big famous landmark, but because of the way the cathedral's position fits into the City in my head, and the way you can sit on its steps and watch the sun set over the West End and eat your yakisoba from Wasabi or pasta salad from Tesco's for dinner. It's my mental "home" in London. But that might class it as "very favorite," I guess.

I also love the fragment of the old London Wall I found on my first trip and revisited every subsequent time. It's tucked away from the busy roads, and has a lovely bit of garden around it.

I don't know if any of those count as "unlikely," though.

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dmstraylight asked, If a PnP RPG based on the Onyx Court series was produced, what system would you want it to use and why? How about for Doppelganger? Driftwood?

The obvious answer for the Onyx Court is Changeling: The Dreaming, since that's where it came from. But you'd have to do a lot of system hacking at this point to make it work, since Banality doesn't figure into the Onyx Court, and it's kind of a central idea for Changeling; rip that out and the whole thing falls apart.

If not Changeling, then maybe Deliria, which I haven't actually played, but is in my head as a reasonably flexible system for doing faerie-related stuff.

The doppelganger books, I don't have a ready answer for. I have L5R on the brain at the moment, so that's the first thing that leaps to mind (especially with the Void and all), but from what I've seen of shugenja spells, they don't lend themselves to the mixed-Element approach of the witches in my novels. Come to think of it, I have a hard time thinking of any magic system that treats conjunctional effects of that sort as a common thing, rather than an occasional exception, though I'm sure such things exist. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Driftwood, of course, is easy. 1) Grab every gaming core book off your shelf. 2) Drop them on the floor to make a map of Driftwood. 3) Have fun. ^_^

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Aaaaaand that's it for this round of "ask me anything." Tune in at some indeterminate future point for more!

When I was scheduling appointments for this trip, I deliberately left today open, because previous experience told me the preceding week would give me ideas for other things I needed to do -- things not already on the schedule. Unfortunately, the major item on that list just isn't feasible: I can't get to York, make productive use of the Railway Museum archives, and get back in time for my flight tomorrow morning. But I've got plenty of smaller odds and ends with which to fill my day, and those will just have to be enough.

( About those odds and ends . . . )

I had more I wanted to say here, but didn't get a chance to write it down, and now it's gone. As of typing this bit, I'm back home, after two excessively long flights. So I'll close by saying I did two things this trip that I'd never quite achieved before: I killed both a pen and a notebook. Every Onyx Court book gets two little notebooks (Paperchase minis), one for the London trip, one for book-research; I've always used up the majority of the former, sometimes almost all of it, but this is the first time I've actually blown through the whole thing. And I ran out of ink in my pen, too. Which seems like an appropriate note to end on, don't you think?

I have a moment of doubt, when I set out this morning without so mch as glancing at a map -- but my direction sense holds, and I find my way to Covent Garden without a single misstep.

(The Covent Garden area is nigh-impossible to miss, what with all the theatre marquees; the actual square itself is rather more thoroughly buried.)

( Don't click through if you don't want to hear museum designers criticized. )

That makes for a fairly late night, but I don't mind. I feel a bit more like myself today -- got a good night's sleep last night, the first since I arrived here, and had a full day that didn't involve being gimpy. So that's pleasing. Now bedtime, and tomorrow, the police!

So apparently, coming down with a cold isn't enough back luck for one trip. This morning, I did the one thing I must not do:

I twisted my ankle.

Yes, THAT ankle. On my way to the Tower Gateway for the DLR, I stepped on the edge of one of the shallow gutters along the footpath and overturned my foot, in exactly the direction it needs to not go. While it's probably fair to say I did more damage to my nerves than to my foot, that isn't to say it escaped completely unscathed; it is a bit twingy. Still, "a bit twingy" is much less than I feared, in that first instant of blind unreasoning horror. As soon as I could think, I dropped my bag and downed some Advil, and put my foot up on on the seat on the ride out to the West India Quay, and fortunately, the Museum in Docklands is abundantly supplied with portable folding stools. (Also, while I'm sure it's possible to walk out there -- heck, I'm not surprised to see Google tell me it's closer than Chelsea, less than four miles -- no way on God's paved earth was I going to do that, even before the ankle incident.)

So I'm largely okay, more rattled than hurt. But definitely rattled, I must admit.

( Not that I let that stop me. )

Museum days are not terribly exciting to write about, I suppose; most of this post is Ankle Drama. Oh well. Maybe I'll be more exciting when I go to the Linley Sambourne house tomorrow.

I dawdle a little this morning because I have to wait for the Bank of England to open at 9:30, so I can go exchange some old pound notes I brought with me. On the way back from that, I detour on impulse to the Guildhall library, where I waste half an hour waiting for a book that turns out to have gone missing. But the visit itself is not a waste, as the helpful librarian (I've yet to meet a non-helpful librarian at the Guildhall, or indeed at most libraries) tells me the king of thing I'm looking for -- a survey map of London's Victorian sewers -- has been moved to the London Metropolitan Archives. Particularly alert readers will recognize that name from my Ashes-trip adventures in secretary hand. The archives, of course, are in Clerkenwell, and it turns out that on Thursdays they're open until 7:30. I may also be able to get the info I want at Abbey Mills, but it's worth trying this first, because it's closer, and I have a catalogue reference that looks promising. So much for the quiet evening I had planned, eh?

Actually, my whole plan for today is a bit borked. ( Which turns out to be a bit of a theme. )

My feet are feeling rather abused -- though not in any surgery-related fashion -- so I don't know if I will commit the stupidity I'm thinking of for tomorrow. We'll see in the morning, I guess.

By the way, stay tuned for a second non-trip post in a little bit. My hostel has vastly improved its pricing for wireless, so I'm much more able to handle side tasks this year; this is very fortunate, given the things I keep having to take care of. Anyway, I have a question I need answered semi-urgently, but I'll put it in a separate post.

la_marquise_de made me realize I hadn't actually said anything about this publicly.

I'll be making my fourth research trip to London at the beginning of June, arriving late on the first and leaving on the tenth. I don't have my schedule for that planned out yet, but if you are London-local, drop me a line (either here or by e-mail), and I may try to arrange some kind of dinner one night. No promises -- it depends on what the schedule ends up looking like -- but I think it would be fun.

My calculations, via Google Maps, suggest I walked about ten miles that day in Westminster. Which is hardly a world record, or even that impressive in the grand scheme of pedestrian activity -- but it goes some way toward explaining that whole blister thing.

I guess I should have toughened my feet up more before I headed to London.

I will be brief this time, because I didn't actually write notes for most of the day, and indeed had very little that needed note-taking. Because today, it was not so much with the hard work.

Which I probably needed.

( Unless I can pretend being punted on the Cam is hard work . . . . )

Now it is late. I will send to people a few things that need to be sent, and then I will sleep the sleep of the not-terribly-virtuous.

Today, in order to keep myself off my feet as much as possible and avoid the self-detrimental stupidity I might otherwise indulge in, I do something completely alien to me, as least where these research trips are concerned:

I sleep in.

( Because I can only stay out of trouble by staying unconscious. )

I didn't have high hopes for today, when I went to sleep last night. But this has turned out far better than I feared, and there are some good things on the horizon for the back half of this trip.

I'm not going to type up all of my St. Paul's notes, or any of my Geffrye notes; they're just not that interesting. But here's the narrative bits.

( Nothing like religion to start the day off right . . . . )

And that's it for today, I think. It's been days since I got a good night's sleep, so packing it in early isn't a bad idea. By the time I type this up and post it, check e-mail, dump photos, and do a bit of writing-related work, it'll be something like a feasible bedtime, I hope.

Tomorrow, I go west. Unless my plans change. (Which they may.)