A Grand Day Out...

No, Mother, not a post about Wallace and Gromit...*sigh* This is actually a post about my fantabulous day out in London today; for those of you seeking animated Plasticine goodness, alas, you shall remain disappointed. Jog on...

So. Today. Well, not having seen Rich for about a year, what with one thing and another, we decided to meet up in Londinium and it was awesome. Even though he's horrible to me and insults me all the time (love you really!) we always laugh like mad things when we meet up and it's always, always brilliant fun when we get together. We started off at Highgate cemetery, which is incredibly beautiful and really interesting - if you haven't been I strongly suggest you drop by because it's fascinating. It was bloody cold though; trust us to pick the one day of the year when it actually feels like winter!! *insert Game of Thrones-related pun here* But yes...Highgate. It really is amazing; the Victorians certainly knew how to *do* death and some of the tombs and headstones are absolutely staggering. When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, that is how I want to be remembered: with a bloody great big lump of rock carved into a suitably epic memorial to my greatness and how much you are all going to miss me. Pay attention to this, please. You are all to be prostrate with grief at my passing and erect a headstone which adequately reflects your sorrow and despair. Or I'm going to bloody well come back and haunt the lot of you. Just a friendly heads-up, however : whatever goes on your headstone is how you'll be remembered for posterity, most likely by random strangers with cameras, so think very carefully about how you intend to be immortalised!! Some of the inscriptions on the headstones and mausoleums go from the sublime to the ridiculous; I'm not sure you're supposed to convulse into hysterical giggles while walking round a burial ground!

The cemetery itself is split into two sections: the 'newer' East Cemetery, which you can wander round of your own free will and where you will find the burial places of such diverse characters as Karl Marx and the man who invented Hovis, and the West Cemetery, which you can only see by guided tour in order to prevent yourself breaking something vital while wandering around. And to stop you hurting yourselves, too...We had a brilliant guide for the tour; he was really funny but very interesting, and he gets bonus points from me because he agreed to include Lizzie Siddal's grave in the tour so I could go and say hello to my girl. We also got to go into one of the mausoleums, and also one of the other burial tombs where you can see some of the hundreds of lead-lined coffins stacked up. It was incredibly atmospheric, but I found it slightly sad as well; all those people being buried above ground and yet hardly any of the tombs are visited now because the families have either died out or moved away. The East side was more intriguing because there seem to be a lot of 'political' burials all in one area by the Marx memorial - Eastern Europeans and Islamist Communists all buried in the same area; fascinating. I didn't even know there was such a thing as an Iranian Islamist Communist, but that is apparently the Thing-I-Have-Learnt-Today.

Having frozen half to death (boom boom) walking round Highgate, we headed off to the next part of the day - which I didn't know anything about because someone refused to tell me beforehand because it was a surprise or something :P - with a quick detour to Tate Britain so I could say hello to Lizzie properly. And that was when I found out they. Moved. Ophelia. All the Pre-Raphaelite stuff appears to now be shoved on two small walls in one end of one gallery (and Beata Beatrix has been loaned out to a gallery in Russia, so grrrr on that front also); as a result, poor Lizzie-as-Ophelia isn't shown to her best advantage. It's still one of the most mesmerising paintings I've ever seen though, and as an Elizabeth Siddal fangirl it's always a joy to see her.

Then it was onto the surprise: the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, which is held at the Natural History Museum and was a brilliant surprise! But oh. My. Stars. There were some seriously amazing photos in that exhibition, some of them by bloody ten year olds - it's enough to make a girl throw her camera out the window and vow never to take another photo ever again.  Now this:

is a photo I took with the panoramic setting on my camera while in Northern Ireland last year, and I was stupidly-proud of the result.  However, there were people who'd sat in the cold for FOUR DAYS just to get one shot taking part in this contest; FOUR FREAKING DAYS!!  Not only is this completely insane but the photos were INCREDIBLE! Picking a favourite would be really, really difficult because most of them were just beautiful (except for the one inevitable picture of frogs, which had me averting my eyes, although I didn't actually physically run off screaming. This is progress...) but one of the ones that sticks in my mind is this one: a merlin which has just pounced on dinner and looks incredibly peeved that a photographer has dared take its picture while it does so!!

  

I also really like this one of the butterfly:

 

OH!  And how could I forget the picture of the baby chimp?!!

Isn't that just the cutest thing you've ever seen in your life?!!  I mean really, how can you not look at that and go "aww!"  You have no soul otherwise.  It's a fact.

But seriously, there were so many incredible images in the exhibition that it's almost impossible to choose one or two favourites; I'm glad I wasn't judging it.  But it was a fantastic exhibition and a brilliant surprise: I am *so* glad we went because it was just amazing.  Definitely going to have to do this more often, methinks...

Oh, and if you want to see the photos for yourselves, head to the Natural History Museum website where they have a whole section on the competition: you can find it here.  Definitely recommended!!