Caen Wood

Went to see Kenwood House today. Beautiful place just up the road, that I'd never visited in 10 years I've lived in this area. They play classical concerts every summer there, and I've promised myself that this summer I will go and see at least one!
Talking about shows, on Sunday dad and I went to see Havana Rakatan, Cuban dancing, at the Peacock Theatre. I felt a bit cheated at first, as the female dancers all came on looking gorgeous with dazzling smiles, while the blokes entered the stage looking so miserable they'd have given Posh's pout a run for its money. To make it worse, they started stripping only to stop at their flies! All was forgiven when they returned on stage a few minutes later with tribal skirts showing gorgeous legs and interesting lunch boxes :)))

Anyway, back to Kenwood House. We visited the house and its collection of paintings including Turners, Vermeers, Rembrandts (although we missed those as they were upstairs and we took so long on the ground floor that when we tried going up it was closed). They currently have an exhibition on the abolition of slavery, appropriate for this house that belonged to William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield, solicitor and judge, the first to rule in favour of a slave in 1772.



Then we had a walk in the grounds, coming across an oak tree which was felled by the storm in January. I was a bit surprised as I don't remember such a great storm - although I'm so dippy some times that I probably wouldn't realise there was a storm unless the roof

flew from over my head.

Yesterday I bought a wonderfully fluffy bathrobe at the N1 shopping centre. I tend to avoid it as it's full of shops where I'd leave my entire salary, but we walked past it on our way from buying a new cooker (kindly donated by dad). It will be delivered next week, now I only need to work out how to connect the pipe to the gas without blowing up the whole block.

Dad's leaving tomorrow morning... I'll miss him!

Royal Albert Hall

One of my favourite venues, I just love that place.

I went there the other night for a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
performance of Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Violin Concerto and
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I would have gone
just for the latter, the rest was a bonus. We got the cheapest
tickets, £5 to perch in the rafters and have a bird's eye view of the
whole venue, offered as "restricted view". In fact, we got a very
good view of the stage too (although I wasn't bothered as I'm not
really worried about that for a classical concert).
And for the first time I heard Pictures at an Exhibition live in its
classical version, rather than as played by ELP. The guys at the back (horns and percussions) looked like they were having a ball - very enjoyable :)))

Parthenogenesis

The other day I was reading about this female hammerhead shark that
gave birth a few years ago, while in captivity and with no apparent
male assistance. Initially there were various theories as to how the
baby shark came to exist, including that the mother had had sex while
in the wild until three years previously and she'd stored the sperm,
but now scientists have found that its DNA only matched that of one of the
females kept in the tank, and that no male DNA was anywhere to be
found. Sadly, the pup was killed almost straight away by a stingray,
before keepers could remove it from the tank.

Now I wonder if my GP would offer this hypothesis when I ring him
about my period being two weeks late (after all, he did suggest "old
age" as the cause of my itchy skin a couple of years ago),
considering that there's no males to be found around my parts either
- although not 'cos of captivity, rather a personal choice. Well, he
might try... and considering that my usual PMT starts about a week
before I'm due, and that now I've had it for a total of three weeks,
he might find that "Jaws" aren't the only ones that can rip your
limbs off.