Well, now I know why so many people love London. We spent the last two days exploring the city, and found it to be really fascinating. We saw the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. walked through Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and St. James Park to the Thames. It's quite an experience to see all the famous places like Berkeley Square, Grosvenor Square, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Houses Of Parliament, Big Ben, the Tower Of London and Oxford Street. All over London the streets are lit up by very sophisticated Christmas decorations, even in the small lanes in the inner areas away from the big streets. We took a boat tour along the Thames under all the famous bridges and past Canary Wharf, and then on to Greenwich. When we went into the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich we discovered that there was a big section of it dedicated to Lord Horatio Neson, with a glass cabinet containing the uniform that he was wearing when he was hit by a musket ball in his left shoulder. At the time he had already lost his right arm and right eye in previous battles, and this latest injury in the Battle of Trafalgar killed him.
We had no idea that we were going to come across a connection to Nelson in Greenwich and will now no longer be surprised by any more encounters. Anyone would think that we have been researching all the connections to Nelson for the last 9 months.
Interestingly, I read in the paper the other day that the powers that be are calling for Greenwich Mean Time to be discontinued as the exact reference point for time, because the International Atomic Time is more accurate. It seems that because the Earth wobbles on it's axis at various intervals it slightly changes the position of 0 degrees longitude, which means that the 400 atomic clocks all around the world have to be adjusted by adding a leap second every twenty something years. This is considered to be very tricky and seemingly inappropiate, considering that IAT is more accurate than Greenwich time.
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