Today, though at the time of writing it’s actually yesterday, involved a trip to the Greenwich Observatory, primarily because of this;

Seen in a slightly more comprehensible form here;

It took me a while to get moving in the morning, and I detoured past St. Pancras Station (phone, will you please stop auto-correcting that? it’s not clever; everyone already knows what Pancras is spelled like) to figure out where the Eurostar leaves from, then King’s Cross, to see whether I could see platform 9.75. (sorry for going decimal; the phone won’t let me do fraction characters)

Finding the National Maritime Museum & the Greenwich Observatory was a matter of following the signs, and then heading towards the big thing on the hill when the two ‘Observatory’ signs turned out to be facing each other.

They had, as part of an exhibition on the problem of Longitude, an artistic exhibit called Longitude Punk’d, with historical Steampunk approaches, one of which used the remarkable memory of elephants.

There was also a time-travelling Astronomer Royal, Maskeldyne, or at least an impersonator, talking about the Longitude prize & the various methods, including one involving sympathetic magic & a dog.
That one was real.
And didn’t work.

I took the precaution of starting my tourism at the top of the hill, so that everything would downhill from there, and it paid off nicely.
Down in the museum was the rest of the Longitude exhibition, the serious bit concerning the problem, the various unworkable, unlikely, and fiendishly difficult approaches, and the sensible solutions; Lunar Observation, and an accurate Clock.
Included in there was a small part of Babbage’s Difference Engine, which would have made the calculations needed for Lunar Observation to get the time in Greenwich easier to produce, if it had been completed.
There were also a number of Harrison’s clocks, carefully restored & really complicated, though they did get smaller & more clock-looking over time.

On the way out, I spotted this, which I am at a loss to explain;

And this, last seen with a crashed alien spacecraft in front of it;

Oh, and this is outside of the Maritime Museum;

After all of that, I wandered back to the hotel for a bit, before heading out on a journey of great gaming significance.
First stop was to pick up a copy of the Atomic Robo RPG, which I managed, and the next was to track down this place,

…, because it amused me to do so. (It’s part of The Kerberos Club RPG setting)
Helpfully, there’s the Union Jack flying, or at least dangling, on the building in the photograph.

Along the way I spotted this, which I’m assured is a historical landmark.
Presumably it’s somewhere behind, or under, the people having their pictures taken upon said historical landmark.

This sort of thing happens a fair bit; I eventually gave up on getting a photo of an official GMT clock, with helpful official distance measure devices, at the observatory, and settled instead for one in which two tourists are very pleased to be standing before this august piece of scientific history.

If you look carefully behind them, you’ll note that you cannot see the Greenwich Meridian. It’s OK; I took a close-up.

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One question eludes me.
Why the hell is Nando’s, of all places, the one packed-out food place around Euston Station at 7pm? I’m talking a line just to get to the counter, never mind to get a table.

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I also found this, mostly by accident.