Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

Those don't look like official cycling shorts to me. Just a group of girls following their tour leader. Ah, oui! Time for a photo! If only they had French berets. I can't decide which of these photos to put on my Instagram.   Any suggestions? Connecting with Dreaming of France

If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings.  Here are the previous days . Piccadilly Line, Day 38. We spent last week exploring the Covent Garden area, this week we'll hit the British Museum, trying to reserve some energy to explore Bloomsbury, the area made famous for being the meeting place of the Bloomsbury group, an informal gathering of artists, writers and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Big day ahead so let's get started. It's just a half mile to the British Museum, most famously home to the Rosetta Stone, which dates to 196 BC. The face of the large rock— 3′ 9″ x 2′ 4″ x  11″—is inscribed with a decree affirming the royal cult of King Ptolemy V on the...

Image via © TfL, from London Transport Museum Collection Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings.  Here are the previous days . We're following the Piccadilly Line path. This is Day 37. "All I want is a room somewhere Far away from the cold night air. With one enormous chair, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?" Most of you probably recognize the lyrics to Wouldn't it be loverly? from My Fair Lady . Can you hear Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle the Covent Garden flower girl singing her heart out. The location? The Royal Opera House aka Covent Garden.  Once upon a time the area also housed a fruit and veg market—as seen in My Fair Lady as well as Hitchcock's Frenzy —but the area became so congested, the market was r...

Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings.  Here are the days that came before . TOday we're still walking the Piccadilly Line route. This is Day 36. Okay, enough with lolly-gagging at Trafalgar. Last week  I flashed back to hanging out with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square with my big bro. Time to get back to the tour. Time to get inside the National Gallery and my timing couldn't be better.  Painters' Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck is on exhibit through September 4th. The exhibit looks at paintings that artists such as Freud,  Matisse, Degas, Leighton, Watts, Lawrence, Reynolds, and Van Dyck themselves owned.  The why, whether for inspiration, to support a fellow artist, as a financial investment or even, what the National Ga...

I’m taking a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings.  Here are the days that came before . Close to the Piccadilly Line. This is Day 26 When we left off the virtual walk last week, next door at London’s Natural History Museum , I posed the question, should I stay or should I go? Stay in this museum rich district or go back to the Picadilly line and follow the track for 10,000 steps?  The question was rhetorical. How could I be this close to the Victoria & Albert and not go inside? Calling itself the world’s leading museum of art and design, looking akin to an Ivy League university, the museum could easily stand in for an institute of higher learning. Paintings, photography, textiles, jewelry, theatre, architecture.  The V&A delves into them all all. We c...