Back in Germany. London continued to be great until the last minute. Lunch with kathyh at the Tate Modern was lovely, and we had a great stroll afterwards. Sunshine, wind, the Thames sparkling, and this kind of conversation:

Kathy spots Drake's Golden Hind, mentions Nelson's Victory, which sets off Nelson talk.

S: Is it true that the navy had posters with Emma Hamilton being described as public enemy No.1 as late as the 1920s?
K: It might be. It was like with any of the women who married one of the Beatles.
S: Though at least they weren't naive enough to leave them as legacies to the nation.

At which point both of us looked at each other, struck by the same thought.

K: John would have!
S: He so would have, if he had remained in Britain. Left Yoko as a legacy to the nation!
K: He would have.

On Wednesday evening, I went to the Globe, which has changed directors since the last time I was there, and watched Coriolanus. I kept wondering why Caius Martius himself was vaguely familiar, and then I looked him up in the programm; Jonathan Cake, who had played Oswald Mosley in Mosley. Where he was very different, and so I was impressed. Mind you, Coriolanus is pretty much insufferable, but the production brought out a black humour I had not really noticed when reading the play.

Thursday was spent packing, meeting kangeiko for breakfeast, finally getting a ticket for the exhibition of Michelangelo's drawings, meeting londonkds for tea, watching said drawings and racing to the airport, only to hear the flight was delayed. Which left me more time contemplating the drawings, which were beautiful and so incredibly detailed sometimes just pieces of a shoulder, or an arm; and I thought andrastewhite and artaxastra would have loved the fact the texts pointed out both M.'s homoerotic loves and the fact that the Renaissance saw sexuality not in terms of gay, hetero, bisexual. Also, I was chuffed for some reason upon discovering Michelangelo addressed his father, Lodovico, as "charissimo padre" in his letters. And there was the sheer magic of seeing those reddish or black lines forming words or figures or fragments of the human body, somehow more real in sketch form than up there on the ceiling.

Arriving back home last night, completely exhausted, I discovered more reasons to love fandom:

The Busy Griefs, a fantastic post-X2 story by karabair, and The Siege of Jericho, which is yahtzee63 taking on Sydney and Sloane pre-pilot-of-show in Alias. gentilhomme wrote a fantastic Jack Bristow ficlet for fandom_muses, The Apprentice, about the first time Jack tortured someone. Last but not least, eirena completed my happiness by making two beautiful banners for my fandom_muses roleplaying Sloane journal (scroll down a bit, as this is a sponsored journal). Much like my muse, I had a slight problem choosing and rather than throwing one in the fire/glass table, I picked both and and will be using the second one for this journal as soon as eirena has finished modifying it (she promised a surprise twist for my personal use)...

ETA: And the shiny new layout of these very pages is up!