Medieval Humor and a Night Cruise

Things are getting better here. I'm getting out of the house and doing some exploring, which is helping me manage my grief. I promise I'm not going to write a great deal about Olga today because you all need a break from that subject as much as I do!

But I did have a momentous realization yesterday that has helped me a lot -- my "theory" about her medication causing her more severe symptoms cannot be correct, at least not entirely. I realized yesterday that I wrote on July 9 about her being quite ill the previous day -- and yet we didn't get her medicine in the mail until the afternoon of the 9th. So in other words, she was having breathing and walking problems before her first dose. This is important, to my mind anyway, because it means I am not responsible for making her health worse with medication. It was already happening, and stopping the drugs later would probably not have made any difference.

You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.

So yeah, yesterday I needed to take a long walk and get the heck out of this house. At some point I have to learn to spend time in the flat and garden again, but right now it seems incredibly confining and suffocating. I walked all the way through Primrose Hill and Regents Park and down Tottenham Court Road (above) to the British Museum -- about four miles. I wanted to visit some beloved British artifacts like...

...the Tring Tiles! I've written before about these medieval tiles (c. 1330), which depict scenes from the life of a childhood Jesus. They are frankly hilarious in their depiction of a boyish Jesus who tries to play with his friends and winds up striking them down for minor offenses, only to reanimate them after being scolded.

The museum caption for the above panels reads: "(Left) A boy playfully leaps onto Jesus' back and then falls dead. (Right) Two women complain to Joseph on the left, while Jesus restores the boy to life."

Here we have: "(Left) Corn is being reaped in midsummer. (Right) Parents shut their children in an oven, to prevent them playing with Jesus."

And: "(Left) Jesus makes pools by the River Jordan. A bully destroys one and falls dead. (Right) Jesus restores the boy to life by touching him with his foot."

The Tring Tiles are perhaps my favorite artifact in the whole museum. I wonder how accurately the stories are interpreted, but they are supposedly taken from apocryphal Biblical writings describing the childhood of Jesus -- so perhaps the stories are more fully fleshed out there. (You can read more about the background of the tiles here and here.)

And don't forget the Roman-era pottery beaker featuring penises with wings! Those crazy Romans.

After a couple of hours I took the tube home, and met at a nearby pub with my former co-worker Lindsey, who I haven't seen in a couple of years. (She's been working in Myanmar and Ghana, and is about to move to Brazil.) Long ago, back when we first got Olga, Dave and I met up with Lindsey, her husband Gav and dog Nell for an outing to Hampstead Heath. I wrote about it at the time. Well, Lindsey had to say goodbye to Nell last year, so she and I compared notes on pet grief. When I expressed any reservations about the timing of our decision, she said that it's better to take action a month too early than to wait too long -- which she felt they did with Nell. I guess all of us who make these decisions second-guess ourselves, as some of you have pointed out in comments on my previous posts.

Finally, Dave and I took a dinner cruise on the Thames last night because it was the 15th Anniversary of our Civil Union in New Jersey (back in the days before gay marriage was legal there). We boarded a boat on the Westminster Pier and cruised downriver past Canary Wharf while we had salmon salad, tomato soup and a chicken breast with potatoes and veg. I thought the dinner was perfectly acceptable but Dave (with his chef training) was not impressed. We did have some spectacular views from the boat on the way back, though, which you can see here:

I just left the natural sound on that video, so you'll hear the wind and people talking (including us, occasionally). The first clip shows us passing beneath Tower Bridge and then past the Tower of London; the second shows what appears to be some kind of party atop the Walkie-Talkie building, before zooming in on the Shard and the Monument and passing beneath London Bridge; and the third shows the colorful lights of Southbank, the London Eye and Waterloo Bridge.

I realize I have packed an awful lot of stuff into this blog post, so thanks if you've stuck with me this far! It was quite a day.