Today

[enismirdal]

1. Went to Kew Gardens. Looked for chafer beetles. Found none.

2. Went to Hampstead Heath. Looked for chafer beetles. Found none.

3. Went home, wanted to keel over, but popped to lab to feed bees first. Then keeled over.

4. Found that my favourite takeaway now has a website with secure card payments. Woohoo curry even when I have no cash to hand!

5. Travel all amusingly disrupted by the enormous bomb they found 2 miles down the road from my house. Can we all have three cheers for the heroic bomb disposal expert who took care of it? Now that is skill. I admire that person so very much.

Comments

[melime.livejournal.com]

Travel all amusingly disrupted by the enormous bomb they found 2 miles down the road from my house.

Holy crap!!! D: That's really scary to think that it was just chilling out there for all those years. Wow.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

The East End got pretty heavily battered during WWII - a lot of buildings were flattened (which I think is part of why it's so full of hideous 60s tower blocks now). Our main university building actually has shrapnel scars on the stonework, as do some of the graves in the Cemetery Park down the road (which is now a nature reserve). So I wasn't particularly surprised when they found it, and figured they would get the thing under control. It took a bit longer than they planned, however!

[say-aye.livejournal.com]

O.O! A bomb! 2 miles from your house! Glad it got taken care of! That's really scary, Eni!

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Apparently at one point they thought they might have to evacuate everyone within about a kilometer of the bomb, which could have been as many as 40,000 people! But luckily they got it well under control and only had to move the 6 people who were living in house-boats on the river where it was found, which is very fortunate I think!

I wasn't too worried, since it was such an old bomb and they had their best experts working on it. Nonetheless, it's good to know that they made it safe in the end!

[(Anonymous)]

Obviously even the stereotypical best engineers in Europe don't get it right all the time under pressure.
I think the hideous modern buildings are also due to the ideals of rehousing people even if they hadn't had their houses flattened but merely lived in badly built ones.
Abner