on the ship

more about our voyage later... we are now moving along the coast of england

Four Dinosaurs and a Giant Sloth

Today we visited the Victoria an Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum which is across the street. I especially enjoyed a visit to the dinosaur section.

A dinosaur

Another dinosaur

Another one.

One more dinosaur. Of course I have their names, but it’s too much trouble to add them.
If you want to identify dinosaurs, ask a 4-year-old.

A Giant Sloth

Skeleton of a Giant Sloth from South America

My Previous Encounter with a Giant Sloth

Our visit to the cave of the Giant Sloth in Patagonia in 2017

The Milodon, or Giant Sloth, whose bones are found throughout Patagonia, was hunted by early people, who probably contributed to the extinction of this one-ton beast. The bones of this animal were found in the cave where the statue now stands. For a while, it was hoped that this beast was not yet extinct.

Photos © 2017, 2026, mae sander

The British Museum Part II plus dinner

Artifacts from three burial sites in Britain and one Horned Helmet

The vast wealth of the British Museum is impossible to see in just a few hours. Even in such a short time, I had far too many photos. Today I’m showing the contents of just one display case it, because I found it especially interesting. This case highlights three burial sites from different eras. And then adding one photo of a wonderful horned helmet found in the Thames River. 

A glass vessel from a Roman grave in Britain

Pottery grave goods from St. Albans.

A pair of shoes from one of the graves.

“The three cremation burials whose contents are shown here are of different dates and were excavated in very different circumstances. The late Iron Age grave from King Harry Lane, St Albans, demonstrates that Roman artefacts and customs were already familiar in Britain before the military conquest in AD 43. The grave from Elsenham, Essex, though so disturbed by ploughing that precise recording was not feasible, is important because it contains a very rare and interesting type of enamelled vessel, and is dated by pottery and coins. The other grave-group, from Southfleet, is an early discovery from an important site, and includes another exceptional find, the elegant pair of shoes.”

Horned helmet

Found in the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge, London

150-50 BC

Originally this helmet would have been a gleaming golden colour and decorated with red glass studs. The helmet is unlikely to have been used in battle and was probably a form of ceremonial headdress. The helmet is a very rare find, it is the only Iron Age horned helmet to be found in Europe. The helmet is made from sheet bronze sections held together with bronze rivets.The raised decoration is repeated on the back and front of the helmet.

Dinner with our friends Sheila and John

In the evening we met our friends for dinner at their club. Here are a few photos.

It had been 10 years but when we got together it seemed much less time.
 We started with a drink (sparkling water for all).

The four of us at the table before dinner.

Our meals: lamb chops, bouillabaisse, and curry with rice and salad.

Yesterday was a very busy day! I have many more photos an memories, but this is all I can manage now.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

The British Museum, Part I

The Cowardly Lion?

Horses from Halikarnasos

On our visit to the British Museum today, we spent most of our time seeing the Parthenon Marbles and the other sculptures from around that era. All these sculptures were brought to England around 200 to 250 years ago. Here are some of the horses we saw.

A statue of a horse from the Mausoleum at Halikarnasos, Turkey.

The entire Mausoleum from Halikarnasos is now in the British Museum.

We visited this and other ancient archaeology sites last year when we were in Turkey.

“The Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, designed by the sculptor-architects Pytheos and Satyros, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  The modern word for a monumental tomb derives from the Latin form of Mausollos' name”

Horses from the Parthenon

Here I am, taking a photo of the sculpture.

A Sphinx

Ancient Egypt: Granite sphinx of Taharqo 25th Dynasty, about 690-664 BC

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Morning in Russell Square

Our hotel in London is across from Russell Square. We took a brief walk this morning before out day’s tourist activities begin.

Photos © mae sander 2026

Night and Day

 Overnight to London

Detroit last night: waiting for the overnight flight to take us to London.
Despite having expectations for a pleasant flight, our seats were uncomfortable and the food was icky.

Heading out of Heathrow Airport by taxi to our hotel in London.
If blogger and web access will allow me to do it, I’ll be posting more as our trip continues.

The National Gallery, London

This is a huge museum, and every painting in it is a masterpiece! 
Although we flew all night in challenging conditions, we slept a bit this morning,
and then spent a few hours seeing the wonderful works of art. I’m just showing a few.

Portrait of Cezanne by Camille Pissarro. (1874)

Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Artemisia Gentileschi (1615-17)

The Este Diptych by Ercole de’ Roberti (about 1490)
You can see another museum goer behind the case where this is displayed.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Women in the Kitchen

 

Women in the Kitchen  by Anne Willan, published 2020.

This book tells the story of twelve women who were famous for their cooking, with very enjoyable recipe sections for each of them. I hope to try some of these recipes. I liked reading about Hannah Glasse, Lydia Child, Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Alice Waters, and the others. While some of the subjects of the book are new to me, I have used cookbooks by many of the other authors who appear in this book. 

Illustration from Women in the Kitchen. Note that there is a book open on her table while the woman works at the fire — no doubt a cookbook!

Women in the Kitchen includes many amusing and interesting little facts, such as that The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer “outsold all other American cookbooks of the nineteenth century, its success only checked in 1914 by the outbreak of World War I.”  

I learned about several authors whose works I had only vaguely heard about. Sarah Rutledge (born 1782) for example, was the author of The Carolina Housewife. “By 1847, when Sarah Rutledge published The Carolina Housewife, her only book, she could look back on a lifetime as doyenne of Southern society, featuring rounds of spring presentation parties and languid summer suppers giving way to the festivities of Thanksgiving and the winter holiday season. When she set up house independently in Charleston, she would have been served by slaves.” So her advice on how to run a household is very different from later authors, who address women who had few or no servants!

Predictably, there’s a chapter on Irma Rombauer and her original and insanely successful way of writing a cookbook: The Joy of Cooking. Who doesn’t know this cookbook? By 1974: “No cookbook in American history had achieved such fame. Two decades later Joy of Cooking was chosen by the New York Public Library during their centennial celebration in 1995 as the only cookbook among its 150 most influential books of the century. More than a million copies had been sold by the time the seventh edition was published in 1997. After a series of revisions, a 75th anniversary edition was published in 2006. It contained 1,152 pages and more nearly echoed earlier editions. The urge to modernize was curbed and the teaching text was restored and expanded. As Julia Child put it when she heard about the upcoming anniversary edition: ‘Thanks for putting the joy back in JOY.’”

Women in the Kitchen is a quick and entertaining book to read. I found some of the material new to me, and some very familiar — which is a nice combination, I think. The author keeps her focus on food!

Cooking at our House

Cooking Sunday evening dinner: Alice made salmon with cherry tomatoes. I made au gratin potatoes.

After the Storm

Earlier this week, a violent storm tore through town. Our immediate area was very lucky, but there was quite a bit of damage in a few other areas. The front wall of a skating rink a few miles from here was ripped off by the strong winds, and quite a few cars were crushed by falling trees.

Rain has continued on and off. The weather hasn’t stopped the flowers and flowering trees from continuing their spring blossoming. 

An azalea blossom covered with raindrops.

A fallen tree around a quarter-mile from our house. (Woman walking dog for Eileen’s Critters!)

Cyclists pass by a fallen branch. Photos in the paper show vehicles crushed by much bigger tree limbs.

Ephemeral blossoms on a weeping cherry tree a day ago.
By now most petals have fallen.

© 2026 mae sander — shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

During the Storm?

A Monster worse than Hitler

 

A monster stalks London. It’s 1939, and the Blitz is raining bombs and terror down on central London. But the monster is worse, more dangerous, and less comprehensible. The characters in Francis Spufford’s novel Nonesuch have to deal with this combination of horrors. There’s a very good monster, and believable innocents caught up in a world they don’t really understand. The main character, a woman who was working in a broker’s office, takes charge of the struggle, and a dramatic struggle it is!

The book is pretty good with a combined war story and horror theme, but somewhere in the last 100 pages it takes a long-winded turn, with tons and tons of detail about bombs in London. At this point I had to force myself to keep reading. And when I finished, I felt a bit cheated because the ending… well, it’s not exactly an ending. It leaves the reader unsure, I think. (Maybe I just don’t get it.)

Reading this Week

An old book by Ursula Le Guin 

As I read Ursula Le Guin’s space travel book The Dispossessed, my mind was filled with the
images from the real trip around the moon that took place last month. I picture the story by imagining the view of the earth from near the moon in this live photo, transmitted by the astronauts. However, I didn’t really enjoy Le Guin’s carefully composed details of 1974 era space fiction, and didn’t finish reading it.

A New Book by Francis Spufford

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford interests me because I enjoyed one of this author's earlier books, Cahokia Jazz, which is an alternate-history-detective novel. At the time: December 2024, I wrote a very brief review: "What would the area around St. Louis (where I grew up) be like if all post-European-arrival history had been different? Here's a speculative -- and suspenseful-- fiction about the answer." Now I’m reading Spufford’s next book, and it’s amazing and quite different. I’ll post a review of it when I finish reading.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Blossom Time (Early Edition)

Photos © 2026 mae sander