UK 2022: 221B

We start our first full day in London with a visit to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, located not quite at 221B Baker Street, a fictitious address even when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originally introduced the character of the world's most famous detective. (Fortunately, the museum has been kind enough to fake up a doorway for the Instagram crowd.)

The museum combines a fascinatingly detailed recreation of Holmes and Watson's bachelor residence with set pieces recreating their most famous cases. The recreation hits the high notes from the stories such the tobacco filled Persian slipper on the mantle and the queen's initials punched out on the wall in bullet-holes (one would expect the neighbours to complain about this sort of thing) and fills in the rest with appropriate and authentic artifacts from the era.

Although Sherlock Holmes doesn't identify as either SF or fantasy, it's hard to ignore how frequently he shows up in one form or another in genre literature: revealed as the nephew of Vlad Tepes in The Holmes-Dracula File, the second book in Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series; crosscast as queer black FBI agent Sara Holmes in Claire O'Dell's near-future Janet Watson Chronicles; investigating the Great Old Ones for James Lovegrove in The Cthulhu Casebooks; mismanaging magical investigations in the Warlock Holmes series, by G. S. Denning; and in innumerable other novels, short stories, guest appearances, and offstage references.

For conveniently short examples, the curious reader can sample Poul Anderson's The Martian Crown Jewels, featuring Martian consulting detective Syaloch, whose second floor lodging is located on The Street of Those Who Prepare Nourishment in Ovens, and Neil Gaiman's Hugo-winning A Study in Emerald, featuring a consulting detective, a wounded Afghanistan war veteran, and a queen named Victoria, none of whom are who you think they are.

- Sid

UK 2022: The Pandemic Run.

In four hours, Karli and I leave for London. It's our first trip by airplane since February 7th, 2020, when we returned from Disneyland, just under the wire before the pandemic clamped down on international travel and only a few weeks before we all started working virtually via VPN and Zoom - at least, all of us who were lucky enough to be able to do so.

The UK has removed a lot of its restrictions, but we're still treating London as hostile territory, at least in terms of the pandemic. It all feels a bit like a near-future cyberpunk scenario written by William Gibson - masking up for the airport and the flight, producing our vaccine passports along with our regular passports, certifying that we haven't visited any red zones before our entry into England, and planning COVID-19 tests so that we can persuade Customs and Immigration to let us back into Canada in a week. (Although, given that the United Kingdom is currently being battered by one of the worse storms in 30 years, comparisons to Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather are equally appropriate.)

Cue the techno theme music - we're starting our run. 

- Sid

"Would you like a jelly baby?"

One week to go before we depart on our trip to England, and at the moment we are still planning to do the trip.  In preparation, I asked an English co-worker if she'd like me to bring anything back for her - crisps, chocolate bars, cheap tights from Primark*, anything like that.

She thought for a moment and asked for jelly babies.  Sadly, in spite of her English origins, she was unaware that the offer of a jelly baby was the characteristic conversational gambit of Tom Baker's 4th Doctor**.  Fortunately someone has already created collated evidence of this very English approach to breaking the ice:

- Sid

P.S.  It turns out that my co-worker had never seen Tom Baker as the Doctor, arguably the most popular of the portrayals of the last Time Lord - sic transit gloria mundi. 

* As recommended by another English employee when Karli and I were in London for our honeymoon.

** And, apparently, a number of other Doctors at least once.