Some errors of fact in this post have been corrected.

The 6th of February 2006, my wife's cousin Andrew Chamblin passed away. Mr. Chamblin was an extraordinarily gifted researcher in the field of theoretical physics, as well as an accomplished mountaineer. At the time of his death, he was serving on the faculty of the University of Louisville & University of Kentucky/Louisville. I had heard many wonderful stories about him before hearing that he had died, which came as a severe shock since he was only 36. However, I never had the opportunity to meet him.

There were two memorial services for Andrew, one at Christchurch College, Oxford (where he spent a year working with Roger Penrose) and the other at Pembroke, where he completed his Ph.D. Now, this is an awkward thing to say, but owing to my fairly tenuous relationship to Andrew, and owing to Andrew's exceptional achievements in theoretical physics, Laura and I reaped what might be described a host of tremendous benefits. For one thing, we had an opportunity to drop everything and travel to Oxford and Cambridge. There, we were introduced to Andrew's family, who are some astonishingly nice people. We attended services in chapels that would ordinarily have been off limits to us, and we were given a guided tour of one college by Prof. Gary Gibbons. It was a peculiar situation I have encountered often.

We arrived in London and immediately boarded a train for Oxford. I had been warned that it was miserably cold and wet in England. It was no such thing. It was hot and humid. I observed there something that surprised me slightly, as well: the pound. It has a purchasing power in England roughly comparable to about $0.80-.95 for the items we tended to buy. Yet, as everyone knows, the pound costs about $1.85 on forex markets. So travelling in the UK was stupendously expensive, with items like hotel accommodations or cab rides approximately twice what they cost in the USA (factoring in exchange rates & fees). This pattern appeared to hold for items like rental property in the smaller towns we visited.

I was favorably impressed with most of what I saw: a huge endowment of splendid old buildings, particularly the Houses of Parliament. In fact, I thought the latter was the most impressive building I've ever seen. Of course, I was a little embarrassed to post my pictures, since I knew Wikipedia would have a good collection, as does Flickr. (I had thought the structure was so iconic it was impossible to take an interesting photo of Big Ben. Wrong. Wrong again.)

London also has the British Museum, which really does require more than the say we spent in it (we were somewhat enervated from the heat). There's nothing comparable to its collection of ancient Greek art, since it includes the Elgin Marbles. However, having access to other people's photos online made us even more desultory as tourists, as one might expect.