Congratulations!

[liv]

...To nou on turning 40! nou organized a most excellent celebration, including walking under the Thames through Woolwich foot tunnel. I did not know there was a tunnel under the Thames, but nou is really good at paying attention to things like that.

And then we spent the afternoon in the Greyhound pub, a proper trad drinking hole sort of pub, not ye olde, not hipster, just a place where you can sit and talk and drink lager. It was basically too hot to move, though a few people did manage some walks and visits to the local artillery museum. Me, I just had fun talking to nou's excellent crowd of friends. Walking people, geeks, local history people, and a bunch of people from Oxford who all have second-degree connections to me. I was in extrovert heaven, in spite of the heat.

We moved on to a Chinese restaurant in Surrey Quays, Noodle Family. It wasn't in fact the restaurant that nou was expecting in that location, though they confirmed it was the same place when she made the booking. But it served very very tasty food, including things like thousand year eggs and sea-spiced aubergines and Chinese style potato salad made out of raw lightly cooked grated potato in vinaigrette.

I headed to nanaya and alextiefling's after the meal. And in that part of south London it's often easier to get around by bus rather than train or Tube, so I ended up with a change that involved walking past the restored Cutty Sark at sunset. So I got an evening and morning of chatting and catching up with good friends I don't see often enough, as well as being enchanted by their two young kids, the older of whom is just about learning to talk.

...And to adam_in_rabbinical_school whose username is no longer accurate, as he is now Rabbi Adam. The ordination service at Southgate Progressive was amazingly moving; the focus was on the wonderful friendship between our two newest rabbis. And R' Mark Solomon was leading the singing, which is always a treat.

I met up with jack before the service for lunch at a very good Lebanese place, Warda, and for a chance to chat as we haven't seen eachother in three weeks, for various reasons. And the service was, as these things are, full of old friends, including pseudomonas's parents. We stayed on for a reception and dinner, and by about 7 pm I'd just got to the point where I couldn't deal with being out and about for one moment longer. So jack drove us home, and being in my husband's car on the way home is enough like being in my own space that I started to unwind. And we had a couple of hours before bedtime to sit on our new sofa and drink tea and chat (mostly ranting about Princess Celestia and about Git). It is so, so good to be home.

Comments

[vatine]

There's at least five tunnels under the Thames that I know of.

One is the Woolwich foot tunnel (navigated multiple times on foot). There's the Blackwall Tunnel (navigable by car or bus, I've done it in cars multiple times, cannot recall if I've done it in a bus), the Rotherhithe Tunnel (navigable by car and, I believe, by foot; only been through it in cars), Brunel's Thames tunnel (now where the Overground goes from Shadwell to Canada Water; navigable by train, done that) and whatever it's called that carried the Waterloo & City Line between Bank and Waterloo.

I should double-check if my remembered pedestrian walkway in the Rotherhithe Tunnel is actually there (and keep an eye out for TfL having another "last pedestrian tour" through Brunel's tunnel).

[vatine]

Seems as if Google Maps thinks that the Rotherhithe tunnel is navigable by foot. Also seems as if Brunel's Thames tunnel is more directly between Wapping and Rotherhithe.

[liv]

Thank you, good facts! I did in fact know about the Blackwall Tunnel (and the tunnel part of the Dartford crossing), and that some of the Tube lines cross the river underground. But I didn't know there was a foot tunnel at all, and now I have learned about Brunel's tunnel.

[vatine]

Oh, yes, the Dartford tunnel! Been through that one (in a car) as well. There's also a foot tunnel somewhere around Greenwich (basically between Greenwich and, uh, Mudchute? No, Island Gardens.
Edit: Also, tube tunnels Canning Town - North Greenwich, North Greenwich - Canary Wharf and Canary Wharf - Canada Water.

Many many many tunnels. And I think there's a new one being built somewhere around Silvertown.

[alextiefling]

And tube tunnels Pimlico-Vauxhall, Westminster-Waterloo, Embankment-Waterloo (two sets), Bank-Waterloo as previously mentioned, and Bank-London Bridge. DLR tunnels Island Gardens - Cutty Sark and King George V - Woolwich Arsenal. The new one is Crossrail: City Airport - Woolwich.

More obscurely, there is a service tunnel directly under the Thames Barrier, but I imagine this is probably the hardest Thames tunnel to get access to.

[liv]

Ooh, yay comprehensive list of tunnels! And one under the Thames Barrier, that's very exciting.

[vatine]

And I go through the Waterloo-Westminster tunnel pretty much every day. I don't know if I've been through the DLR tunnel (George V - Woolwich Arsenal) yet, it certainly wasn't finished when I last worked at East India Dock and had a client with lots and lots of site visits needed, down the Arsenal way (thus the multiple uses of the foot tunnel, but on the whole I prefer the ferry).

[liv]

Yay, I really like it when I make an offhand comment about things I know little about and my readers turn out to know lots. Now you mention it I think I may have been through the Greenwich one, we used to go to the Observatory when I was a kid and did lots of walking along the river around there, and maybe one time we crossed under the river too.

[pseudomonas]

Hang on, what were my parents doing there?

[liv]

Um, mostly complaining that you don't talk to them often enough... To answer your question less literally, R' Emily did some of her training at their synagogue, so they were there supporting her.

[pseudomonas]

Oh, yeah, they do that a lot. S-i-L points out that the telephone works in both directions...

[mathcathy]

There is something fabulous about being at home, isn't there?

I find I can go to quite some inconvenience to be at home rather than having to stay somewhere else for one or two nights.

[liv]

I normally don't mind too much being away from home too much, but a whole weekend from Saturday morning to Sunday evening, with the only break being when I was actually asleep, was a bit too much. But it's also true that now I have a home with jack in Cambridge I miss it much more than I used to miss other places I've lived, where I never felt strongly rooted. And it happens that I stayed in Keele last weekend, and went away the weekend before that, so it has been a while.

[nou]

Thank you for coming, and thank you for this marvellous post!

The potato dish wasn't actually raw, just very lightly cooked. There's more about this dish on my Chinese menu blog, including links to a few recipes.

[liv]

Aha, thank you. I know I had read about the potato salad before but I had forgotten the details. I continue to love the ways you're so organized you can dig out exactly the relevant Chinese menu post.

[lovingboth]

Lots of tunnels under the Thames :)

Greenwich also has a foot tunnel.

[liv]

I suppose there are, really; I knew there were lots for Tube and rail, but I'm surprised it was worth the engineering effort to build them for pedestrians. Though I suppose out to the east bridges would be pretty challenging too, and you need to be able to get across the river somehow...

[davidgillon]

Possibly reflects the low capital overhead of throwing swarms of Irish navvies at the problem in Victorian times.

There's probably a thesis in there for someone on the intersection of social history, economics and engineering.

[liv]

Yes, I can imagine cheap labour would have been part of the calculation. And building tunnels does seem to have been an important application of that social situation.

[davidgillon]

I actually only made half the point I originally intended to, and you've very nearly picked out the bit I missed.

What I meant to say was that there's an intersection of social history, economics and engineering that potentially shapes engineering solutions to only be valid for one moment in history. Foot tunnels have pretty much passed out of the engineering toolbox, even though technically we're more capable than ever of building them, but economically the hire a swarm of navvies solution doesn't work anymore, and the buy a tunnelling machine solution works more economically efficiently for larger bore tunnels and oh, fascinating interactions to ponder.

(Including whether my great-grandfather was one of said Irish navvies, I know he ended up running a pub in Blyth, where the next couple of generations of the family were raised, but why he moved from Cork to Northumberland has never been clear)