By Laura Grimes

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“Cheese! Where’s the cheese?”

The Pantsless Brother and I say this nearly every time we scurry through the mazes of the Underground trying to find the right train. We feel just like rats.

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It’s time to say goodbye to all the fun we’ve been having. It doesn’t look like the ash cloud is going to favor us with another return to cancel our flights again. I miss Mr. Scatter and the Large Smelly Boys anyway, and JoJo is looking forward to seeing his buddies in the hood.

As I type, The PB and I are sharing one last beer together — the Hobgoblin. Only one beer tonight, not four. And as he put it, “None of that foreplay stuff with the lousy beers. We’re going straight for the (insert sexy word that sounds like origami, but it’s not).”

Before I go, though, I have a couple of quick postcard notes to blog about and JoJo has a few more friends to share. I still have notes for longer stories that I might write up later, but they require a more thinking brain than I’ve had for a few weeks.

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We went to The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre last night because TPB had never seen it before. It was a perfectly enjoyable show. Our seats were so high up I had to pop my ears a couple of times, but they afforded a great view of the balcony below us.

Several minutes before the show started I sat forward in my seat and looked down just in time to see a man with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses walking down the aisle holding a bright red object close to his side. He got to his row, and as he turned his body around to scoot in to his seat, he carefully shifted the object behind him and then to his other side. Then he sat down. The woman sitting next to him leaned over to chat and he presented her with one of the show’s signature red velvet roses.

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I hit the British Museum today while TPB traveled north to Hampstead. He checked out Kenwood House to see paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, J.M.W. Turner, Van Dyke, Thomas Gainsborough, Fran Hals, Joshua Reynolds, Francois Boucher and more.

I could tell about the Rosetta Stone, the mummies, the mind-blowing miniature mosaics and on for forever. JoJo found buddies everywhere he went, but he was camera shy. After I had been there several hours, my feet were tired and it was time to go. But before I left, I made sure to see the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Greece. After I read all the material and gave all the marbles a good glance around, I picked one frieze panel to examine up close:

Then I read the card, which said in part:

The scene is thought to have inspired the poet John Keats to write in his Ode on a Grecian Urn of ‘that heifer lowing at the skies.’

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JoJo found buddies to play with outside the British Museum:

He got a twofer on this one:

JoJo waves goodbye!

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The Pantsless Brother and Mrs. Scatter say buh bye from London. Notice the photo is only from the waist up!