Elementary, my dear Watson

One thing I love about living in England is being able to see the places mentioned in the books, specially when those books were my childhood favourites. So today I decided to visit Sherlock Holmes Museum since I’m re-reading The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes at the moment. It is so tiny! I always imagined Sherlock's rooms to be cramped with various odd things, but much bigger than they are in reality. The English smallness still often catches me by surprise. As expected there were few Russians around. I wonder if Holmes is more popular and more loved there than he is in England. I wish I could re-watch Russian movies with Vasili Livanov as Sherlock Holmes. I can’t imagine him to be any different and therefore struggle to watch movie adaptations with any other actors no matter how good they are.

While I admire Holmes love for observation and logic, my favourite detective will always be Miss Marple. I adore her little English garden and constant tea drinking. Doesn’t it sound like a perfect way to spend ones elder years? (Joan Hickson was perfect in that role). I guess I should research if there are any Agatha Christie museums around.

The smallness of the museum was to my advantage as Cat seems to prefer outdoors and gets restless very fast inside. So after spending about 20 minutes in there I walked from Baker Street to St John’s Wood station via Regent’s Park. I’ve been to Regent’s Park numerous times, however I never been to that part of the park before. Why did I always walk from St John’s Wood station to Baker Street along Park Road instead of going through the park? Strange, very strange. The area on the left of the lake is beautiful, particularly on the warm sunny day like today (supposed to be 20 degrees!). The lake and the islands were teaming with the bird life and Cat was happy to watch flying, swimming, diving, mating birds. Sadly I could only identify doves, swans and ducks for her. The rest had to be labelled as “I think it’s a goose… it doesn’t look like a duck...”, “that looks like some type of stork… well it has long legs and neck, must be stork”. I think next time I’ll bring the camera along, take some pictures and with the help of Collins Bird Guide will try to figure out what are all those birds are exactly. Sounds like a perfect way to spend free time, maybe I can learn the names of most plants and flowers as well. I always wanted to do it, but there was never enough time. As mentioned Cat prefers to be outside, so in a way I’m forced to have time to study outdoors. Motherhood has its own advantages. I’m looking forward to the time when I finally get to play with a train set (one of my childhood dreams) and Meccano.