Hyde Park & Kensington Gardens

My main aim on Monday afternoon was to go and pick myself up a Paddington Bear from Paddington Station. I grew up reading all the stories about him and what could be more perfect! I do indeed now have a tiny wee bear all of mae own and he is very cute. Unfortunately not snuggable size as they're tourist prices so he's only a little one but he'll look cute on my bookshelves when I get home.
The next destination was the science museum and I decided that it would be far better exercise to walk than take the tube. Therefore, off I headed accross Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park in the brave hope of navigating the acres of random pathways to find my way across to the other side.

I hadn't expected much. One of our customers had rather pooh-poohed them as just a vast expanse of grass. The papers say that normally the daffodils & crocuses have bloomed and passed by now but it's been so cold and so cloudy for so long that they've barely poked their green leaves above the surface. I thought that the parks would be beautiful come summer but nothing much right now. They are, however, beautiful in their own stark, austere way. The trees reach up towards an overcast sky without any adornment yet still provide corridors down which the eyes move. People walk along the paths wrapped up warmly in coats and gloves and scarfs, and only the wee scotty dogs running around and wagging their tails as they sniff the crisp scents seem not to feel the chill in the air. The willows lean their branches over water that mirrors the skies and the fountains seem to echo the cold rather than contrast a summer's heat. But it is beautiful.

I didn't get round to the Princess Di memorial but I did see the Peter Pan one. It's quite lovely and he does so well capture and immortalize the Victorians. It was they that helped to introduce, create and form our current conceptions of childhood. Before children were in many ways simply small adults that helped with their share of the work and that it was hoped would survive to maturity. It was industrialization, commercialization, the rise of trinkets and luxury items in France (which spread to Britain) and their dissemination and cheap copying for the working classes, urbanisation & th rise of the bourgeois that all helped to contribute towards new ideas of 'middle-class', the role of women and also of children. The push for child slavery laws and for children to be treated differently tied into new ideas of how children should be treated. Thus rose the ideas of innocence, of cuteness & a sor of miniaturization & sanitization of the world. The Good Folk became tiny fairies to be used in pantomine and children's nurseries in carefully bowdlerized folk tales. What more could they desire than a tiny Tinkerbell and Peter Pan, the epitomy of the childhood that they wished to create yet held within a story that teaches that all stages in life must come to an end, society must be conformed to and in the end all boys must grow up to be men and girls - well they get to stop at playing house and practising needlework to do it for real.
In saying that though, the story has a very real appeal and nostalgia for us still and these Victorian romanticised notions of what childhood is like.
(I also like Hook & Finding Neverland).

Actually, I managed to get lost in Hyde Park (thank you hon, I know that you're laughing with me rather than at me, really :P). Sad but true, I ended up essentially going in a circle and ending up back near where I started. Conveniently this was near another tube entrance so I decided to just take the Underground to...the Science Museum.