London, Gloves and Guineas

I had a tutorial at the London School of Economics today for my Open University geology course, Understanding the Continents. I had to get up at some unearthly hour to get all the animals up - including the children. Having thrown Tristan, Amber and Rosie at my parents with a couple of dozen croissants as a contribution to breakfast, I got to the station, boarded the train and settled myself down with my knitting. The conductor came past and said he was very impressed, and that knitting was 'a lost art' :-) I realised afterwards that my gloves were on my lap, the gloves that I got from Great Dixter last year:

whereas what I was actually knitting was some little mini mittens...I have a nasty feeling he thought I'd knitted my gloves! Oops.

The tutorial was great, and I met Dr Jason Harvey who is about my age and has done a huge number of exciting things but hey, I bet he doesn't own ducks. He went through the basics of geochemistry and ternary phase diagrams and got all excited about peridotite, it was fab. Although I did get a bit lost trying to find the loos before the lecture so frankly I was pleased to make it back to Room 3.21 to be honest. I also met a couple of people I knew from other courses which is always nice. I hadn't seen Steve since we did a Summer School at Malham Tarn and we spent our time freezing out on the moor; he's from Kent so it was a bit disconcerting for us soft Southerners to have snow in May. Anyway, I charged back to London Bridge having elbowed my way through all the Christmas shoppers and got back in daylight, so the poultry had a leg stretch.

I cleaned out all the animals yesterday, so while I was doing the guinea pig hutch, we made up a little run for them to have their first taste of grass:

There was a lot of squeaking but they did have a bit of a nibble on some clover. Rose then brought them in to the lounge for a cuddle, and ended up with a sort of guinea pig neck-warmer. She said they were a bit tickly!