Loyal readers, my super amazing wife and I have been on another vacation so as I am sure you are all overjoyed to hear that means you all get another set of lengthy writeups about our various adventures on said vacation. This one should be good though; it was a lot of fun for us and therefore I am sure it will be a lot of fun for you to read about.

Our destination this time was the UK, more specifically London and Bath and then swaths of Scotland before ending up in Shetland for Shetland Wool Week. But first we had to get to the UK, which went largely pretty smooth except that the airline misplaced my super amazing wife’s suitcase for a while. This meant she was wearing my socks and sweatpants the first day, but I do that every day so it must not be so bad. They eventually delivered the bag to our hotel a day later, which like, I think the traffic can get bad in London but it’s not that bad.

Anyway we had arrived in the morning after an overnight flight, which meant that we were dazed, confused, and not necessarily in our own clothes as we set out into the bright London afternoon (the weather was stunningly good the whole time we were in the UK, though almost everywhere we went people were telling us how bad it had been just a week before, so we had good timing). After fortifying ourselves with lunch (Chinese food, very culturally appropriate for the UK I know) we arrived at our very first destination: Novelty Automation.

For those poor souls not in the know, Novelty Automation is the project of the engineer and artist Tim Hunkin. I learned of the esteemed Mr. Hunkin via his YouTube channel, where he has a series of videos sharing his practical engineering knowledge, which he applies to (among other things) making the arcade machines which populate his arcade. I tried to explain this all to my super amazing wife to justify dragging her to an obscure street in London (conveniently close to the hotel though which is why we went there first), but she didn’t get it until we walked in the door.

But once we got in there I think she was sold. It is a cramped, tiny little alcove of a shop but tons of fun. It was crowded when we got there (like eight or ten people inside) but I got us some tokens and we started playing games. Since I had seen the videos it was like meeting celebrities in real life. Right inside the door was the game that my super amazing wife was most enamored with. She is, as discussed many many times here, a big fan of sheep, so she had to have a go at Pet or Meat. We got pet! In retrospect I’m not sure which one she would have preferred. Meanwhile I played The Fulfilment Center and won a zero-hours contract, and My Nuke, where my extensive nuclear training did not come in handy and I dropped several fuel pellets and as a reward got some nuclear waste. Overall the arcade was super fun and I would totally host a birthday party there, which they note is one of the services they provide.

Our time at Novelty Automation concluded our only real big destination on the first day. A big part of the reason we were in the UK and London was honestly to shop and so we spent the rest of the afternoon zooming around to the different sorts of shops we wanted to go to. But not like high end luxury shops mind you, no no, our tastes were niche. I mean not that niche, it was tea and books, two notably popular things. But we were looking at special teas and special books. Destinations included Mariage Frères, which I thought was fine, and Postcard Teas, which I now note bills itself as London’s Finest Tea Store and might just be. It is small but they were very knowledgeable and passionate; while we were there the man behind the counter asked a Chinese lady where she was from and then they talked extensively of the various tea regions around there off the top of his head. We also wandered into TWG Tea at some point because we thought it was Twinings (which we went to another day) but you can give TWG a pass.

As for books our first destination was Cecil Court. My dream in London was that I was going to go to an antiquarian bookstore and then just find all sorts of London Missionary Society books and ephemera for (relatively) cheap because London is where the Missionary Society is from and various people from previous generations would have had their libraries liquidated and people just wouldn’t know what they had but with my extensive knowledge I could pick it all up at cut-rate prices and have the world’s finest LMS library but this did not happen. I was a bit disappointed with the antiquarian book selection overall (this could be my fault I admit) and Cecil Court didn’t seem to have that many bookstores frankly. Though I did pick up a book from Tenderbooks, they were a great little shop. To be completionist we also went to the big Waterstones which was you know a bookstore and then also Hatchards which was pretty nice.

By this point it was late in the day and our feet was killing us so we went on back to the hotel, detouring only slightly to see one final celebrity: