Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Strange things are afoot at the ROG...

So I was at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich on Saturday with a couple of folk, wandering around geeking at Harrison's (fantastic) clocks, at astrolabes, at Soviet-era precision pendulum clocks, at tourists taking pictures of each other with their feet astride the big metal line buried in the courtyard marking the prime meridian (don't take a GPS along unless you want to be disillusioned, by the way), at the camera obscura.. uh, you get the idea. Geeking, anyway.

And so there's a kind of tour thingy following us around - a clean-cut lad earnestly explaining things like time zones and why Flamsteed never had any money and why Newton was widely considered to be a bit of a tosser by his contemporaries to a group of attentive people. Like tour groups tend to do, in the fairly cramped Flamsteed House they push people before them like a piston as folk scuttle on ahead when the tour appears behind them and the guide starts blah-ing on again.

Now, imagine my surprise when at the end of the tour they all gather in a corner and the guide says "Right! Now, let's see what the Bible says!" or words to that effect and, good heavens (no pun intended), they all whip out their bibles while the guide leads them through a wee homily about how the book of Genesis teaches us about this and that, and how God decided to slow down the pace of development (the time connection, you see) by introducing different languages, and how this bit of St. Paul says this, and so on. It's just as well none of them actually started praying, as nobody would have known where to look - the popular view of religion here is that it's basically your own business and fine between consenting adults in private, but actually showing off your religiousness in public is a little showy in a "Look at me! I'm not going to Hell!" kind of way. And besides, my own limited knowledge of these things tells me that Jesus shares my opinions about praying in public, and he should know. After that they had a bit of a discussion and left.

I'd never seen anything like it before - maybe it would have been completely unnoticed in, say, St Paul's Cathedral, but at an observatory it was certainly a bit of a surprise.