Cowes!

Why have I lived my life so far without ever coming to the Isle of Wight?  Admittedly it's been on my visit-list for a long while, for reasons that should transpire over the next couple of days, but I hadn't realized that I was stepping straight into a picture-perfect Georgian and Victorian small seaside town, that in lots of ways seems caught in a timewarp, but also has lots of little restaurants, feeding yacht people, and the lovely little hotel where I'm staying tonight.

Here's its bar,

and here's the view from my window on what, admittedly, might have been an atypically sunny day.

And this gives you a sense of its status as a metropolis ...

Cowes also has a lovely long seaside walk, with huge container ships and liners coming into Southampton in front of one, and, here, a very pretty fountain, given to Cowes by George Robert Stephenson - cousin of the engineer Robert Stephenson - to celebrate the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandria of Denmark in 1864.  Yes, it does say "Keep the Pavement Dry," which was its hopeful temperance message (cf bar, above).

Then there are some rather fine lions on the Egypt Esplanade.  I was all ready to write about the Esplanade as a Sign of Empire - and then I read a plaque saying that it was supposedly named after some Roma - then called Gypsies, and elevated into Egyptian - who had an encampment here (no word about what happened to them).

Back in London, this morning, here's a weirdly melancholy figure staring from a window.