where the riches of ages are stowed
Okay I had ice cream a few hours ago, so I can continue onward and upward.
Wednesday I didn’t do anything besides class and read. I got convinced to go to a pub down the street with a bunch of people from the halls, but I stayed less than an hour before I came back and continued reading. I read Henry V and finally finished Midnight’s Children and went to bed way too late. Oh, also Oscar noms came out that day, which we checked in between classes. I’m pretty upset about The Dark Knight not getting nominated for Best Picture, but other than that I hadn’t/haven’t really seen enough of the films to get worked up otherwise, except that Benjamin Button doesn’t deserve that many nominations. It was good, but come on it wasn’t life-changing.
Thursday was class day all day. That night, Kari, Manuel and I went to see The Reader, since it’s up for so many awards. It was good; it was a bit of a different take on a Holocaust film, which was interesting, but it definitely felt like an Oscar bait movie. I guess most movies do this time of year. It gets a little old but what are you going to do? After that Kari and I went back to Trent Park and we watched Frozen River at her place, since it’s up for Best Actress and Original Screenplay. Also not really an upper, but I would say that Melissa Leo definitely deserves her nom. That was refreshingly not Oscar bait-like, but the actor who played her older son was not that great and it kind of killed part of it for me. On the shuttle ride back from Trent Park to the bus stop, I was the only person on the coach since it was nearly 1 a.m., so the old driver struck up conversation with his sole passenger. And by conversation, I mean we talked about movies/TV for a few minutes (he cries during Ghost and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), and then he rambled off his story to me about the one time he went to America (Chicago). It was for a girl, and I couldn’t understand half of what he way saying, but I know it ended up in her slapping him, so I ventured to guess that’s why he isn’t eager to return to the States.
Friday was class again, which Kari skipped out on. In our seminar group, the only person who had read Great Expectations had read it four years ago, so we were kind of up a creek when it came to our discussion question and I was proud of myself that I managed to come up with a fairly intelligent sounding answer since no one else was making an effort to (I really want to read that book, and I had read the first couple chapters, but with everything else I had read that week there was no way I was going to make it through another 400+ page book). Of course, any answer in that class sounds intelligent. That night was the “riverboat disco” which Middlesex had set up for exchange/study abroad students to go on and which went up and down the Thames through London. The bottom floor had a bar and tables to chat at, the top floor had a dance floor, and you could also go outside in the freezing air and watch the lights of the city go by. I had a good time, even though it was a little long; by the end everyone was just hungry, tired and ready to get off. There was a lot of dancing to Indian (and some American) techno music on a dance floor that smelled heavily of B.O. Apparently there is a large number of Indian students at the Hendon campus, and they all seemed to know the songs quite well, so us Americans/Europeans were off dancing in the corner not knowing the words until some Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears came on. The views from the boat were pretty spectacular though.
London Bridge…
is quite stable, actually.
You were supposed to be able to actually see Big Ben in this, but Suzy’s arm quite ruined that.
The next day, a group of 10 girls from my hall went to the Portobello Road Market, while the guys went to play football (how wonderfully stereotypical). The street looked nothing like the backlot on which they filmed Bedknobs and Broomsticks (and nobody was dancing!), but that didn’t stop me from singing the song in my head all day long. It was incredibly busy, but quite interesting as well; it was definitely anything and everything a chap can unload. Old tea kettles, cameras, books, magnifying glasses, old and new clothes and bags, fruit, fish, flowers, you name it.
Adorable houses on Portobello, including one a few down from these in which George Orwell lived.
Heaven?
No, wait, here’s heaven. I bought one of the “1,000 seeds” loaves and it’s pretty delicious.
These are for mommy. I would’ve shipped them but I don’t know how well they would hold up on the transatlantic journey.
And despite the bit of London we were in, there was no sign of Hugh Grant. Maybe next time.
I wasn’t intending on buying anything, but there was a man there from an online clothing company, and he was selling a sweatshirt with the most famous quote from On the Road on it; I couldn’t resist the prospect of wearing around my favorite book, and 10% of it goes to charity, so I had to do it. He was an incredibly nice bloke as well. All my favorite British men that I’ve met are older. This could be a problem.
In other news, my skin tone rivals that of Dracula himself.
Saturday night, Manuel and I decided we wanted to see Milk, which wasn’t playing at either of the Wood Green theatres, so we took the bus a half hour to Camden to find out that every showing of every film there was sold out. Defeated, we took the bus all the way and ended up going to see Frost/Nixon in Wood Green, even though he had already seen it. I loved it though; I love Michael Sheen in this especially. I’ve seen more movies here than I have in the last six months back at home, but it’s Oscar season. And movies here are so much cheaper for students on the outskirts of London than they are in Orange County; and since everything else in this city is so dang expensive I figure I should take advantage of the good deals I can get.
Today, I decided that I wanted to do a little something by myself, so I took the tube to King’s Cross to go to the British Library to see their collection of historical documents. As someone who loves books, and especially old books, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. And I was right.
Newton statue outside the Library
There’s no way that I could even name all the priceless books, maps, and documents they have there, but here’s a few of the history-making things I saw that left me speechless:
-Two of the four existing original copies of the Magna Carta, as well as the papal bull from Pope Innocent III two months later declaring the Magna Carta unlawful
-The second oldest known parchment of the letter to the Hebrews
-The Codex Sinaiticus (a Bible including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, dated c. 350)
-The Lindisfarne Gospels
-The King James Bible
-Many of Gutenberg’s earliest printings, including one of the copies of his Bible (the second I’ve seen)
-Innumerable other beautiful religious texts from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and more
-Pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook
-Galileo’s first scientific publication
-writings of Newton and Darwin, and a first edition copy of On the Origin of Species
-Shakespeare’s First Folio
-Captain Cook’s journal
-The logbook of the HMS Victory, including the entry recording Lord Nelson’s death in the Battle of Trafalgar
-Letters and writings from Thomas More (to Henry VIII), Florence Nightingale, Queen Elizabeth I, and others
-Beowulf
-Jane Austen’s writings as a teenager (she had wonderful penmanship), as well as part of the manuscript for Persuasion
-Lewis Carroll’s diary, open to the page where he writes about finishing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
-Virginia Woolf’s notebook for Mrs. Dalloway
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
-Tess of the d’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
-Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
-Writings from other important literary figures; I can’t remember them all but they included Plath, Milton, Wilde, and Wordsworth
-Musical compositions by Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart
-And — historical document of historical documents — original Beatles lyrics. I think they have more that aren’t on display, but the ones that were out were “Yesterday,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “The Fool on the Hill.” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Help!” and “Michelle.”
I managed to sneak a couple pictures even though I think that is discouraged.
“Help!” and Yesterday”
Magna Carta
Second copy of Magna Carta
Papal denunciation of Magna Carta
King James Bible
Though part of the permanent exhibit, the second Magna Carta and the King James Bible were both downstairs in a temporary exhibit called “Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights,” which also had some incredible documents and information, such as the 1689 Bill of Rights, the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, The Putney Debates transcripts, The Irish Remonstrance of 1317, first edition printings of Locke’s Two Treatises and Paine’s Rights of Man, William Blake’s notebook and the 1832 Reform Act, among many other things.
The death warrant for Charles I signed by 59 people, including Oliver Cromwell
Hobbes’s Leviathan
Early design ideas for Union Jack
Also in the building is the library of King George III, donated by his successor. It’s six levels of bookshelves that wrap around in a rectangle and form the center of the British Library.
This is what I expect my library to look like someday.
All in all, it was quite a successful day. I managed to see about 1,000 years of human history without even leaving one building.
Now that I’ve written a novel myself and it’s after 3 a.m., I should go to bed.
