Seeing Sights

You see some strange things on the Tube. Actually that should be strange people on the Tube. For example yesterday I saw a family in full riding gear; jodhpurs, whips and silly hats, the whole kit and kaboodle. No horses though. I'm not sure you really need to dress up like that to ride the escalators on the District line. Unless it's a new event for the 2012 Olympics - Public Transport Eventing. Dressage on the busses, show jumping over the station barriers in the Tube. It's a thought, Team GB might even manage to win a medal. I also got asked yesterday if it was worth visiting the Imperial War Museum. It certainly is; but I was asked by a German family! What do you say to that? "Yes it's great, there's a V2 rocket in the foyer, you know; the ones you lot fired at London". It's full of booty brought back from the wars we've fought. It must be the only UK museum that doesn't have a queue of foreigners outside asking for their stuff back. I also got cornered by a bloke called Miles selling scientific dvds. I told him to bugger off but he was very persistent and just moved onto the next person. It may surprise you that the 'science' on the DVDs was "Intelligent Design". Or maybe not, let's face it people who approach you on the street are not usually selling copies of A Brief history Of Time. Apparently there is a 'large number of scientists who now support the fact that evolution is just too unlikely to have happened all on it's own without some guiding hand'. He didn't mention who made the even more unlikely guiding hand in the first place however, and I was not about to engage a nutter in discussion between Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street.

After this I have taken to riding the busses. Mainly because you can get off in the face of nutterdom a bit more easily but also because you can see more. For example yesterday I went past the Direct Marketing Association offices. The urge to get off the Bus and stick loads of unsolicited junk mail through their letter box was almost irristable. I also went past Bookmarks, London's last socialist bookshop. Apparently there are still some socialists left. By the looks of it they are currently in their element, as the window is full of books about the Credit Crunch (the failure of Capitalism, the rise of new socialism &c.). In one of those strange coincidences that happen a lot in London I was on my way to the British Library, where I saw Lenin's application for a readers ticket. From new school socialism to very old school socialism in one bus trip.

The Library was absolutely fantastic. Hideous to look at of course, I've never seen so many bricks in one place in my entire life. It's like a huge high school gymnasium. It took years to build, went massively over budget and was dated even before it opened. But inside it is full of fantastic things. If anyone says that a room full of documents must be boring they've never been here. I saw:

Shakespeare's signature on a mortgage for the Rose theatre, 

Two Magna Cartas, 

Captain Scott's Diary, 

DaVinci's notebooks, 

The Lindisfarne Bible, 

The Codex Sinaiticus, 

A bit of dead sea scroll, 

Charles I's death warrant, 

The declaration of the English Commonwealth (and Cromwell's oath as Lord Protector)

And the original, hand written version of Alice in Wonderland that Dodgeson wrote for Alice (apparently he was "very fond of children". Hmm. I think that's a polite euphemism).

It was all a bit overwhelming.  I was in there for ages. If you are ever in London it is worth a visit. Much better than the tourist trap of Madam Tussaud's at the toher end of the Euston Road. And the bookshop has a section called "Books". 

I also went to the National Maritime Museum. This has been shut for years for renovation and the last time I went I was a little kid. The only thing I could remember was seeing the uniform Nelson was wearing when he was killed at Trafalgar. The reason this is all I could remember is that it's the only interesting thing in there. The whole place suffers from that strange problem of the English in that everything we did in the past was evil colonialism and nothing good ever comes of that. In a museum that deals with Britian's maritime history this poses a problem as that's all the Navy was for in the 17th to 20th Centuries. Weird. This even comes through in a newish display which has the stained glass naval memorial from the Baltic Exchange in the City reassembled, so you can see it as it was originally. All very interesting. But nowhere was there any mention of why this glass  was in a museum. 

It's because the IRA blew the Baltic Exchange to smithereens in 1992 and there is nowhere else for it to go. Obviously you can't put this on a museum information label as it might upset any Irish ex-terrorists. Is it just me or is that a bit pathetic?