(no subject)
I managed a single day's work yesterday, and got quite a bit done - it rather looks as if we have a very big job indeed coming up, probably in the new year. This morning, I felt curiously active and enthusiastic, managing to shower, set a batch of resin tests, finisht this weeks' batch of the online job and get to the British Library all before noon.
I'd arranged to meet the g-d to have lunch and see Taking Liberties, their new exhibition on the "900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights". This is much more g-d's type of thing than mine, since she is young, enthusiastic and works for Amnesty as a volunteer, but I had to go to the library anyway to replace my lost card and do a little bit of work-related research, so I tagged along. In the event, the exhibition was fascinating and very well arranged indeed. Whoever designs the shows at the British Library does a marvelous job of making what are mostly displays of books and bits of paper engaging and memorable. The literature was supplemented by recordings and short films, and I especially enjoyed the brilliant touch of giving everyone who entered a little bar-coded bracelet that could be used to register votes on different subjects throughout the display; an intelligent use of interactive technology in a museum, for once. At the end, you could compare your own votes with those of everyone else - I was mildly disturbed to find that I came out as considerably less liberal than I had thought I was. The show clearly explained the development of civil and political liberty in Britain, and I ended up feeling genuinely grateful and a little humbled. Oddly, I was most moved by the pair of little Halas and Bachelor cartoons from the late 40s, explaining how the new health service and educational reforms would work. They were, I suppose, aimed squarely at my parent's generation. I was the baby in the cartoon, who would be given proper health care and a good, free education like everyone else for the first time. I would get my teeth and general health looked after properly from the cradle and go to grammar school and university, all firsts for both sides of my family. Come to think of it, I would get a nice new hip when I needed one. We both emerged feeling rather grateful and proud to be British, which is quite rightly a very un-British thing to feel ("last refuge of the scoundrel"), but sometimes unavoidable.
Then the g-d headed off for her tutoring job, and I headed for the reading rooms with my newly replaced reader's card to spend an hour or so scanning back numbers of The Times, and gradually teasing out the histories of some more inhabitants of the Mayfair house. These were a father and son from an old county family with the maddening habit of alternating the same two first names for all their sons. The father emerged as a perfect Wodehousian buffer; I suspect he hated the Mayfair house, as he seems to have spent most of his time buried in the country, blamelessly planting trees, raising Herefords and shooting squirrels, which he was rather obsessed with. Another example of shining Englishness in his way, I suppose.
I'd arranged to meet the g-d to have lunch and see Taking Liberties, their new exhibition on the "900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights". This is much more g-d's type of thing than mine, since she is young, enthusiastic and works for Amnesty as a volunteer, but I had to go to the library anyway to replace my lost card and do a little bit of work-related research, so I tagged along. In the event, the exhibition was fascinating and very well arranged indeed. Whoever designs the shows at the British Library does a marvelous job of making what are mostly displays of books and bits of paper engaging and memorable. The literature was supplemented by recordings and short films, and I especially enjoyed the brilliant touch of giving everyone who entered a little bar-coded bracelet that could be used to register votes on different subjects throughout the display; an intelligent use of interactive technology in a museum, for once. At the end, you could compare your own votes with those of everyone else - I was mildly disturbed to find that I came out as considerably less liberal than I had thought I was. The show clearly explained the development of civil and political liberty in Britain, and I ended up feeling genuinely grateful and a little humbled. Oddly, I was most moved by the pair of little Halas and Bachelor cartoons from the late 40s, explaining how the new health service and educational reforms would work. They were, I suppose, aimed squarely at my parent's generation. I was the baby in the cartoon, who would be given proper health care and a good, free education like everyone else for the first time. I would get my teeth and general health looked after properly from the cradle and go to grammar school and university, all firsts for both sides of my family. Come to think of it, I would get a nice new hip when I needed one. We both emerged feeling rather grateful and proud to be British, which is quite rightly a very un-British thing to feel ("last refuge of the scoundrel"), but sometimes unavoidable.
Then the g-d headed off for her tutoring job, and I headed for the reading rooms with my newly replaced reader's card to spend an hour or so scanning back numbers of The Times, and gradually teasing out the histories of some more inhabitants of the Mayfair house. These were a father and son from an old county family with the maddening habit of alternating the same two first names for all their sons. The father emerged as a perfect Wodehousian buffer; I suspect he hated the Mayfair house, as he seems to have spent most of his time buried in the country, blamelessly planting trees, raising Herefords and shooting squirrels, which he was rather obsessed with. Another example of shining Englishness in his way, I suppose.