London, Day 2
Headed back to the British Museum this morning to see the Assyrian galleries and an excellent guided tour of their Japanese collection, which included some beautiful modern artwork as well as a fascinating array of netsuke. Rowan pleaded exhaustion after lunch (he slept yesterday afternoon and woke at about 4 am), so after I booked our tickets to see Martin Freeman in Richard III next week, I walked to the British Library to see some of their treasures - sketches by da Vinci and Michelangelo; letters from Galileo and Darwin; the oldest complete New Testament (the Vatican has the second-oldest) and oldest Beowulf (plus the first page of Seamus Heaney's first draft of his translation); original scores by Chopin, Handel and others; Scott's diary; Olivier's unfilmed script for Macbeth; Jane Austen's writing desk; early drafts of Beatles songs... Sadly, neither the handwritten original of Alice's Adventures Underground nor their copy of The Necronomicon were on display... but they're having an exhibition on the history of British comics and Melinda Gebbie is talking there tomorrow night, so I expect to return. Tomorrow, though, we'll probably go to see something less serious, such as the James Bond exhibit at the London Film Museum.
Speaking of matters less serious, tonight we went to the O2 to see Monty Python Live (Mostly), a reunion of the surviving Pythons ("One Down and Five to Go", to quote one of the T-shirts on sale). It was enormous fun, being mostly re-enactments of famous skits from the Four Yorkshiremen to the Parrot sketch, with some elaborately choreographed routines to famous Python songs - including "Sit on My Face and Tell Me That You Love Me". You'll be able to see it at the cinema, but that won't match the experience of being among 6,000 people singing the choruses of "The Philosophers' Drinking Song" and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" along with the original cast.
Speaking of matters less serious, tonight we went to the O2 to see Monty Python Live (Mostly), a reunion of the surviving Pythons ("One Down and Five to Go", to quote one of the T-shirts on sale). It was enormous fun, being mostly re-enactments of famous skits from the Four Yorkshiremen to the Parrot sketch, with some elaborately choreographed routines to famous Python songs - including "Sit on My Face and Tell Me That You Love Me". You'll be able to see it at the cinema, but that won't match the experience of being among 6,000 people singing the choruses of "The Philosophers' Drinking Song" and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" along with the original cast.
