The idea with September was to holiday in London for the month, but it hasn't worked out that way. But we managed it today.
We spent the morning at the British Museum, which might be my favourite place in London, and their
Shakespeare: Staging the World exhibition. I'd hoped we might have the place to ourselves on a weekday, but there were a few dozen school kids in there running around and drawing the exhibits and enjoying the actors telling them about bear-baiting. They were a little bit raucous, but well-behaved and given they were mainly about 9 pretty much engaged with it all.
Although I found the bear-baiting stuff a bit more upsetting than the kids (the Elizabethans used to make a bear fight dogs and the skull of the bear they found had bite and scratch marks as well as evidence of a heavy blow to the head, which had presumably been done so they could file down the bear's teeth so she wouldn't kill the dogs with one bite), I loved the background detail of the life of Londoners from 400 years ago.
My favourite stuff came from the Gunpowder Plot which included what was said to possibly be the lantern that Guy Fawkes had been using when they caught him. That just seemed impossible and perhaps it was - after all, no doubt at the time some enterprising person might have realised they could make a bob or two with such an item and it would be pretty easy to just say a particular lantern was his - but it still made me very excited to be so close to it. And given my squeamishness about the treatment of the bear I was perhaps hypocritically delighted to see a reliquary that included the right eye of one of the minor plotters of the Plot which had been plucked out as part of his punishment and then kept in a silver ball. You could still see the dessicated eye inside. Who says museums are boring? Not me.
In the afternoon we went to the birthday party of a friend's one-year-old son. The birthday boy seemed to have a good time especially when he got to stuff his face with birthday cake. What a delight that is and it made me remember some very specific icing that I had eaten at one of my own early birthdays. Perhaps not my first, but such a fragmental, yet suddenly vivid memory that I suspect it must have been one of the first four. I was hanging out with more kids of course, most of them very young, but they were all cheerful and fun to be around. A three year old clashed heads in a small accident with the very benign birthday boy and she cried to her mum about it. She claimed the boy had done it on purpose, despite the fact that we'd all seen it happen and in any case this placid little boy was not really capable of doing anything. Her mum explained that it had just been an accident and the girl sobbed, "He hurt my feelings," in an accusatory manner, which made me laugh an awful lot. Especially when I looked back at the baby accused of such evil designs, just sitting there, already having forgotten the incident, not able to understand what feelings were.
And we ended the day by going to the Raindance festival to see
The Lottery of Birth, a thought-provoking documentary about the way we accept the values of the culture we're born into. It's thought-provoking and clever stuff and one with a radical mandate for change in the world. Idealistic, perhaps, but I think it's probably true that we need some big upheavals if the world and civilisation are going to survive in any meaningful way. I am not too optimistic that we're capable of making that change in time or without terrible consequences, but at the centre of the film is the important message that we should question everything, especially the stuff we take for granted. Most of the things we believe, we believe only because of the time and place we were born and because of the values of the people who raised us.
The thieving rich must be brought down - talking of which, the lettings agency has agreed to refund me the £20 for the (not) missing crockery, but they still think they are justified in charging £200+ for the cleaning of the flat. They will be first against the wall when the revolution comes...
