Alankria - May 5th, 2008

I come again in praise of the internet: yesterday I spent the whole day in London with the visiting

stephcampisi, taking her on a small tour of the city. The parts that I particularly enjoy, that is, which meant that we went first to the British Museum and wandered through the Assyrian and Ancient Egyptian exhibits (discussing, among other things, the origin of the cuneiform languages and hieroglyphics), and then went upstairs to an exhibit on bird, flowers and insects in Chinese art (ceramic, scrolls, fans), where we learnt how Chinese artists used images such as the preying of insects on other insects to indicate the political turmoil of their times. I imagined a room full of people holding fans, each fan making a subtle political statement. I bought two books in the bookshop, for potential research purposes: a small book on Persian myths, which will be useful for this novel, and a very small book about ancient calendars. Afterwards we walked to Forbidden Planet, where I managed to only buy two books (Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, the first of hers I'll have read, and Undertow by Elizabeth Bear) and Steph lamented the extraordinarily high prices of Australian books in comparison even to ours. We ate sandwiches in a church garden, where children ran around screeching but the blossoming trees and greenery made up for it. We then walked along to Piccadilly, stopping briefly in Fortnum & Mason, and continued along to Harrod's and, via its candy hall, went up the Egyptian escalator well to the chocolate bar, at which almost everything on the menu is made of delicious chocolate. A chocolate that melts so finely, it can be drunk through a straw-spoon; I did just that, and we dipped strawberries in another small bowl of it. We walked more afterwards, through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Steph admired the squirrels from a bench in the Princess Diana memorial walk bit in Ken Gardens: a strip of pathway, planted on either side with brightly flowering plants. (She also admired the many old buildings in the city.) We ate dinner at Wagamama, ambled a bit more through the hazy, dusky Kensington Gardens and admired the swans from a safe distance (Steph has an anecdote about Australia's black swans, involving cheese and wine and a mango and fleeing from the birds), before I had to get the train back home. The weather was perfect for all this: warm but lightly overcast, so it was not too hot, but somehow not humid either.

A full day, and now I'm home for the Bank Holiday with some sunshine -- and according to my parents our swimming pool has reached a survivable temperature so later I may have my first swim in it of the year.