@pfooti · 2024-06-24 · travel

London, 24 June 2024

Yesterday was mostly a travel and recovery day. Walk, Drive, Fly, Train, Underground, Walk. We (and our luggage) made it to West London (Kensington, near the Earls Court Underground stop if you’re keeping track) pretty much unscathed. I misplaced one of my pairs of glasses, but it was the least important pair. Chrissy pointed out that this means I probably have some glasses that are just for show or something like that, which isn’t entirely untrue.

King George the Third (the revolutionary war guy) donated his books to the library. He wanted everyone to see them, so here they are. You might not be able to tell, but they’re arranged by size. That’s how archivists arrange books. Size, not subject. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it- you could argue for ages about whether or not the Bible belongs in Fiction, but you can’t argue about the dimensions of the physical thing.

The heat, acclimating to all the walking (we did way less walking in Morocco) and some tummy troubles meant today was a slightly lowkey day, although not that lowkey.

Chrissy (right) next to a really big atlas, the gift of a Dutch sugar merchant who wanted to get the British and Dutch to stop fighting (and sinking his ships) and instead buying sugar for their tea and biscuits (from him). This was the largest book in the world (and thus housed alone, see above photo caption) until 2012 when Some Dude commissioned a slightly bigger book because people are always doing that kind of stuff.

We started the day at the British Library, which is new enough that it wasn’t in use yet the last time I had been in London.

Here’s a manuscript by Alan Turing on the question of whether a piece of software could be intelligent. You might have heard of the test he proposes in this paper.

Like the Library of Congress, the British Library collects pretty much every book that they make on the island, and the whole shebang goes back a couple hundred years. Since they are so good at collecting and organizing stuff, they also seem to accumulate unrelated archival material; the library houses one of the largest stamp collections in existence (like two million stamps, which is probably just all of them).

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The treasures of the library include a lot of really old copies of sacred texts, including a copy of the Qur’an from 1300. There was a family along with two kids, the father asked his older daughter (teens?), “hey, can you read this?” - they both could. There’s something pretty compelling about linguistic drift and the fixity of a sacred text there. The fancy bible, on the other hand, was in Greek, although from 350 AD or so, so pretty old. Still, I couldn’t read any of the bibles.

Liberty of London. Full marks for flying a flag that includes Trans pride on Terf island.

Afterwards, we headed to Liberty of London, a department store. The main goal was to get a couple yards of some fancy fabric that Liberty is famous for, which we accomplished. I wanted a shirt already made from such a fabric, and while they had a few that would almost fit me, in reality they were too tight. The salesguy said he keeps telling the buyers they need to be more size inclusive and I have to say: if they had a shirt in one of those cool patterns, I would have bought it, and if I liked it, I’d probably buy one or two a season indefinitely. So: money on the table etc etc. But hey, not every business wants my money.

I needed to go here even though I didn’t know I needed to go here. I just walked right by it and was like hey.

Skipping ahead to one that definitely got my money, I saw a Third Man record shop on the map and detoured us there. Boom, I’m now going home with three new albums (two of which were recorded in the Nashville store- Raconteurs and Old Crow Medicine Show). If you don’t know, the Third Man is a label / recording studio (in Nashville where they record straight to an acetate and press directly) / store run by Jack White. So yeah. Lucky for us we have a hard-sided suitcase on this leg of the trip.

Welsh rarebit and crab satay. Not shown: all the other fantastic stuff, I kept forgetting to snapshot all my meals. Eating like I’m genx, lol.

Aaaalso in the “places that got me to spend money” space: Dinner. Today marks Chrissy and my 24th wedding anniversary. Twenty four years! She’s the peanutbutter to my jelly. We ate at Fallow:

Cheese and leek croquets
Mushroom parfait (it was a puree of smoked shiitake and lion’s mane, and sublime- basically a pate)
Welsh rarebit (broiled cheese / mustard sauce with saurkraut on a bread)
Crab satay (kind of deconstructed- no skewers involved, but the peanut sauce really worked)
Chateaubriand and potatoes
Frozen custard with ginger crumble and rhubarb compote
Custard cake with raspberries and cream
I also had a variation on an old fashioned that included miso and butter - it was really good, but it was mostly an old fashioned, both the miso and butter were taking the evening off I think (it was hot)
Chrissy had a cherry / sherry confection that was a lovely celebration of cherry. And sherry. All in all: delicious every bit. I think we agreed that the mushrooms and croquets were the best.

Floral street, around the corner from Covent Garden

We did a little after-dinner stroll from the restaurant (near Picadilly Circus) through Leicester Square and to Covent Gardens. I saw the places where I wasted so much time when I was a teenager hanging out in London, there was even a street performer at the Covent garden steps like I remembered. The VR Arcade was gone though, replaced by a movie theater; bummer. Plus ça change.

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