I met my friend Adam, shortly to take his wedding vows. He asked me to read some John Donne at the service (presumably not Donne's own wedding poem: 'John Donne / Anne Donne / Undone' - his in-laws didn't approve) and we drank beer. Then I went to meet my new-born nephew. He seemed as tranquil and engaging in my arms as a fairly tame rabbit, but did cry rather a lot for the rest of the evening. And night. Still, all very delightful.
The next day, I had the pleasure of another Olympics training day. The expense and inconvenience was not soothed by the discovery that somehow I hadn't been registered, and that I'd done the same course - sans Olympics, Burger and Chocolate logos - before. Ho hum. Insult was added to injury by the announcement that the uniform included a man-bag and baseball cap (St. Morrissey would strongly disapprove), and that I am now the proud holder of a City and Guilds qualification in Not Hitting Children And Vulnerable Adults from… McDonalds University. I sat next to another academic, and we had a few choice words for all this. Still, this fine painting hangs in Hackney College:
Anyway, enough of this nonsense. I cleansed my intellectual palate afterwards by a trip to the British Museum, where I gazed in awe upon Europe's oldest book, St. Cuthbert's Gospel. It was made around 698 and buried with St. C. Despite that, the handwriting is more legible than anything I have ever put down on paper. I also saw a Shakespeare First Folio, Milton's notebook (he wrote in three languages, sometimes changing mid-sentence), Austen's notebook, and the first handwritten pages of Angela Carter's Nights At The Circus. And loads of other incredibly historic texts too. But my brain's too small to remember.
While I was there, I filmed this rather astonishing artwork - Patrick Hughes's Paradoxymoron:
