On Wednesday, when I wrote my last installment, I was debating about taking some days off to do some sight seeing. Wednesday was a particularly grueling day. The weather was very cold, rainy, and windy - someone told me that the weather forecasters were calling it the worst June weather in years. Since it was so nasty outside, I was more than willing to spend the day inside the BL. For most of the day, I was in the Manuscripts Room and then moved down to Rare Books to finish up what I had been working on last week. While I was in Manuscripts, I noticed that the guy across me left his desk only once in the while day. Besides the basic wonder of how he could sit there the whole day, seeing him there the whole time also brought home to exactly why I needed to get of the BL for a few days. Does one really want to be that sedentary and focused for three months? Probably not. So, I decided that if the weather was better the next day, off I would go.

As a side note, while I was sitting in the café sending out my emails, a woman came by asked me do a survey about the wireless service at the BL. I agreed to do the survey and gave her quite an earful about how it should free to all readers and that 4.5 pounds ($9) an hour was a highly unreasonable amount of money to charge for it. Maybe my feedback will actually have some affect, but at least I got to vent about it at any rate.

Thursday dawned bright and clear (for London - which means lots of clouds, but some intermittent sunshine) and I turned by back on the BL and walked down to Trafalgar Square via Monmouth Street. I highly recommend this walk to anyone because you get to walk through Russell Square, past the British Museum, through Convent Garden and Neal's Yard, and then you end up quite nicely at the National Portrait Gallery. It's enough to warm you up in the morning but not too exhausting.

As I was walking through Leicester Square, I walked by the half-price ticket booth and couldn't resist buying a theatre ticket. I decided to see Oleanna by Mamet with Julia Stiles and Aaron Eckhart. Mostly, I just wanted to see a good drama and thought this would be my best bet. Even though I don't precisely have the funds to be going to the theatre all that often, I decided that since I was already at the booth and taking a day off, I should seize the moment and splurge a little.

Leicester Square

the National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery may lack the impressive façade of the neighboring National Gallery, but its collection is quite fine. As per usual, I spent most of my time in the Victorian galleries. It also lacks very benches in its galleries as as I found out during the extended period time I was in the Victorian rooms. The portrait of Charles Darwin by John Colier was the most striking to me. The picture depicts Darwin as old man, standing with cloak on and hat in hand. He looks rather like an old man begging admittance to a warm fireside than the distinguished scientist and researcher that he was. It's almost as if the changes his theories wrought upon the Victorian mindset have aged him and made him tired of this newly demystified world. Also of interest in the Victorian rooms were a set of daguerreotypes (a form of early photography) by Lewis Carroll from his Oxford days.

Having spent almost two hours in the Victorian rooms, I wandered outside to eat my lunch. I ended up eating at Leicester Square, which was sunny at this point in the day and great place for people watching. After lunch, I went back to the Portrait Gallery and walked through the rest of the galleries. I must admit that I find most of the eighteenth century and Tudor portraits more than a little boring, although the Romantics room was very interesting. They had the portrait of Byron in Corsican dress that always finds its way into literature anthologies. I also enjoyed the Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley portraits as well as the Percy Shelley and Keats pictures.

After being the eighteenth century for far too long in my opinion, I moved downstairs to the contemporary galleries. These galleries included portraits of all sorts of British celebrities and artists. The most bizarrely fascinating was the video portrait David (as in Beckham). It's in a darkened room of its own. You walk in and there, projected on the wall, is a video of a long-haired David Beckham sleeping (or at least pretending to sleep) every few moments he moves around a bit. The shot shows him from the waist up, without shirt or anything else on. It's such a function of him as a celebrity and sex symbol that one almost feels uncomfortable being in the room. So weird. The special exhibition on at the Gallery was the BP Portrait Award exhibition. These new portraits were quite good and demonstrate that British portraiture is very much alive and well.

The unfortunate thing about how interesting I found the Gallery is the amount of postcards and such that I bought at the shop. But, as I tell myself, it's important to copies of these paintings so that I can refer back to them later - at least, that's what I tell myself.

St. Martins-in-the-Fields

the interior of the church

the cafe in the crypt

the crypt floor

the Garrick Theatre

It was very strange to see actors on the stage that I had seen before in movies. It was almost as if people who are in movies, celebrities, are somehow not really real, and seeing them on the stage (especially from the front row) makes them undeniably real. Particularly when the actors took their bows at the end of the play, they were so physically close and that seemed somehow very unsettling. Both Julia Stiles and Aaron Eckhart were very good, although I think Julia Stiles was bit better because she seemed to disappear into the role more. Eckhart was good, but when the script called for him to be angry, his anger seemed a sort of forced - he needs to better build up to it, I think. Overall, though, I enjoyed the show immensely.

I really enjoyed the walk back to Bloomsbury as well. At that time of the evening, it's almost dark but not quite and there a few people about but it's not so crowded as usual. I'm beginning to understand why so many writers mention their walks in London in the evening as so important and interesting.