Tuesday, January 4, 2011

SO SORRY SO SORRY SO SORRY

But today, oh, guess what?  Let's see:

Article A: British Library exhibit on the evolution of the English language, from the Saxons and Vikings up to Muhamad Ali's and the Queen's speeches, through profanity, propaganda, accents and acronyms, traversing spelling variations, language derivations... for a spelling nerd like me it was basically heaven.  


Then B: lunch at St Pancras Station, a glorious place I couldn't get any decent pictures of.  


Then my aunt and I picked up my cousin and grandmother and dropped them off to go handbag-shopping.  We headed to D: Magnus, perhaps the only shop in the world with (fun, pretty) shoes my size, where I picked out two very exciting specimens with which I am deliriously happy:



However, as we were pulling up in front of the shop, something completely horrid, C, happened.  We were almost parked as a guy on a motorbike came down the road and braked.  Then, I don't know, it happened very fast but I suppose he tried to accelerate and he slipped on a patch of oil.  The front wheel slid out form underneath him and the bike fell on top of him.  He'd been about ten feet in front of us the whole time, but it looked and felt for all the world as though we'd hit him.  We and some other people got out of our cars and helped him to the pavement, picked up his bike etc.  He'd hurt his knee quite badly.  Very long and stressy and shaken story short, the police and an ambulance arrived and took him away, and a very nice police officer sat in my aunt's car for a bit and worked out what had happened.  The saddest bit was that it was this man's birthday.  And he'll be layed up for a couple weeks at least.  Awful.

Well, we got over that after a bit, and I was dropped off at a café to meet up with exhibit E: my mother's old boyfriend from, oh, before they went to university, I suppose.  He's an awfully nice guy, the sort who, according to all reports, has been wearing the converse and skinny jeans I saw him in today for about 35 years.  That look.  He's also a rather well-established journalist, who wrote this book, which is referenced in my chemistry textbook, as well as Just My Type, his most recent publication, about fonts.  My dad got it for Christmas and I read a couple chapters before catching my plane.  I definitely recommend it.

So, my day ended with exhibit F: three episodes of The West Wing.  Good times.  Must go to sleep as my cousin and I have a day of photography about the city planned for tomorrow.  Wish me luck and more shots like this, my favourite of the trip so far:  

1 comment:

Tights Lover said...

Great photos. Sounds like a pretty good day (minus the motorcycle guy incident). I guess it was good he wasn't injured any worse.

That museum exhibit looks really interesting!