Library, park, and .... snow!

I know I'm still 'way behind in my blog posting, but since I've been emphasizing work over sight-seeing for most of the last week, I should be able to catch up in the next day or two.

As you can see from this picture, taken along the Serpentine in Hyde Park last Monday, fall is noticeably here. There are leaves everywhere, but the most trees seem to have a lot more than this one still on the branches. I wonder if they'll all be down before we leave?

Monday I welcomed some new guests and it was while we were doing the "stay awake until dark" walk that we went to Hyde Park. They took off the next day for a few days in Bath, leaving me to grade papers and work on a presentation I'll be giving next week. But I did allow myself a little time off on Wednesday, and met my hitherto-virtual friend Just a Plane Ride Away for lunch at the British Library. It was wonderful to meet her f-t-f (and I wish her a speedy resolution to her computer problems, as I really miss her blog posts!) and the Library was a wonderful place to visit.


The library is the sleek modern building above, not the Gothic one peeking over its shoulder. The latter is St. Pancras Station, which does look more like a library, or maybe a castle, than a train station, I agree. The large Library building only has a small area for public view, but what a wonderful assortment of documents and artifacts are on display there! (No photos, of course, unfortunately.) Original copies of the Magna Carta are probably the stars of the show, and I learned a lot about them and their period from the informative displays.

But my favorite item was probably the Lindisfarne Gospels, as I've always loved looking at photos of illuminated manuscripts. But this is the real book, and the illustrations are more wonderful in person than I imagined they could be. I just stood and stared for the longest time. A second favorite would probably be the Beatles display—the lyrics to I Wanna Hold Your Hand in draft form! How cool is that! But there's also tons of other wonderful stuff—Shakespeare folios, Jane Austen manuscripts, etc., etc., etc. It was amazing how much time you could spend in such a small space, and I probably would like to go back!

After lunch, when my companion had to catch her train home, I decided to take advantage of my location near the one large London park I hadn't yet visited. It was a little walk, but I had a nice lunch to dispose of, and so headed for Regent's Park. It followed the pattern I'd observed in my other park visits, in that it had a completely different look. At least in the portion I visited, which was the more formal section. Like the other London parks, it's huge, and I know I only saw about a third of it.

One thing all the parks have in common are wonderful trees, and I'm especially taken by the willows, since that's a species we don't often see at home. Here's a particularly fine example near the Clarence Bridge:


One reason I didn't venture further through the park is that, in spite of the beautiful sunshine and blue skies obvious in my photos, it was actually quite cold. My friend had reported seeing cars at the train station in her town that had a few inches of snow on top, and it was hard to miss these newspaper headlines, since London newsagents helpfully display them for you.

By mid-afternoon, when I was in the Park, there was still some snow left! I was surprised as it didn't feel that cold. And the residual white stuff was only in shady areas, but it certainly made me wonder if I had enough warm clothing for the football game we were going to attend that evening!


I have to step out of order a bit here and comment on yesterday's momentous political events in the U.S. The amount of coverage on TV here has been astonishing, as has the level of interest in our election expressed by Londoners we've encountered. There was little else on the BBC news yesterday and even less non-election news today. You can sample the online coverage here. I made it to about 2:30 last night before I had to go to bed, but things were looking good at that point and I slept easily!