That London

It's half term! I took the day off and we went to see the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library.

On a recommendation, we went to Fortitude bakery because I was already hungry, but they didn't have the beignets Charlotte and Tabitha wanted so we got a snack and went to go and have a look in the British Museum until they were available. There was a huge queue so we abandoned that idea and went back to Fortitude and the timing was pretty good.

Fortitude had a queue, too, but we got their beignets (they aren't beignets like the ones in Chef so I wasn't interested). For some reason, Charlotte had a cake fork in her bag?!

We then walked to the British Library (pretty much back where we started yep) to take a look around there. These museums have some crazy stuff in them. We saw the Magna Carta, a Mozart manuscript, a Gutenberg Bible, and a King James Bible among other stuff that has only ever really existed in the abstract for me. I've heard of the Magna Carta, obviously, but never really thought of it as something you could go and take a look at.

The fantasy exhibition is pretty interesting. I grew my backlog by a few titles (didn't buy anything though because I am a good boy), and got a bit annoyed by a reference to The Witcher as being a popular Netflix show, with no mention of the games. There's no way the show would exist without the games; even with the popularity of Game of Thrones.

After that, we walked around a bit and decided to go to Pali Kitchen at Great Portland Street station. Pali Kitchen is great; it's like Indian food Subway.

We then walked back up to the British Museum in the hope that the queue would be less awful and it was. Normally wouldn't queue so much but Tabitha's next topic at school is Greece and we thought it might be nice to give her a frame of reference. I also wanted to go and look at the Japanese exhibition we missed last time when I was grumpy.

We came to the conclusion that there's just too much at The British Museum to do it in one visit in a meaningful way. It's so vast and every cabinet has an overwhelming amount of information in it; it's just not possible (for me, at least) to process and retain that amount of information. Some of the stuff there is so old that I can't really visualise it in context properly. There's no reason that glass-blowing couldn't exist 2,000 years ago, and probably in a way that pretty closely resembles how it is now, but for some reason that's an anachronism in my head. They might as well have had TV.

Finally we learned that if you offer a 10-year-old a hot chocolate, it won't matter if it's in the opposite direction to the train, so we walked to Chin Chin Labs on Greek Street to get a hot chocolate. We passed a Waterstones on the way and picked up a book for Tabitha as she finished one on the way in, and I grabbed the final book in the Three Body Problem trilogy, and that's it! My legs were aching so bad as I played a lot of badminton the last few days.

Not really sure why I wrote so much for this but it's done now and I'm not changing it.