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We were so tired that I couldn’t believe we were making this kind of superhuman effort to leave the house, but I am glad we did it. Once you’ve forced yourself to step out the front door into the unforgiving light of the real world something kicks in and we had a lot of mildly weary fun.
I didn’t know much about post-Roman Egyptian history and it was interesting to see how different faiths have influenced the country and also managed to live fairly harmoniously alongside one another. And because the country is so dry it means all kinds of unlikely items have survived for centuries. It’s very unusual to see clothes that were worn in the 4th Century, but I also loved things like the invite to dinner or announcement of a birth of a daughter that have survived just as long. Sometimes it’s the mundane and every day things that make the most impact and connect us with the real people of the past. I hope one of my Hermione hands can survive for 1700 years and be seen in a museum and that historians will argue about what it signified. It will really require our civilisation to be destroyed, but luckily we’ve got people working on that.
Later we went to a cafe in the museum that I’d never seen before (it’s at the top of the staircase in the rotunda in the middle) and we found a window where we could see into the old British Library reading room, where Karl Marx had once worked and more importantly so had I. I had come here in the early 1990s, I think probably to research the Encyclopaedia of the Royal Family I briefly worked on, but it may have been to research stuff for Lionel Nimrod or some other early BBC Radio show. Now the library has moved to new premises and this old reading room is now a bit of a building site, though the shelves on the upper balcony still have books on them and the desks are still in place. So the British Museum itself became an exhibit in the British Museum for us. And when the whole place is dedicated to me and my life (I’ve kept all my certificates and diaries and stuff so that they can be displayed once I have achieved my destiny of being a major historical figure) they can tour the old desks and speculate about which one I sat on and what I was working on and whether I was just sitting, looking around to see if there were any nice looking students in. No one will ever know now. That information is lost.
The video of the RHLSTP with Luisa Omielan can be seen in the usual places
vimeo -
https://vimeo.com/146086145
