Pick up the train tickets for Wednesday's journey to Gatwick. And since we're already at King's Cross, and so more or less there, we go over to the British Library. The big exhibition is a west African one, a paid exhibit that we're not especially eager to see. We do spend some time in the main hall, though. Visit old friends - from the a letter of the still unmarried Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII and Magna Carta to original Beatles lyrics scribbled on scraps of paper and even on the back of a birthday card of then one year old Julian Lennon. Interestingly the copy of Magna Carta is accompanied by a document signed by Pope Innocent some two months later annulling it in terms that make clear the papal position on hierarchy. No Vatican preferential option for the poor, or even for simple democracy, in those days. Some documents we haven't seen as well. A letter from Cold War spy Guy Burgess, by then long escaped to and exiled in Russia, writing to congratulate a friend on his knighthood. Letter from Karl Marx as well.
Our original intent is to go back to the London School of Economics for a lecture entitled Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are Seizing Power. Should be interesting but after the last couple of LSE talks we're a bit wary. What if we're just told what we, and everybody else, already knows? And on the other side of the scales is the best lamb kleftiko in London. So it's matter over mind. The kleftiko wins and we're off to Kilburn and Roses. Kleftiko as succulent as ever. As well as the old men in the café there's a woman at the next table with two girls, aged about eight and nine, in school uniform. Overhear one girl saying cynically "He changes his girlfriend even more often than he changes his job."