Day 1 was not taxing (compared to what is coming!) – just a quick 50 minutes on the train to Liverpool Street and then 4 stops on the Circle Line to St.Pancras. We are staying in the Renaissance Hotel at St.Pancras and managed to check in early, so headed off to the British Library hoping to get into the Anglo-Saxon documents exhibition. However, we should have booked ahead – it was completely sold out. So, after a quick lunch at the library we headed down to the British Museum and instead looked around there. We made a beeline straight for the Sutton Hoo treasures and all the Roman and Viking exhibitions – very interesting to see the Sutton Hoo finds again. On the way out through the Great Court we encountered a protest. The Assyrian exhibition is sponsored by BP and the protestors were objecting to the British Museum’s support of BP in the light of climate change and BP’s role in the Iraq war. They had all linked hands round the old Reading Room and were chanting and singing.
After a strenuous afternoon of intellectual stimulation, we decided we ought to test the hotel facilities, so went for a swim. The spa has what was described as a swimming pool, but overgrown bath seems a more apposite description. It was very pleasant (and about the temperature of a bath) but the dim lighting and underwater lights alternating red, blue and green were presumably trying to create a sort of Turkish Baths effect. In reality it felt more like a Turkish Harem (though not having been in one, I can’t be sure about that).
In the evening we had our briefing and found that the first fly had arrived in the ointment … Apparently there is an unexploded bomb (WWII not Brexit) in Paris and the Gare du Nord is shut. So we are now booked on a Eurostar two hours later and are hoping that it will be open by then. Our tour guide joked that the line to Disneyland is still open, but we really hope that he was joking! We shall see what happens in the morning.
