Day 17

July 27

A very quiet Sunday. This morning I didn’t rush. I had a good breakfast and coffee at my flat. I thought about doing a Beatles tour today but found out it is the wrong day. It was yesterday!!! It will be available next Tuesday, I won’t miss it this time. The tour I choose today is a literary tour. It is scheduled at 14h30. So I went around noon and had light lunch reading the new Time Out magazine. It could be compared to Voir in Montreal.
The tour was very interesting. It took place in Bloombury and Fitzoria areas. Both were working class areas in the late 1800 and early 1900. It is now see as an intellectual quarter. I saw many famous places associated with literacy. I saw where lived : Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, Lytton Strachey… I also heard about Marie Stopes, who was campaigner for womens rights and family planning. She edited the journal Birth Control News which gave anatomically explicit advice. Her sex manuel Married Love, which was written while she was still a virgin, was controversial and influential because it told women how to enjoy sex. Not very at “le goût du jour” in the early 1900.

After a good walking around, we went to the British Library. It is a gigantesque modern edifice, just beside the gothic architectural St-Pancras station. Even if both buildings are very different, it is still beautiful because the architech of the British Library choose to use the colours of St-pancras Station. British library was inaugurate in 1998 by Her Majesty The Queen. We didn’t spend much time there because it was almost time of closure when we arrived. But I saw the manuscript of some songs of the Beatles and I heard them talking with headphones. I will have to go back…

Tonight there was rain over London, …for about half an hour.