Had a lovely weekend in London.
We'd been planning this visit for ages, as The Magnetic Fields were playing the Royal Festival Hall, and though that was on a jolly awkward Sunday night, it was too good to miss. It was great to see the Royal Festival Hall inside, and marvel at how tiny people were when the seats were originally installed. It's about to have a major refurbishment of course, one of the jobs being to install seats that 21st Century folk can actually get into, but I hope they don't lose the very fifties tatty teak in the loos in the process.
And the Magnetic Fields were of course, great.
We spent most of Saturday in the V&A which was fun. I'd been hoping to go and spend a good long time in the 17th Century section of the British Galleries, hoping for more good practical details of the sort I've been getting from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter. Sadly, though the exhibits were really interesting, there was a focus on royalty and the court that's inappropriate for my research, so only a few things were of real use. It was good to see though, the miniatures painted by Nicholas Hilliard, an Exeter boy, as my characters depend so much on their miniatures of their father and St Peter. But I failed to get good photos of them, as the light in their display case kept mysteriously going out.
So it's back to work on the book this week, though guilt about my lovely weekend and starting work late on Monday morning has meant my evenings so far this week have been spent largely on work. Then tomorrow it's yoga and Thursday it's the girls night out at Hotel Barcelona. So maybe by the weekend, after we've erected our new shed, I'll be able to crack on further with the novel. That's the plan
