After spending Saturday morning at the London Library, I met a friend for lunch - which is usually food+beer followed by coffee. Alas, this time it turned into an all afternoon and evening drinking session and when I finally got home I found an invitation to a Sunday picnic in St James Park waiting for me.

Normally, two days of drinking is very bad for me, so I RSVP’d as dubious - but fortunately despite my fragile state the following day I felt just about able to cope with it.

A quick run round the local Waitrose for Champagne, ice and nibbles and off to meet the chaps at St James. It was one of those incredibly hot days and they wanted to sit in the sun, so I spent the first couple of hours slowly melting while impatiently waiting for the shadow from a nearby tree to rotate round to our location.

Adam, as is his wont had arrived with most of the contents of a greengrocer and plenty of Pimms - so while he spent the next hour chopping fruit (and washing it in mineral water), the rest of us switched to other drinks. Someone had brought some tiny Scotch eggs and I am not a huge fan of them frankly, but after my bottle of Champagne had unexpectedly exploded on me and drenched the eggs, it seemed rude to refuse them after that. They were actually quite good, although I put that down to the lack of Egg and an excess of Scotch and Champagne.

It was a bit of an odd afternoon in the totty department though as there was a distinct lack of any. St James Park has rather gone downhill in this regard which is disappointing. One of the chaps had a good zoom lens to focus in one some eye-candy in the distance, but it did feel a bit like being a tabloid photographer. Ugh!

We also managed to run out of ice - thanks in part to the heat melting it in double quick time so some of the guys ran over to a local ice cream van and came back with some ice lollies which were draped around the drinks to keep them cool. After that the melted ice lollies were then themselves poured into the former Pimms jugs and liberal quantities of Gin added. It actually turned out to be rather nice, if not what Walls Ice Cream probably had in mind when designing them.

In the distance, a brass band was playing - although they seemed to stick to popular classics as opposed to the sort of classical music I would have preferred.

As the evening wore on to a close, it suddenly started to rain. Not a light shower which runs off your clothes and hardly affects you, but the huge heavy drips of rain which slam into your clothing and drenches you in seconds. Naturally, we scurried around to clear up and made a run for the now vacant bandstand for shelter. As the rain looked here to stay for a while, it was decided to unpack everything again and carry on the picnic in the bandstand until it got too dark to see properly.

Quite amazingly, one crowd of people stayed out in the rain in the distance having their picnic. They later pulled out tea-lights once the rain stopped and the sun started to set - I must remember to do that myself next time. The candles that is - not the sitting in the rain.

Overall, a very enjoyable day - good company, good food and good drinks, along with it pouring down with rain. In short, a perfect English picnic.

The London Library is claimed to be the largest lending library in the world, and yesterday I joined some friends in having a tour of the place. It is set in a fairly small looking building in the rarified atmosphere of St James and Pall Mall, but appearances can be deceptive.

Despite its posh location, this is no fancy library but a very real functioning building - and the slight frontage conceals a vast building behind it.

We joined a regular tour which they hold on the last Saturday of the month for interested people and prospective members, for unlike most libraries in the UK - this is not state funded and hence has an annual membership fee to be able to use the building.

The library itself was originally founded in 1841 by (amongst others) Thomas Carlyle, who was dissatisfied with some of the policies at the British Library. The library has been based at 14 St. James’s Square since 1845, having originally occupied the first floor of the Travellers Club at 49 Pall Mall. The library therefore predates the 1850 libraries act which obliged local councils to set up community libraries for the general populace.

The most amazing thing about this place though - is the miles upon miles of book shelving, and unlike reference libraries where you order a book and it is delivered to your desk - here the members browse the book shelves themselves quite freely. This offers the almost unique feature of serendipitous discovery - where you go for one book and notice sitting next to it is another which you didn’t know about but is also useful for your researches.

As someone who spends hours sometimes just browsing around archive files on the internet and often find things by accident that way - I can really appreciate how this ability to browse the bookshelves is hugely useful to the membership.

The main part of the building is some 7 stories high, and there are wire framed floors in places where you can see right through from top floor to basement, and there is a second wing of similar size followed by a new extension under construction. Over a million books are on these shelves - and they aim to allow around 97% of them to be taken home to be read.

There is a quite marvelous atmosphere in the book stacks as they are very narrow and there is the delightful all pervading smell of old books though out the place.

It’s not a building to visit for the building itself - its a place to visit to experience the amazing atmosphere of a literally gem in the heart of London.

They have a digital database as well, and include tons of journals - alas the scientific ones which interest me are not part of their remit, otherwise I would probably find it cheaper to join the library myself than pay for each document I need from JSTOR etc.

I originally heard about the library after a mini-scandal last year over a sharp hike in the annual membership fee to £375 per annum - and I was reminded of the tours by a mention in The Londonist.

Even if you are just going for a look and don’t actually plan on joining the library itself, anyone who reads a lot will love a tour of this quite remarkable institution.

Update - Had an email from the Library letting me know that their JSTOR access actually includes the entire catalogue, which makes it much better for me. Also, a friend who was on the tour went back the other day on a daypass ticket.

Here I am sat at home trying to do some work. The balcony door is open and there is a cool breeze in the flat.

There is also an almighty racket outside from the seagulls. Quite staggering amount frankly. So, thinking that one of the neighbours is probably throwing chunks of bread from their balcony to attract the local birds (its quite a fun thing to do), I wandered out to watch the commotion.

All I saw were two seagulls on the riverside.

That’s it - just two birds making enough noise for a couple of dozen of their brethren.

I hope they get a sore throat from all that screeching!

Some years ago I was in Seattle for a business trip (horror of a flight there) and had a few hours to take in a few of the obvious tourist spots, including the Space Needle. When visiting touristy places I tend to pick up a few mementoes and have a tendency to get a booklet of some sort - and a cup.

I have learnt that most tourist venues sell cups - so if I always buy a cup, I can have a generic collection which is generally similar across the range.

Anyhow, this time I got something very different. I found some boxes which contain a wooden pen in the shape of the Space Needle - in itself not actually that interesting…

…until I read the note and it turned out these pens had been made for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, but hadn’t arrived in time so spent the past 40 odd years in a warehouse forgotten. They were found, cleaned up and were finally on sale.

I thought the story was charming - and promptly brought one for myself, and a few for my colleagues back at the office who had worked just as hard on the business proposal.

Why am I writing about it now - well, there is a weekend of Frasier on one of the satellite TV channels and I noticed from the trailer in one of them that the Roz character has one of those very same pens sitting on her desk when working in the radio broadcast office.

Neat!

I’m in Germany this morning - or so claims The Internet™. As it happens, I am sitting inside my usual coffee shop in Canary Wharf and sitting at my usual table (after it was vacated by interlopers) - but the internet is convinced that I am in Germany.

As it happens, this is not a new occurrence and every time I log on to the T-Mobile Wi-Fi service in the UK, all the adverts on websites switch to German. Google is usually better at knowing my real location, but even they sometimes get it wrong and just now tried to bounce me over to the German Google website.

As the location data is based on IP address tables, I could understand some glitches, but it does seem that either T-Mobile UK is routing all its internet traffic via a German proxy, which would be very odd - or they are identifying themselves as German to query systems - which would be equally odd.

However, as a diversion - it could once have been possible for me to be sitting in London - and also be in Germany. Where Cannon Street train station now stands used to be a German enclave between the 13th and 15th centuries. Queen Elizabeth 1 finally rescinded their privileges but the land itself remained the property of the Hanse merchants right up to 1853. It was only eventually sold to make way for the train station.

There is a plaque by the train station commemorating this heritage - and a photo of it (take by myself) is on Wikipedia

So - had the internet been around in the 14th century and I was sat inside the German enclave, then the adverts I am seeing today on my web browser would indeed be correct. But I am not - so they are wrong.

(Oh, and the Y button on my laptop seems to be glitchy this morning - damn)