Visit to the British Museum for the exhibition Treasures of Heaven.

It's a cathedral like space inside the old library reading room, and very fitting for a show like this. The image above is from a page on wikipedia and shows the restored Reading Room. Don't expect the space to look like that however, because it's been converted into multiple rooms and has very subdued lighting. You only get a sense of the huge rotunda and walls through gaps in the artificial walls separating the themes of the show.

The exhibition has all sorts of reliquaries on display, going back to the earliest days of christianity. From something like a fragment of the "true cross", or part of Christ's "umbilical cord" to English saints such as Becket or Cuthbert. There is even some King Charles 1 who seemed to translate almost immediately to martyr and saint when beheaded in 1649 (an Anglican Church Saint).

Some of the items are truly beautiful. Not only the gemstone encrusted and artistically worked caskets that contain many of the relics, but the figurative paintings sometimes wrapped around them. The large picture used to advertise the show (above and right) is also surprising. Fresh and natural and from the early sixteenth century.

Things really were very different in the past and religion really was a matter of life and death to people. Where what happened after death would impact you for all eternity, or at least until the Last Judgement. Peter Ackroyd is perhaps the premier cultural writer/historian of London and his Life of Thomas More well describes the deep religiosity that suffused the medieval world.

Bit of a painful day yesterday, getting my third puncture this month and the 4th this year ...

I am very sorry to say that I've been very lazy and always got a bike shop to fix the puncture for me. This costs about £30 each time though and is now getting more expensive. So, since the puncture happened on my way to work, and I'd have "advisors" available (people who know bikes), I thought I'd do it myself for a change.

Thanks to good advice, and even some hands on from various people at work, I got the back wheel of the brompton off, the inner tube patched and everything put back together.

I did manage to cycle home, but had to stop at a local bike shop and buy a better pump. Plus show me how to sort my gearing (see picture) because I only seemed to have gear 1 and 2, not all three!

And now the bike seems to be running almost perfectly. Now I need to schedule time to clean it ....

One thing with a Brompton: if you get a puncture, you can fold it up and get a bus. A big plus when it's pouring rain.

I mentioned the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time in the post about my visit to Lambeth Palace.

A lot of BBC journalists were striking this Thursday and this impacted a few BBC radio programs (e.g. the Today program was off the air). So, when the podcast of the latest episode of Melvyn Bragg's intellectual chat show failed to appear, I assumed it was due to this industrial action. It turns out that the show is just having a break until later this year.

If you like an informed conversation between people with a good knowledge of the subject, then this is the best discussion program on radio. Perhaps the best anywhere. Melvyn Bragg manages to ask good questions, gets out of the way and gives people the room and time to speak. The subject can be anything from ancient history to modern physics.

In an age where the level of discourse often sinks very low, this type of programme is an endangered species.

Samples :

• The Minoan Civilisation
• Proust
• Conciousness
• The Carolingian Renaissance
• Zoroastrianism

See the complete archives.

I went to Lambeth Palace Library with a ticket for the new exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The exhibition costs £6 and you need to book online (or call) for a particular time. When I saw the exhibition is open on Saturdays during July, I booked an 11 am slot.

Unfortunately, no photographs inside the Great Hall itself, but I took some of the grounds (the photo of the Great Hall below is taken from the Archbishop's web site).

On entry to the grounds and garden, we are greeted by a couple of ladies who act as our guides, and introduce us to the buildings, some history and the exhibition itself. In a way, it almost feels like you are being privileged to a private tour, although there must have been about twenty people in total.

The Palace and Library itself have quite an interesting history, from the times of the "heretic" bible translator John Wycliffe, through Henry VIII and the Reformation. Then through the Commonwealth and Restoration, and all the way up to the Second World War bomb damage. The Hall is a large room and every wall is covered with books, many of which seem to be very old, and almost all leatherbound.

Great Hall
Location of exhibition

Lollard's Tower - now some
prime residential property?

Lollard's Tower contains the remains of a prison from the 17th Century,and is named after the followers of Wycliffe.

An empty space on its outside once contained a statue of Thomas à Becket, removed by Henry VIII who disliked any veneration it was shown by passing boatmen (the Thames used to run directly past the building, by its walls).

The exhibition is partitioned into various display "cases" which follow the history of common tongue biblical translation from the earliest days (e.g. Wycliffe in the 14th C), Erasmus through Tyndale, Luther and Calvin and even into the 19th Century with translation to languages like Cree and Malay.

1. The Wycliffe Tradition
   Wycliffe translated "into the language not of angels but of Englishmen"
2. Renaissance Scholarship
3. English Vernacular Bibles
   Including William Tyndale's translations from the 1520's and 1530's, smuggled into England
4. The King James Version and Translators
   Fifty-four scholars, headed by Richard Bancroft. Based on the Bishop's Bible but drawing heavily on Tyndale, Coverdale and the Geneva Bible
5. The King James Bible
   The first edition open at St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. MS98 is also shown, an early draft made by the Westminster company
6. Early European Vernacular Bibles
7. Spreading the Word Overseas
8. Textual Scholarship and Critical Editions
9. Towards a New English Translation for the 20th Century

Definitely worth a visit and it would be good to have a better look around the rest of the place sometime as well. Walking distance from Vauxhall by the river.

So, I bought a new laptop. It's a Lenovo X220 Thinkpad and a pretty nice machine. An Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM and a great keyboard. A shame it's got a touchpad since I only use the trackpad (like on my X60s): I disabled the touchpad in the BIOS.

I initially tried to install Debian Stable (Squeeze) on the machine, but the display resolution was wrong because X wasn't new enough. So, I installed Debian Testing and ran with this for a few days. Mostly OK but at least one solid lock-up a day and no error reports in systlog or Xorg.log.

This is very new hardware, and from scanning Phoronix (for example), I know a lot of Intel DRM work (both driver and kernel) is ongoing. So I downloaded Linux 3.0 (rc4, then rc5) and made a kernel package in the Debian way :

So far, so good. No nore lockups.

• The display's great (crisp and bright)
• Keyboard's very good, as usual
• Suspend to RAM and disk works
• Audio works
• WIFI works
• Webcam works