Darwin's birthday

The last museum in London for me was the Museum of Natural History where they have a special exhibition for Darwin's birthday. Of course, every natural history museum in the world is really his, but this exhibition was particularly well put together. The stories were lovely. He was only 22 when he set out on The Beagle and lots of the notes captured Darwin as a bit of a lad rather than the sage, bearded image that we tend to be presented with. He rode on the backs of the Galapagos tortoises but had trouble keeping his balance, pulled the tails of lots of animals and repeatedly threw iguanas back into the sea to try to work out why they kept returning to him so he could do it again.

They had lots of contemporary stuff, sadly enough still defending common sense against 'intelligent' design, a nice film of the path he walked for years while he was thinking it all through, and the two finches (hummingbirds as it turns out) that started him thinking. They were tagged and presented on a velvet cushion in pride of place. One highlight was the little scrap of paper where Darwin sketched out a tree and comes up with the model of branches for evolutionary science. This is the first codification of the idea of the tree of life.

Christine and I then went to Lynne's house and I made the shredded kale and potato soup that I had eaten in Portugal. It worked just fine. Finally I trudged off in the night to my train to Edinburgh where I found two empty seats. This mean a lay down on the train and a patchy but passable night's sleep. I finally looked out the window in Carlisle but could not workout why the train was going that way. The announcement was the we were diverted in the middle of the night because of flooding. I contented myself with staring at the white sheep with black faces (just like in the cartoons) and the wonderful green of everything until the train pulled in at the station in Scotland.