Being followed

Those of you interested in what happened after yesterday are going to have to become adept at reading the subtext. My IP address is known. My two online reviews are no longer there, one murdered by my own hand, the other by persons unknown...
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I know very much less about history than I should so visiting the British Museum's Thomas Becket exhibition today was an eye-opener. I knew about Henry II's state-vs-church feud with Thomas Becket and Thomas's murder in Canterbury cathedral but I did not know that 350 years later history so precisely repeated itself as Henry VIII not only destroyed the tomb of Thomas Becket in the cathedral and forbad venerating him as a saint (see extra for the censorship of a prayer to Thomas Becket) but also that his execution of another Thomas (More) was as a result of a similar dispute.

Some feuds go on a very long time...

I also visited the exhibition at the Barbican of an archive of work by the radical 1980s feminist architecture co-operative, Matrix. It should have been invigorating but that history was much too close to the bone. All those shabby women's centres joyously set up in short-life housing, those battles with patriarchal councils, those women's construction courses, those radical stencil-duplicated exhortations for change (I still feel my arm turning)... I couldn't stay.

Not all battles are won. 
(Well, I guess eventually one side wins...)


Two other extras because it was such a treat being somewhere other than Oxford today.