Today we walked through Regent’s Park again, and got a good view of a coots’ nest.

Though there was one egg already present, the pair of coots were still working on the nest. One of them was paddling backwards and forwards to the reeds, chewing off lengths of reed with its beak and bringing then back for its mate to add to the ramshackle raft that constituted their domicile.

It may not look like much but in London it’s worth at least six figures.

We found our way to the Wellcome Collection. This is a strange museum with a medical theme, but crossing the boundary into modern art.

Among other things, they have a hardcopy of the human genome.

It’s in very fine print. I’d hate to be the proofreader.

They also have a petri dish of sheep shit, from Dolly, the first cloned mammal.

I didn’t take any picture in the exhibition on the history of dentistry because I was too busy being grossed out.

On to the British Library, where we were meeting a friend in the Treasures Gallery. You’re not supposed to take photos there, but I had taken a couple before I saw the sign. As it turned out they were two documents that involved huge changes for the world, with the best of intentions but not always the best results. First, Karl Marx’s reader’s card at the British Museum Library. (They didn’t have to go far for that one.)

Then the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament.

This is the manuscript in which the Gospel of Mark (generally considered to be the oldest of the gospels) does not have the resurrection in it. Mark chapter 16 ends at verse 8 without the zombie Jesus bit. Also, a couple of references to Jesus being the son of god are missing. Funny how they left that out when all the later bibles are so insistent on it.

There are other lots of other goodies there, including one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta, but some of the BL’s greatest hits were missing. No Lindisfarne Gospel, no Beowulf. In some ways I miss the old manuscript room when the British Library shared digs with the British Museum. Somewhere hidden in the BL and no longer on display is Scott of the Antarctic’s diary, and Fleming’s notebook with the failed experiment that led to the discovery of penicillin. Really the problem with the BL is that they have so much good stuff, but they are in the library business, not the museum business, so they have to be choosy about what they display.

The also have the coolest domain name, http://bl.uk/ . Is there any other organization that can get away with just four characters?