After tumbling out of the V&A the next 24 hours or so of our trip was very me-centric, though we approached it gradually. We swung by Buckingham Palace to see if Chuck was home but we decided not to bother them and then went on down by Westminster Abbey where I was hoping to see Livingstone’s grave but we didn’t get there in time. We wandered on past Elizabeth Tower (I schooled my super amazing wife that Big Ben is actually the bell, man I am so knowledgeable about England) to the riverfront, which marked the first time in our several days in London that we actually saw the Thames, and eventually had some wine in a cave.

But this was all prelude to the main event of the evening, we were finally getting some culture, that is right we were going to see Back to the Future: The Musical! When I first saw that this was a thing it was like, of course we have to go, we are patrons of the arts around here. Plus my super amazing wife likes theater (before we started dating I did a series of elaborate maneuvers one time to get us seated next to each other at a play) so it was something I could drag her along to. I mean I didn’t drag her, she enjoyed it, I promise. Being in the theater was a lot of fun, they have really decked it out with all sorts of stuff. It was dazzling, you can see in the below photo that I look really dazed:

The musical itself was very good. Beforehand I got the t-shirt (I am wearing it right now), I got the deluxe cast recording, I got the lapel pin which unfortunately is “just” a DeLorean and doesn’t say like “musical” on it or anything, but whatever. There was less Huey Lewis than I was expecting but my absolute favorite part was whenever Doc sang because he got backup dancers “that just appear whenever I start singing” which is great. They swapped out some plot points to make the whole thing easier to stage (my only quibble there is the unrealistic portrayal of radiation poisoning, we can’t mislead the public like that in a musical about time travel) but it was really great. The effects were cool and it has to be one of the best musicals I have ever seen (I haven’t seen many but still).

Then we went back to the hotel and went to bed. But the next day was the single event I was most excited for, which was visiting the SOAS Archives in London! I have already revealed some of what I saw but I have been wanting to visit these archives for ages, specifically the archives of the London Missionary Society. They have all the letters and records of the Central Africa Mission and I wanted to see the original papers of these various people I have been obsessed about. In advance you have to request boxes and apply for a library card if you want to do the same, but it is free and when I went everything went perfectly smooth. I hiked on over to the SOAS Library as soon as it opened and checked in with the front desk, who issued my card and gave me directions to the special collections room. They had the boxes I requested (the maximum of three you can request at any one time), and handed me my first one.

It is just wild to be able to handle these documents. In a way it feels voyeuristic. Because of looking into Mama Meli, John and Elizabeth May are two of the people I have tried to find out the most about. In the archives is their private diaries and those happened to be in the box I was handed first. In my limited time I couldn’t go through everything page by page necessarily, so to narrow it down I went off of the dates I knew from the Chronicle, which is unfortunately births and deaths. Flipping right to the dates of tragedy feels weird but I suppose this is why they wanted their diaries preserved, so as to be known in some future time. I did start to feel like I knew these people better, as I quickly knew who wrote what based on their handwriting alone. And telling, maybe, that John and Elizabeth’s handwriting was so similar at first I couldn’t tell them apart. Even in a small chunk of archives I learned a lot of new things, like that Elizabeth actually went by “Rose,” her middle name.

To try to get through everything eventually I was reduced to just skimming through and taking pictures that I could transcribe later, but the overwhelming feeling was just wow, this stuff is just sitting in boxes. There was what was labelled as one of the original manuscripts of one of Stanley’s books, which just like, how is that just sitting in a box here. But this is the beauty of libraries and academic research and museums, that these things are saved and we can learn people’s stories. Even skimming I saw hints of fights and foibles and stiff upper lips, hints of people trying to smooth over arguments or defending themselves from accusations and just the mundane work of getting on with it when your husband or yet another close friend dies. I have so much more work to do on these archives but I think even this little chunk will keep me busy for a while.