Deux pressions, s'il-vous plaît

I have just got back from Paris, where I went to see an exhibition and some Parisian friends. I had a very nice time -- I'm always surprised how much I like Paris. The romanticisation is a lot of baloney, but it's actually a lovely city. I went with a friend who has the excellent quality of a similar attention span to me, and this makes me free to say that all the art is beginning to bore me and I could do with a beer. Yay! Not to mention how effortlessly they seem to make good food there.

The exhibition was wonderful, but also frustrating in that I want to see script, and of course the parts of the books which are open are the shiny bits. These may or may not have some minuscule script on them, but the higher grade the book the more likely it is to have whole openings of gold and majuscules, so the sort of script I particularly want to find out about for a project of my own, the Caroline minuscule of high-grade liturgical manuscripts, remains annoying invisible a few pages further into the book. I can forgive the general public for this, easily, because there's no reason why my preoccupations should be imposed on the world at large, and in general decorated pictures are beautiful and appealing -- though I do think that most people appreciate a good page of script if shown it -- maybe just a few pages at a time though, not a whole roomful. But it annoys me that curators take this point of view too -- that the tip of the book-iceberg, the pretty stuff, is the only bit that counts. It's because they tend to be art-historians, not historians. The catalogue could easily have included more pictures of the script of the manuscripts.

That aside, it was an excellent trip. I put a very edited group of photos up here, many of them taken from the Seine on a boat trip, using my little camera phone.