Started the day with breakfast at Pain de Quotidien. You can tell that Alex is enthused for the day ahead.
Pedalo ride at Hyde Park
Beautiful gardens at Hyde Park
In the afternoon we went to a lecture at the Royal Society (which, as you can tell from the above, I was very excited about). The lecture was about children growing up in abnormal situations and their ability to cope with traumatic childhoods.
One of the speakers was Emma Donaghue who was talking about her book, Room. Emma's book is about a woman and her son, held in captivity, as told from the perspective of the son. I was originally wary about a story told from the perspective of a child; Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible includes frequent chapters told from the perspective of Ruth, the youngest child of the Price family, and I always found these to be the weakest of the book. Ruth's voice always seemed contrived and a bit gimmicky. But this is not the case with Donaghue's excellent (and haunting) book. I would highly recommend giving it a read.
It seems to have gained new salience given the recent Castro case and it's apparently going to be made into a film. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work since the interesting and arresting point of the book is that it's being told from the boy's point of view. This may be hard to translate onto film. But I'm interested to see whether or not they pull it off.
One of the other speakers spoke about his work studying Romanian orphanages. I recently read a really fascinating article on Romanian orphanages, which can be found here.
Outside the Royal Society with my sister
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