Communication

I'd thought my hospital appointment first thing this morning was to meet someone who could give me a name for what is wrong with my hands. Turned out it was to put electrodes on my hands and arms to find out whether I have carpal tunnel syndrome. Diagnosis: communication between me and my GP could be better. (Also, the John Radcliffe is a really confusing hospital to find your way around.) But it was fun to watch the involuntary twitching and jumping of my arms, hands and fingers.

I'd allowed myself 3½ hours of bus to get to the British Museum in London but it actually ran roughly to timetable so I spent my extra hour at the Wellcome Collection. I have no idea why they had an exhibition on the cola nut but I wallowed in a bit of nostalgia over a short video about it filmed in Cameroon.

The curators of the British Museum exhibition, Silk Roads, have gathered artefacts from their own collections and 29 other organisations to show that 'rather than a single trade route from East to West, the Silk Roads were made up of overlapping networks linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from East Asia to Britain, and from Scandinavia to Madagascar'.

There was too much for me to be able to take in all the detail, but it's fascinating that there was such a rich exchange of art, techniques, thought and religions across the globe during Europe's so-called 'Dark Ages'. Just one symbol of that which entranced me was a coin minted by King Offa in the late 700s which part-copies a dinar of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansour (who founded what became Baghdad). One face of Offa's coin says 'REX OFFA' across the middle, with an inscription in Arabic (upside down) above and below that includes,' There is no god but Allah'. Just, wow...

The blip is the 'Heart of the Perfection Wisdom Sutra', in a parallel text (Sanskrit with a Chinese transliteration) necessitated by the spread of Buddhism in the AD900s. Sanskrit is usually read across from left to right but is here rearranged to match the Chinese, read top to bottom, right to left. (This book is from the Mogao Caves in China.)