The British love clutter. When we were in Edinborough, staying at the bejeweled Mrs. Cook's B and B, the attack of knick-knacks upon the senses was overwhelming. My mother was allowed to poke about the private rooms of the Cooks and came away reeling and short of breath. Her brain just couldn't cope with that many stuffed animals and porcelain figurines.
I think London is a product of clutter. The British just can't bear to throw out their old buildings. In Canada we're much more sensible and when something needs a bit of paint we just bulldoze it down and build something new. Not so in London. They fix things. They collect things. They rebuild things.
And if London is the city of clutter, then the British Museum is a shrine to clutter. The British Museum is a museum of knick-knacks. Admittedly, mostly very large and interesting knick-knacks, but knick-knacks none the less.
It's filled with bits of old buildings, pots and cooking utensils, loose change, scraps of this, and shards of that. When the British went exploring, if they found something interesting (the Parthenon, say) they would stick it in their pocket and bring it back home and stuff it in their cultural attic, the British Museum. I loved it.
I saw the Rosetta stone and the Portland vase and a bunch of 4000 year old dead Egyptians. One thing the British need to work on, however, is their storytelling. I find the soap opera behind the objects far more interesting than the objects themselves. I didn't actually see the Portland vase until I went back to the museum with Vicki just last weekend. And perhaps this is deviant of me, but the thing I found most fascinating about it was that it had been smashed by a madman sometime in the fairly recent past and then glued back together. There was no mention of this in the British museum anywhere, though if you looked closely you could see some of the seams from the repair job.
As well, the guy that cracked the Rosetta stone effectively plagiarized some of the crucial first clues from another guy. What happened to that other guy? Did they duke it out in the pub when they were both in their eighties? Was he paid off? Or did he just wallow in self-pity, slide into drunkenness and debauchery, and end up a bum on the street whose only revenge was to stagger over to his nemesis' house and piss on his lawn. These are the things I'm curious about.
As well, did you know that the Parthenon was intact until well into the 17th century when it was accidentally blown up by the Turks who were using it to store gunpowder. I bet that was a bit of a public relations nightmare.
I'm sure there are more and better stories hidden in the museum, but the place is the biggest attic in the world and I was only there, total, for a day and a half.
That evening, in order to examine a different facet of English culture, my mother and I went to see "the Full Monty" at Leicester Square. Movies are freaking expensive in London. The tickets cost seven pounds each. It was reserved seating. The theatre held maybe fifty people and it was shown on one of those postcard-size screens like they have at the ultra-cheap theatres back home.
Afterwards, we had a drink at a sidewalk café in Covent Garden and a really good dinner also in Covent Garden, went for a walk along the Thames and got slightly lost. We eventually found our way back to Leicester Square (aka party central) and rejuvenated our depleted powers with Harvey Wallbangers sitting at the outside tables of the Zoo Club.
The next day followed pretty much the same format except that we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum instead of the British museum. If the British Museum is the attic of an empire, then the V and A is its closet. By far the coolest exhibits in the V and A are the clothing exhibit, the jewelry exhibit, and the weapons exhibit. Again, I didn't come close to seeing the whole thing but these three rooms are worth the price of admission. In fact, they're probably worth the cost of a plane ticket to London.
The jewelry exhibit was my favourite. I think I'd always had a little trouble understanding the concept of "treasure" before I came to England. "Treasure" was something pirates buried. That's about as far as I could conceive of it. Treasure is ancient, beautifully crafted gold rings with emeralds the size of peach pits. Treasure is a 1000 year old clay pot filled with golden Roman coins that a farmer finds buried in his field. Treasure is kept in a special armoured room behind bulletproof glass in the center of the V and A. You have to go through one of those one way Ronco slice-a-matic turnstiles to get into this room. The glass is so sensitively alarmed that a couple of girls who had placed sketchbooks against it to draw something on display alerted the eternal watcher who sent a guard over to shoot them dead if they didn't move away from the glass immediately. To leave the room, there is another one way slice-a-matic turnstile at the opposite end. This one has a a little booth with a window looking into the turnstile and the eternal watcher who sits in front of a console which displays your change in body weight since you entered and has a big button labelled "Nerve Gas" which she is authorized to use to kill everyone in the room should any young art students sketch too energetically against the bulletproof glass.
That evening we had a hideously overpriced and not particularly good Indian dinner. Then we had a drink in a pub filled with college students dressed as farmers and businessmen who seemed to be bobbing for beers in a big bowl of flour.
Chris
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out... ...Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work..."
-- Sherlock Holmes
"Bollocks! Holmes was a coke-addled wanker whom I could have bested at Trivial Pursuit any day of the week."
-- Capt. Bingo Hale