Filling up with old treasure

'Tis the first day of summer. Not shorts weather yet though.

I still like the tube, but I don't particularly enjoy busy stations or awkward standing. A lot more of it is above ground than I expected - I guess as you get further out there was more space to build, or it was built with the suburbs? I don't know. It's 150 years old - can you believe that?! 

Yesterday Little Man (was that the name?) and I went to the British Museum. It was big, and really busy. And there were so many mummies! Wow! I didn't realise so much of that stuff had been dug up and bought. We wizzed around quite quickly actually, but I'm glad we went. It's a lovely old building... And there was an old library - King George's maybe? not sure - which I loved. Heaps of old books and miscellaneous and intriguing artifacts.

Today I took the tube to South Kensington and had me a visit to the V&A: Victoria and Albert museum. I just loved it! It was much more my thing. I love museums and art galleries with beautiful things, you know. Not trains or dinosaurs so much as sculptures and relics. In my kind of museum, like the V&A, you forget that you're tired and footsore and your back aches, and when the room is quiet you forget where you are or that people might be watching and you're on a different plane of awareness. It's tranquil. It's soul cleansing & replenishing somehow.

There really was some incredibly old and beautiful stuff in there. I just finished watching series 2 of Robin Hood this morning, and then I went and saw all this medieval paraphernalia. And old bibles! As well as Romanesque statues and Victorian household stuff (I think), and old ironwork and silver stuff and glass windows, and parts of old buildings. Oh that doesn't sound like much, but you should have seen Trajan's column and the stuff around it. And the wood carvings! And the teeny little marble engravings with the story of Jesus' life. It really was fantastic. Everything was well displayed and there were hands-on activities and old stuff you were allowed to touch. A replica gauntlet and medieval tunics to try on! I only took a photo of the outside of the building and there's not really much point uploading it. There were way too many tiny, intricate, extravagant, enormous, amazing, precious and pretty things to even think about which ones deserved a chunk of memory in my phone.

I might go back there one day.