Life, Love & Literature

I would have called it a day of cul­ture per­son­ally, but when you are a 10 year old boy the naked boobs are obvi­ously atten­tion grabbing.

We were head­ing up to Lon­don to watch Hor­ri­ble His­to­ries, but as we opted to grab a lift to the train sta­tion from Pete on his way to work we were in Lon­don nearly 3 hrs early.  So a bite to eat down on the South Bank and then over the bridge…

no I have no idea what Sam is doing…

to Trafal­gar Square…

Where we paused to recog­nise Nel­son and have a long dis­cus­sion about the logic of build­ing stat­ues and memo­ri­als to dead peo­ple, because after all they don’t know or care. Sam remains unconvinced..

and the National Gallery.

This is where we first started encoun­ter­ing naked boobs, lots of them.

Many moons ago when I was still liv­ing with my par­ents in Wales and Pete was in Lon­don, I used to go to the National nearly every other Fri­day after­noon, to pot­ter for an hour or so, then I’d walk along the Strand into the City to meet Pete from work before going for a few pints and a curry in the East End. Happy days!

Any­way I’d never taken the boys (apart from nip­ping in to use the toi­lets ) as they are not inter­ested enough to jus­tify it as a day trip.   But it seemed a very good way to kill an hour.  We planned well, looked at the maps when we got in to the gallery, iden­ti­fied four or five rooms we wanted to visit, did those and left.  No one got bored, every­one stayed cheerful.

We went to see the Leonard Da Vinci they have as I’m hop­ing we can hitch our wagon to Big Mamma Frog and do our own Da Vinci project.  Although I sus­pect we may well get side­tracked by the Borgia’s a bit as this is Jack’s favourite HH song at the moment (I know we wouldn’t be the first to find our­selves led down this path so any sug­ges­tions of resources welcome).

We did Tit­ian, late 18th Cen­tury Britain, Impres­sion­ism (Monet’s Waterlilies in par­tic­u­lar), Seu­rat and Van Gogh.  Pretty ran­dom really, just what caught our imag­i­na­tion.  We stopped at things that caught our eyes as we walked though other gal­leries, mainly bat­tles, cru­ci­fix­ions and greek myths (with naked boobs!).

We stopped for a drink and snack at the back of the museum oppo­site the the­atre.  I love the going to the the­atre but have strangely never been to a show in Lon­don, so there I got to do some­thing new.

On the walk up to Trafal­gar Square we had an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on Geor­gian The­atre and how many the­atres were set up and named after Geor­gian actors. I also got to pass on the story I’d hap­pen to read on the train of Samuel Foote los­ing his foot in a rid­ing acci­dent that was the fault of George III’s brother, hence they gave him a license to set up his own the­atre which he called the The­atre Royale. Occa­sion­ally things like that work out and you get to sound very knowl­edge­able

I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the show again as I blogged them sep­a­rately here.  The­atre was beau­ti­ful though, lovely domed ceil­ing cov­ered in naked ladies to Jack’s chagrin.

Rather than head straight home we decided to go and spend an hour in the British Museum  which appears to have replaced the Nat­ural His­tory as the default hang out.

We’ve been before so only did some of the Greek and Egypt galleries.

Parthenon Sculp­tures

But Sam was more inter­ested in the pat­terns on the floor

Venus and her boobs

And some male bits to bal­ance it out

Egypt­ian boobs

and a scarab beetle

The mum­mies were their favourites

mummy

mummy and x-ray

With canopic jars run­ners up. Although we were dis­ap­point that the info plaques never told us the names of the four sons of Horus from whom the jars get their heads and the staff in the room didn’t know and looked quite dis­con­certed when Sam ran up and asked him.  Hapi the baboon (lungs), Imsety the human (liver), Dua­mutef the Jackel (stom­ach) and Qebehsenuef the hawk (intestines) if any­one cares. 

Canopic jars

But this was the highlight.

Rosetta stone!  Jack has wanted to see it since he read the first Kane Chron­i­cles.  Some­how we missed it last time we were at the museum.  I sus­pect because it was sur­rounded by tourists pho­tograph­ing it, took me ages to get this.

On the Kane Chron­i­cle theme the shabtis were also popular.

High­light for me was some­thing we nearly missed.  On the way out a sign caught my eye, fol­low­ing it we found…

…Olympic medals

We mean­dered back through Covent Gar­den where there were no naked boobs but there were lots (and I mean lots!) of flags.

And of course street entertainers.

And this would be where my cam­era started play­ing up and I missed the man doing a hand­stand on some bricks on the vault­ing horse.

To fin­ish off the Kane Chron­i­cles thing we stopped down on the Embank­ment to see Cleopatra’s Needle.

And have a run around in Vic­to­ria Gar­dens try­ing to catch pigeons to the amuse­ment of bystanders.

Before head­ing for home.

I love London!

For Sam, St Pauls is the one on the left, the Gherkin on the right (he gets them mixed up )

A lovely day!