Sometimes you're better off dead, there's gun in your hand and it's pointing at your head...

[hazelchaz]

Monday in London. Last day and night in UK, part 1 of 2.

The website recovery fund stands at $179 so far. Thank you to Alison, Elisa, Frank, John, Kieron, Selina, Tammy, and Todd for your generosity and support. In other news, I've started uploading pictures from our trip. Our first weekend in London, plus Cadbury World are online. (The 'Tun pix will be up as soon as I finish matching up my captions to the photos.)

Things I forgot to mention about our visit with frostfox: I have a cute picture of her cat (Max) napping on the guest bed on top of the duvet while library_lynn sleeps under the covers. And Max's full name is Maximum Damage Trouble Is My Middle Name.

People I saw and photographed on Monday included: Moshe Feder (sandial), and Peter Roberts.

We slept in a bit Monday morning, got up and had breakfast at the familiar Belgrove Hotel again, and mailed our poctsarcds from the post office nearby. Including both ones for back home, and the one for bohemiancoast. Stopped at Net Station to post to my LJ, collect e-mail, etc. Got done in about 30-40 minutes, so we had time to spare (it's a pound for an hour's connection).

library_lynn wore her animé shirt -- the one with the Dragon Princess design. (I wore mine Friday night, to the Future Worldcon "Red" party and received many compliments on it. Lynn stayed home, so we didn't get to be twinsies that night.)

Got on the London Underground to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A museum is a huge pile... Queen Victoria started it, in 1899, and King Edward opened it ten years later. That took some time to build! It houses stuff that it inherited from other museums, of course. We didn't make it to all the galleries. But we did see the silver gallery. There was a man who had the idea to collect current (state of the art) British silver, even though it wasn't "historical" (i.e. old) -- good thing he did, because by collecting contemporary silver when it was fresh and available, the Museum now has a nifty representative sampling of British silver pieces. (There's a plaintive or apologetic note on one of the signs, to the extent that they wished they had more than just one or two pieces of French and Spanish silver. And that the museum exhibits stuff loaned from private collectors on a rotating basis.)

We went to the 15th century tapestries. Lynn liked them. The three biggest displayed hunt scenes, that used to be owned by one family (a duke?). One was a piece of a tapestry, and it had a unicorn on it. It was of the mille fleur variety -- lots of flowers and plants. There were two that included the Fates (Clotho and the rest of her crowd).

There was a large exhibit on 20th Century design. Including a poster showing the 1913-designed typeface used in the London Underground. (The LU is an excellent example, in my book, of how to establish an identity through use of typography.) There was one piece made of round drawers that were all pulled out so you could see that it was a set of drawers; Lynn had the urge (successfully repressed) to shut all the drawers. They had Arts and Crafts movement stuff, and Modernist and Post-Modern, and Punk rock albums, and consumer electronics, and early advertisements... Fascinating stuff. It just skimmed the world of design; I could easily have enjoyed seeing an exhibit of, say, 19th and 20th century chairs. Real chairs, not these one-of-a-kind sculpture things; I'm interested in what people actually mass-produce and use. I suppose the next big retrospective exhibit will have to have a whole section just for Ikea's impact on western furniture.

library_lynn also liked the big glass chair sculpture -- made from heavy glass and rebar. It wasn't actually a chair; it was a sculpture that looks like a chair.

There was a special exhibit called "Hearware" which was a science fictional exhibit -- they took a bunch of designers and scientists and extrapolated the world of headphones, hearing aids, and so forth.

Another exhibit was about "70 years of Penguin Books." Penguin Books has been a small part of my bookstore experience all along; almost all of my P.G. Wodehouse books have their trademark orange spines, for example. But they're simply huge in their native land. I learned about their colour-coding: "Orange for fiction, green for crime." Blue for something else, and so on... I'd never seen their crime line; all that comes over here are the classics and big sellers, not the full line of Penguin, Pelican and Puffin books.

Speaking of funny-looking flightless birds: it wasn't until after seeing this exhibit, and more than 20 years after listening to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio shows and reading the books, that it hits me like a ton of bricks that "Megadodo Publications" is a joke about "Penguin Books."

We get as far as we're going to get without lunch, and I stop and ask a guard if I can take a photo of the silver lions. He informs me that I can take photos -- flash photos, even -- of anything in the museum. This overwhelms me -- would that I'd had that information an hour or two earlier. Oh well, we're not going back now. On our way down to lunch, I get a picture of part of the museum building itself: the end of the wall, next to the stairs, with the elaborate textured embellishments and the carved signs for RAPHAEL, TITIAN, REMBRANDT, TURNER. Presumably if you'd gone up those stairs you would have found paintings by those chaps, in the museum's first configuration; those steps now lead up to the Silver hall, which I guess points up the problem with carving your direction signs in stone.

At the V&A Museum cafe, I had Toad in the hole. Two sausages nestled in a pastry crust bowl, basically. library_lynn had a sandwich. Some dessert (some chocolate fudge brownie cake thing). We grabbed a bag of crisps in case we needed a salt fix later, and shared a hot chocolate. On our way out, we stopped at the Gift Shop (of course). There was a tape measure with illustrations of fashions through the ages -- it would have a year (such as 1760) and someone dressed in clothing from that decade. But it was 15 pounds, which seemed a bit much even for a museum shop souvenir. We also looked at the recycled suitbags (no two alike): they're taken a suit (such as a pinstriped suit, say) and cut it up to make a purse out of it. The two pockets with flaps on top from the jacket were now side pockets on the purse, a sleeve (buttons still attached) was the top closure flap, and so forth. Just adorable, but it was 65 pounds. ($120 US if you're playing along at home.) Why, you could buy a brand new pink and purple tie for that much at John Lewis in Glasgow!

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in furniture, then the Geffrye Museum is a museum of 'ordinary' English furniture consisting of about a dozen roomsets representing the homes of the monied middle classes over the last 500 years or so. The 60s room is almost exactly like the furniture that my parents bought shortly after they married, for example. At the moment they have an exhibition of contemporary chairs. Finishing this week I fear.

Furniture

[hazelchaz]

Cool! Something to look at next time I'm in country...

Chaz