Saturday, May 29, 2010

there's an awful lot of breathing room, but i can hardly move

Today was perfectly lovely, despite the fact that it was a grey and drizzly day in London. I woke up around nine, messed around on the internet (the bane of my existence, but how I love it), took a shower, and was out the door by 11:30. At that point, I was quite hungry, and so I stopped for lunch at the pub down the street -- The Only Running Footman, which was the first pub I've ever been to with white tablecloths on the old, scarred wooden tables, and with stickers in the window from Michelin guides. I had passed the pub last night and it was overflowing with posh men in expensive suits and posher women in dangerously high heels; this morning, there were very few other people in the pub, and so I was able to enjoy the food without feeling completely scummy in my sweater/skirt/leggings/sneakers combo. I wrote a couple of pages in my spanking new journal while enjoying a chicken sandwich, fries, a diet coke (mmm), and a latte, and while surreptitiously watching the staff clean behind the bar (it appeared to be the cleanest bar I've ever seen, as well).

But, the entertainment value of watching people clean stuff was fairly short-lived, so I vacated the establishment and took the tube three stops west to South Kensington, home of the Victoria and Albert Museum. This is one of my favorite museums in the entire world, and even though I've spent several afternoons of my life there, I'm glad I spent another one. I didn't peruse the main collections, but I checked out two of their three special exhibits: one on quilts from the 1700s to today, and one on the 18th century collector Horace Walpole. The third exhibit was on the style of Grace Kelly, which I would have loved to have seen, but it was sold out, so I had to content myself with the more distant past.

And content myself I did -- I'm a huge dork for both textiles and history, so the two special exhibits were outstanding for me. The quilts exhibit had some very lovely and interesting pieces, and I was impressed by the audio commentary: for 3.50 (pounds, not dollars), and the deposit of your photo ID, you could get an audio commentary on an iPod Touch, which meant that the audio commentary could be accompanied by visual images. Theoretically you could see the visual images in the form of the displays in front of you, but given the relatively low light they used in the exhibition space to protect the fragile fabrics, having a visual aid that you could zoom in on and play around with was a great idea. And the quilts were outstanding -- some lovely pieces that have somehow survived hundreds of years, as well as some newer pieces that were artistically interesting (if perhaps less usable). One modern piece in particular moved me; the artist/quilter made it with a base of steel-wool-like wire rather than fabric, and it was meant to evoke her feelings on her mother's dementia and subsequent death. Sewing with steel wool sounds dreadful (the commentary said she had to wear gloves, but it still hurt), but cathartic in some weird way, I suppose.

As soon as I finished with the quilts, I moved on to Horace Walpole. He was the son of Britain's first prime minister, eventually becoming the fourth earl of Orford a few years before his death (after his older brother and his older brother's son both died). More importantly, he built a fabulous house called Strawberry Hill, which was a Gothic-inspired manor near London, and collected an outstanding array of art and objects that he analyzed and catalogued. He also wrote "The Castle of Otranto", regarded as the first Gothic novel. He died without heirs, leaving his house to his niece (a sculptor, which would have been rather rare back then); when the contents were eventually sold in the 1830s or 1840s (it's in my notebook, but I'm lazy), the auction lasted over a month and was considered one of the most important auctions of the century. The exhibition contained some amazing stuff, and while I won't go into more detail here, I felt all sorts of inspiration; living the kind of life that Walpole did, surrounded by the objects that he collected, would be strange and amazing, and I had all sorts of tiny seeds of stories sprout up within me as I walked through the galleries.

After that, nothing could really top the experience, and so I came back to Mayfair (after buying three books -- pamphlets originally printed during World War II, telling servicemen how to behave in the countries they were visiting, with all sorts of fun stereotypes about Americans, Brits, Frenchmen, and Germans -- and a couple of pieces of jewelry at the museum store). When I got here, I had afternoon tea in the conservatory of my hotel; it was the ultimate decadent British tea experience (although I suppose it could have been more decadent if I had added champagne to it). I filled up on tea sandwiches, scones, and two pots of tea while writing about some of the ideas that sprung up while I was at the museum. Then, I walked down the road and had a diet coke at a different cafe, where I was able to use my laptop and actually work on Madeleine and Ferguson's story for a little while (shocking, I know). I also got hit on by some random dude who was quite insistent that I come and have a drink with him; I was polite in my refusal the first time, but when he was loitering in the same spot half an hour later on the way back to my hotel, I ignored him.

And now, I'm all packed up and ready to go; my flight leaves Heathrow at 10:35 tomorrow morning, so I need to get up and head out relatively early tomorrow. I'll be back in San Francisco by mid-afternoon California time, after an annoyingly long flight; hopefully I'll be able to write or read for most of it, and then stay up long enough when I arrive in California to cure myself of the worst of my jetlag. It will be go go go after that; I'll have to do laundry and work at unpacking my apartment, since I leave next weekend for Tokyo (ridiculous). So, while there were people in London I probably should have tried to see, I'm glad I took a day to relax and be a dork; the next couple of weeks are going to be hectic. Goodnight!

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