Me, obviously,
first and foremost! I insist you admire
my new hat!
On Wednesday the
office was disfunctional, as in that we had no electricity and no water due to
construction work being done elsewhere in the building, so I decided to take
the day off and go to London. Luckily S
and R had time to spare, so the three of us met at the Club and planned our
adventures from there.
The afternoon’s highlight was meant to be the
newly refurbished Dickens Museum, but since I had run totally out of Assam and
Lady Grey (I had been subsisting on teabags for three days!) we had to drop by
the Twinings Tea Shop first. A wonderful
wonderful shop – well, it was before they decided to refurbish it! Now it looks like all such shops look.
Why do shops and
cafes who have the luck to possess a venue which is unique and full of character insist on changing it to look like all other shops and cafes, rather
than preserve and showcase what they have?
Oxford used to have a wonderful café called Rosie Lees, very quaint and
chintzy and old fashioned, and I used to go there quite a lot. Then they ripped out everything that made the
place special and put in bog-standard mahogany floors and steel counters with
ugly tables and chairs and I now avoid it like the plague.
But we were in
London. The Twinings Tea Shop continues
to have good tea, and since it is the only Twinings Tea Shop in the world I
continue to buy my Numero Uno beverage from them twice a year or so.
Then we headed
towards the Dicken Museum, but shock & horror! it started to snow. Nasty pellety kind of snow. My friends were all for going on and battling
our way through the blizzard, but I am a creature of luxury and anyway it was a
long time before I would get home that day and wet clothes worn for hours are a
recipe for an unpleasant cold, so I flagged down a cab and we piled in and rode
in style to the museum.
Being cold and
hungry we decided to first partake of some light refreshments in the museum’s
café. It is a very small, light and
pleasant café, and the ham & pea soup I had was both excellent and
plentyful, accompanied by nice bread.
Alas, S was punished for her vegetarian ways and had to subsist on whatever
nutrients her body was able to extract from the pieces of dry bread and the
apple she was able to obtain. Not a good place for vegetarians to visit!
The bathroom
Then we purchased
our tickets, at £8 each, and looked over the house. Dickens only lived there for two years, but
they had some nice artefacts of his life.
I must say, I was a bit disappointed.
The whole place was sterile. We
go to the Nursery and there are no toys.
We go to the kitchen and it is aseptically clean (though it doesn't show in the photos) and doesn’t have most
of the implements needed to whip up the simplest dish (no food of any kind,
either, of course - the white stuff in the pitcher isn't real). The bookcases were
tall and full of books from that period, including many by Dickens himself.
But they had huge glass doors. No
writer would have bookcases that huge with doors, because every time you want
to consult a book you have to fetch a ladder to open the doors! I suspect Dicken’s bookcases did not have
such doors, they were installed later to stop the tourists from touching the
books.
The kitchen
But I must not be
too negative. There were a few nice
touches as well. Scattered throughout
the house were books with the title of ‘Read Me’, which my friends rather
liked. I didn’t, because if I had
actually actually come over all Victorian and picked up one of those books and curled up in one of the armchairs and
asked one of the museum guides to be a sweetie and fetch me a nice cup of tea with a biscuit or
two it would not have gone down well.
They don’t really want you to read those books, just pick them up, open
them, look at the title page, and then put it back, thinking how deliciously
quaint it all is.
The hedgehog
The one thing I
really liked was the stuffed hedgehog in the kitchen! Apparently the Victorians quite often kept
hedgehogs in their kitchens to eat the cockroaches and other insects. The kitchen often had a door to the backyard,
so the hedgies could come in and go out at will.
It reminded me of the most interesting thing I read in the autobiography
of Colette, the French writer; viz, that her mother kept spiders in her linen
cupboard, to eat the moths!
There is a huge
field for genetic engineers here, they could genetically modify all the little
undesirable creatures that share our house.
For examples, they could breed spiders that avoid humans like the plague
and never presume to run across our faces while we sleep. Or they could create cockroaches that eat all
the little crumbs and things that fall to the ground and litter our floors, but
rarely multiply and always spend the day hiding in little boxes secreted behind
the stove. Ditto for clothes moths; if
they contented themselves with eating the fluff-bunnies (aka sluts-wool) behind
the doors, and the dust off the furniture, they would be welcomed with open
arms into our homes, and not persecuted and exterminated, as they currently
are. Someone ought to have a word with
those lazy scientists out there, to get them to do something useful, instead of
modifying tomatoes and maize and generally interfering with our foodsupply!
‘Nuff said! We did the museum as quickly as was feasible,
and then went our separate ways. Against
expectations I did not get lost on the way to the bus stop, but arrived just in
time to catch the coach to Oxford. I
stepped off to be greeted by a rather lovely evening, with a sickle moon
hanging invitingly above my favourate fish restaurant – not that it
photographed well, but you get the idea.
