Week 2 | Recap

What I want to tell you
is how life, small wonderful
bright yellow life how life
can happen if you watch and if you try
to write it down. – Esther Cohen

 

We wake up late every day, caught in some purgatory between New York and London time. We don’t leave the flat most days until 2 pm, take the tube or the bus for an hour’s journey to the museum du jour. We hop on the 211 to Piccadilly, transfer to the 38 bound for Museum Street. A short, well marked walk leads us to Great Russell Street where the British Museum awaits.

It appears before us like a palace. And no wonder. It’s the oldest secular public museum in the world.

We have no plan, no timetable. If it were up to me, I’d spend a month here alone, wandering the galleries in search of every item from the BBC podcast The History of the World in 100 Objects. Which I’ve listened to more times than I will admit.

But it’s not up to me alone, so we climb the stairs in search of a few highlights. We find the Lewis Chessmen, Hoa Hakananai’a [an Easter Island moai], Greek goddesses too numerous to count and, of course, the Rosetta Stone.

Along the way, we stop to hold a 65 million year old fossil, a 2 million year old hand axe [I’m pretending it’s the one mentioned as item 3 of 100 in the podcast], 2,000 year old mummy linen and a small, delicate decorative urn.

This while we’re standing in the restored King’s library, known as Enlightenment on the map. Indeed.

There is food, always. A few postcards. And books. Ovid, Tolstoy and Sophocles. The girl’s selection to read for pleasure. This is unschooling.

 

We rest. Not that we must – except the Jojo who has been sick for a few days – but because we can. We linger at the flat. Reading, working, Tweeting. Sometimes we cook, most times we choose one of the dozens of restaurants within walking distance.

Then we explore again. Forgoing the bus for the tube, another short walk delivers us to the edge of the Thames and the stately, temple-like feel of the Tate Britain.

 

 

 

We take a “Walk through British Art”, stop to split a baguette and banana bread [accidentally throwing away my credit card in the process], buy some more post cards and a print.

It’s a triptych from Francis Bacon that makes us pause.

We’re remembering Bacon’s quote we stumbled upon in a Japanese bookstore in New York City last winter.

“It’s all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary.”