Three Weeks in England

Wednesday morning, we skipped the hotel’s continental breakfast and went back to the Pilgrim, where we had had breakfast in London when we first arrived. We both had sticky toffee pancakes, Vere’s with a sausage. Though again, they came with butter but no sticky toffee topping. Then we headed out to our first site of the day, the Victoria and Albert Museum.

It was lightly raining when we stepped out of the taxi and made our way to the entrance. The museum was featuring a photographic exhibit sponsored by Elton John and David Furnish, called Fragile Beauty. However, all the tickets for seeing it that day had been sold out. Vere, still intent on seeing it, bought tickets for the next day. In the meantime, there was still a lot to see in the museum. The place is huge, with more than anyone can see in one day, so we picked and chose where we would spend our time. We decided to skip the art of Japan, Korea, and China, the statue gallery, the art of Islam and Buddhism, metal works, jewelry, silver, glass, and fashion.

Instead, we went to the 300 to 1500 CE Medieval and Renaissance rooms. The first we saw was Vincenzo de Rossi’s The Rape of Proserpina. One of the highlights was the Devonshire Hunting Tapestry which stretched across an entire wall, woven between 1425 and 1430. But it was too long and detailed to capture a decent picture. We saw the Raphael cartoons, which are really not cartoons as we would characterize them, but brown charcoal sketches that were produced in preparation for tapestries destined for the Sistine Chapel.

Other interesting pieces were two painted tiles of Venus and Mars, an ivory carved horn turned into a drinking vessel, and a medieval wooden carving of a lusty man and woman. We also looked down on the Renaissance collection from an overlooking balcony, which held a copy of Trajan’s Column. It had been split in two, as it would have been too tall to fit in one piece. Somehow that seemed a questionable choice. Another lovely piece was Diana stretched out amid boars, deer, dogs and other woodland animals. Also on that upper floor was the National Art Library, open to only members.

We then walked through a beautiful hall full of stained glass, where we saw two stained glass of the Emblems of the Church and Laity, which represent “the triumph of Death over both the church and the secular world. Then there were rooms with fine art paintings, always our favorite. We saw Eve Tempted by the Serpent and the Virgin and the Child in Egypt, both by William Blake; Joseph Severin’s Ariel; Thomas Uwin’s A Neopolitan Mother Teaching Her Child the Tarantella; Charles Robert Leslie’s Ducinea del Toboso; and William Eddyls The Deluge, among many other wonderful works. There were also some of Frederic Leighton’s frescoes. I had wanted to go into the tapestry room, but it was closed.

When we had run through our list, we were tired and opted to go to the museum café for lunch, but it was packed with people, a limited menu was offered, and everyone had to scramble for a place to sit. We managed, but didn’t really like the food or the crowd. I was still full from breakfast, but Vere had an open-faced roast beef sandwich with potato salad, and I picked at his side dish of peas and zucchini.

Then we left in an Uber and headed across town to visit two small museums. With the heavy traffic it took an hour and twenty minutes to reach our first stop, the Vagina Museum. This small museum had innovative displays about women’s struggles with body perception. As doctors of human sexuality, it was important for us to see what they had portrayed. There was a room with women’s sexual history and advances, and in another room, there was a wall full of pictures of all different kinds of vulvas. We did inform the staff that they were missing Ida Craddock in their history timeline, and they promised to look her up.

The second place, the Museum of Curiosities, was only a couple of blocks away.

And it did have many curious, macabre, and unusual items from around the world. This bizarre collection was gathered by the owner over many decades and contained items from paranormal investigations and his contacts within the world of the macabre. There were thousands of items on display, from human skulls and taxidermy, to alleged haunted items from famous places, to natural substances turned into spells and craft. We descended down a tight spiral staircase into two rooms completely packed full of the weird and peculiar. They even had a tiny alcove with goats sitting around a table called the Gnostic Temple of Agape. We were everywhere surrounded by skulls, possessed dolls, bones from countless creatures, and wacky art on the walls and stuck to the ceiling. The upstairs entrance also was an absinthe bar. In a back room, the walls had art by Austin Osman Spare.

We had to sit, have a drink, and absorb it all. We shared one drink called the Sunrise-Absurd, which had absinthe and cherry brandy in it. It was really good, and it is a good thing that we shared one drink, as it was potent. We had an hour before our dinner reservations, so we sat, sipped, and had our minds boggled with what we had just seen. There were things of the natural with shells and bone, stone and seed. One was a coco de mer, the largest nut found in the Seychelles, which strongly resembles a woman’s buttocks on one side and a her belly and thighs on the other. An odd and somewhat ghoulish collection was a display of syringes filled with red liquid. A sign said, “Blood of the Poets.” There is an etched brass plate with the Thelmic law: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, Love is the law, love under will.” And Vere sitting in the Austin Spare room sipping the absinthe cocktail.

We had originally planned to go back to our hotel and change into nice clothes for our dinner and the theater afterward, but since the traffic was so bad, we realized that getting back to that part of town on time would have been nearly impossible.

With another Uber we were off to our restaurant, the Jamon Jamon, a Spanish tapas restaurant with Asian waiters. The food was good and quick. We had goat cheese with honey on tortilla chips, which we shared. Then Vere had the chicken with a creamy sauce that he deemed excellent. I had a tri-colored salad with mozzarella, tomato, and avocado, and a Spanish potato omelet. We had ordered dessert, but they messed up and served it to someone else, so after fifteen minutes, we had to tell them they forgot our dessert. Consequently, they served our cheesecake and almond cake late, but didn’t charge us for them.

Then it was just a few short blocks’ walk to St. Martin’s Theater where The Mouse Trap was playing, the longest running play in London. The beautiful theater was packed. The play was entertaining in a British fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek way. Most enjoyed it, and it did have a surprise ending. During the bows at the end, a key character asked us not to tell the ending to anyone, so all who might attend would be surprised. So we won’t tell you “whodunit.” By the end of the play, the theater got very warm. It was refreshing to finally step outside and get some fresh air. Then a cab ride back to our hotel, where we fell asleep fairly exhausted from our long day.