Three lifetimes

V & A Museum cast room

Real people dusting an old computer

The Enigma machine

Telephone box

Pet Spa at Harrods

Some of the clothing racks for pets at Harrods

Someone once said that you need three lifetimes to explore all of London and I am beginning to think they are right. You could use just one lifetime on the fantastic museums. So today is museum day.

V & A tempts me first and I arrive just as a tour starts. Am blown away by the Raphael cartoons. These where made for the Sistine Chapel in Rome as templates for tapestries. They are each about 5 x 5 metres square and are made of 180-200 pieces of paper pasted together. They where then weaved in Brussels. The cartoons sat around there for about 100 years, then travelled with Charles I to England and then sat at Hampton Court Palace in boxes for a few hundred years. Eventually they where unearthed and framed and later donated to the V & A be Queen Victoria in memory of her husband Albert. They are still the property of the Queen today. From here it’s the Hereford Screen, plaster cast room and William Morris decorated café.  This place is a treasure trove. You could not see all of it in a week.

A quick walk next door and into the Natural History Museum with about 1,000 screaming schools kids. Shuffle past T-Rex and Blue Whales but what really grabs me is the Cranbourne Meteorite is was found in Victoria, Australia in 1854. At 3.5 tonnes I would like to know how it ended up here in London.

Code breaking is another one of my favourite topics and by complete fluke found this next great exhibition on AlanTuring. Saw the actual Enigma machine that was used at Bletchley Park to break the codes. To think about how daring the men where that went into the sinking submarine to get this machine and how much the efforts at Bletchley Park effected the outcome of WW2 is amazing.

Queen Victoria’s, “I love Albert” monuments are next. Royal Albert Hall and the memorial make a strong statement. Also found another piece of telephone box art. Jane and I have been finding them all over London.

Final stop over is the pet spa and shop in Harrods. Well I’ll be. It makes me giggle just to look at it. So much stuff, there must be people out there crazier about their pets than me. That’s a surprise. Jane also tells me when I get home that Christian the lion who was released into captivity and then years later recognized its owner in the wild was brought at Harrods.