Cultural Adventures

The last two weekends I have traveled across to London from Faversham to see friends and visit a few museums.

During the weekend of 9/10th I met up with my sister in the British Museum and showed her around (one of my 101 goals ticked off in the process). I was very pleased to finally see the flood tablets I had read about a lot (in brief - a pre-biblical flood narrative dating back to Sumeria that is part of the epic of Gilgamesh that the Genesis writers seem to have borrowed from). Also mid last year a metal-detectorist found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, it has been named “The Staffordshire Horde” and is on display there while they catalog it.

On the Sunday we went to the National Gallery and saw The Sacred Made Real a wonderful display of Spanish polychromatic wooden sculpture. It is the best exhibit I have seen in ages and finishes this weekend, go and see it if you can. It is interesting to see sculpture in colour as we are so used to classical and neo-classical sculpture being the very austere white. Interestingly greco-roman sculpture would originally have been painted anyway so the neo-classicists were harking back to something that never really existed.

The next weekend I stayed in Richmond for a friends birthday and we popped to the V&A; on saturday and well just wow. I only spent an hour there but it is amazing that London has (at least) 3 really world class museums, it is on par with the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum Of Art - really fabulous, I will return soon.

On the Sunday I went and looked at the Beatles to Bowie exhibition of 60’s photography, which was pretty good, then returned to Faversham.

All in all good fun in the greatest city in the world.