I’m writing this on Tuesday night. I’ve just put in my second day at MS Reading, and my cold’s gotten relatively bad, so there will be no sight-seeing, dining, or drinking of any sort tonight. This is why I’m spending valuable time in another country writing up a travelogue about what it’s like to be in another country.

After some serious sleep, I got up on Saturday morning with a bit of a mission – having forgotten to actually pack any business shirts, I needed to buy something to wear at work the next week. I headed north-east through Kensington towards Knightsbridge, the home of Harrods. After about 15 minutes’ walk, the shopping really started to pick up with an odd mix of stores – Harrods and Armani stood next to shops like “QLOC”, which was an expensive-looking (from the outside) but incredibly-cheap-given-its-surroundings semi-daggy-late 20’s/early 30’s St. Kilda summer sitting on the street having a beer wearing sunglasses guy kind of shop where four pounds gets you a pair of those boardshorts you only ever see on male models in Myer catalogs with tans and awkward manly poses looking into the middle-distance on the beach. Moving on, I found a joint called “Mexx” which was basically a more up-market funky boy and girl store with a lot of less casual stuff. They had a decent white shirt for 29 pounds that was fitted, but had a collar shape I liked, so I went with that.

I didn’t actually mind Knightsbridge too much – I walked the perimeter of Harrods looking at the neighbouring buildings and friendly doormen and goods delivery docks and scary rich families getting out of cars and being bundled in through a secret-looking door and smelling the food court (which was dominated by a doughnut-y smell that reminded me of Frankston shopping centre). Harrods bags are very green, with just a little gold decoration. If I’d been brought up over here, they might be the epitome of reserved class, but having grown up in the land of Harris Scarfe (nee Fitzgerald’s for those who spent the 80’s and 90’s in Tasmania), they just look ever-so-slightly shithouse to me. Having said that, I should reveal that I felt a little bit too intimidated to actually go in without having something specific to buy, in case a helpful staff member wanted to know how they could be of assistance and I were to find myself stuck for an answer. You can really tell they’ve been developing their brand for hundreds of years when they’re manipulating your psychology at that kind of a deep, limbic level. Andrew no feel good. Harrod’s big, Andrew very very small.

A little further along was Hyde Park corner. There were double-decker buses everywhere and the tourist ratio was high high high. Nothing looked particularly appealing in that direction, so, having accomplished my mission and picked up other miscellaneous tourist-y things – power adapters, batteries, etc. – I headed back to the hotel for a quick rest. It was just about lunch time, and I’d resolved not to be a push-over and eat at the standard tourist joints, where a round of sandwiches sets you back five pounds. Oh no, I was gonna slum it hardcore and save wads ‘o cash at the same time. So I went to a Sainsbury’s and picked up some salami, cheese and bread to make my own sandwiches, shaking my head at the thought of some schmoe getting slapped with 100% mark-up to be served the vulcanised version of the same stuff over the counter at a train station. My salami, cheese, and bread ended up costing five pounds eighty. Luckily, I had a plan. I went into rationalisation mode, and pointed out to myself that by buying a half-loaf of bread in a plastic bag, I’d cunningly killed two birds with one stone and scored myself a makeshift lunchbox. Sweet. Andrew wins again. Nice one.

I decided to spend the afternoon on some more conventional tourist-y stimuli – I headed for the museums back in South Kensington, specifically the Victoria and Albert museum. The V & A is free with a three pound recommended donation (suckers), and over the next two days I spent seven hours wandering around the galleries. It was incredible. From the entrance hall, I picked up a map and then headed left straight into a large gallery with six “cartoons” by Raphael. Apologies to those who know their shit already, but cartoons are basically painted or drawn models on which the final version of a work will be based. The cartoons were religious scenes used as the basis for tapestries, and they were each about three metres across by five metres tall. Anyway, that gallery was a good start – I, at least, went straight into “shock and awe” mode, and everything afterwards benefited from the cartoons having lowered my defences. One of the tapestries was of the loaves and fishes incident, and Christ was wearing robes that looked white. I didn’t notice this at first, but the descriptive text pointed out that while his robes are white, their reflection in the water is red, and explained that it was because the red pigment originally used on the robes degrades very quickly, and that the reflection was done using vermillion, which is relatively resilient. Pretty cool, huh? If I’d noticed it before reading the explanation, I would’ve assumed it was some kind of allegorical technique pointing out that it’s impossible to come up with an accurate reflection of Christ’s glory, which I think is a much more intellectually stimulating explanation. In fact, even now that I know the truth, if I was a V & A guide, I’d still give them my explanation. This is just one more reason why I should never be allowed into an education-related occupation. Or to have children. They also had an interesting piece on the restoration and cleaning that they’ve done over the years, showing which bits have been touched up, and where they’ve reinforced the paper with extra strips for moving, etc.

There was an awful lot of England 1700 – 1900 which was all very well and good, but just a bit too expected, so I kind of motored through. There was one recurring theme in that section which I really liked though: beds. They had three four-poster beds, each with their own title; I never realised that the bed fanatic section of society was well-organised enough to agree on shared jargon. Anyway, there was one that was the “Great Suffolkian” or something, which was at least three metres wide, and for some reason sloped down from the middle, which I would argue is not a good piece of human interaction design. Would not pass a usability review. The mattress wasn’t (surprisingly) innersprung – instead it was made up of about thirty layers of every soft substance known to mankind at the time of its manufacture… there was a layer of duck feather on duck down on goose feather on spun wool on unspun wool on twill on cotton on devilled cotton on mashed kiwifruit on a base of cross-tied hemp ropes. They had a cool display where they had samples of each of the materials, and you could prod them in an oddly self-conscious way and say “oooh, it’s luvly!” to bystanders. (The question of how precisely the lone-traveller should comport himself when engaging in socially-sanctioned inanimate-object-prodding is not one my upbringing has equipped me to answer, other than that I shouldn’t close my eyes and shudder orgasmically while doing it. Ever again.) Anyway, now that I’d seen all the beds that Victoria and Albert felt were essential to secure the well-roundedness of my character, I moved on. (Incidentally, try typing “orgasmically” into Microsoft Word – for me, it underlines it as a spelling mistake and tells me I actually mean “Orgasmic Ally”. I have nothing to add to that.)

Next cool thing I saw was a sculpture hung in a small domed gallery. From the ground floor, you look up at the dome, and you see an amazing mandala pattern hovering there above you. The icing on the cake is that the pattern is made up of about forty miscellaneous brass instruments – trombones, euphoniums, trumpets, etc. – suspended with great precision by very very thin wires. The piece de resistance on the icing on the cake was the fact that every single one of the instruments had been crushed completely flat. They looked ace – all ripply and crumpled like a hat under a bus. The sugar on the raspberry on the piece de resistance on the icing on the cake was that the thing that crushed the instruments flat was the massive weight that counter-balances one of the swinging sections of London Bridge. I can’t articulate exactly why that makes it any cooler, or why farting about organising the logistics of such a project is a sensible thing for an artist to spend time doing, but believe me, it does and it is. This is Your Tourist Dollar At Work, people, that’s all I can say. Thank heavens for the Empire.

Actually, that’s something that the museum brought home to me. The bits about imperial British history pointed out that the physical wealth the upper class held was just incredible. Really, really staggering. They had extremely nice clothes that could also stop one of your less-motivated swords or bullets, and comfortable beds, and squashed instruments, all when a lot of the world just wasn’t playing the same game. The rest of the museum - the bits about the rest of the world’s history - pointed out that the British were so damn physically wealthy that they just took all the best of everybody else’s stuff too and put it in a big box in Kensington so that I could have a look when I finally showed up. It’s about time I got some consideration.

Next: Canova’s The Three Graces. I’ve never thought of myself as much of a sculpture lover, but these three single-handedly turned my life around. I have seen the light, and it’s a marble sculpture, maybe slightly smaller than life-size, of three spunky ladies with no clothes on, arms all entwined ‘avin’ a larf about sumfink. The thing is, despite that they’ve got rock-hard abs, buns and eyeballs and each probably weigh about 400 pounds, they just look real. You can walk right up to them, and they look like people. With no clothes on. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the appeal. Cut me some slack; it’s allowed these days: Carly and I watched a show about the Rokeby Venus a month ago or so which was pretty frank about the fact that paintings of that sort were (entirely aside from the question of artistic merit) basically treated as high-class pornography by their owners, which was largely restricted to male (near-)royalty. Female nudes would be hung in men’s private quarters adjacent to the actual bedroom as kind of a fire-starter, as it were. Well, from what I can tell, the Three Graces were the hot three-way girl-on-girl action of their time. And I think they still fit the description. They’re ace. According to my guide-book, when they were first displayed, the thoughtful owner put them on a rotating pedestal so that their shapely posteriors would swivel past every fifteen seconds or so. Mmmm, classy. As I mentioned in an earlier email, they caused a bit of a scandal at the time, which I can understand: I nearly rioted on my own then and there, except I didn’t want to annoy the other guy who was in the room. Anyway, Canova’s going to show up again later, so pay attention.

I saw a “shellwork” flower arrangement. For those dreadfully ignorant people who aren’t familiar with the oeuvre, shellwork seems like it was a pastime for idle-rich types which involved writing away to people near the sea all over the world to request “35 identical flawless viridian whelk shells” or something, and then spending around three years using highly toxic and hallucinogenic glue in a dark room while a troll beats you with a chain that has little pointy bits on it, gluing thousands of these shells together to come up with a reasonable approximation of your average run-of-the-mill flower arrangement that little Nelly Baker down the street could sell you for a ha-penny plus a box of damp matches. I had to take photos, but because there were about eight layers of glass between me and the shellwork, they didn’t come out too well. I am shattered.

While we’re talking about massive investments of time and energy, this group called “Network modellers” has built some amazing models for display in the museum. There was one scale model of Crystal Palace made out of some kind of Norwegian wood (wasn’t it good) that specifically blew my mind – about three feet high, two feet deep and three feet wide, except there was a cleverly positioned and immaculately clean mirror at one end where the middle of the building should have been, saving them the trouble of building both sides. I kind of like that thought – that these people are at one and the same time willing to sit down in a dark room for a whole year being chain-whipped by a troll while they build a perfect scale model of an 1850’s building out of matchsticks, but they wouldn’t build both sides when they could just stick a mirror in the middle… “Oh no, that’s just common sense!” Anyway, I’m not in a position to poke fun – while trying to take a photo into the mirror on a clever and revealing angle, I forgot about the mirror completely and ran into it twice. The only thing that stopped me face-planting into it completely was the brim of my cap.

There was a photographic display with prints of the time-lapse shots that guy took back in the twenties. You know, that guy? Who took photos of the stuff? Like the horse? Running, you know… and a guy, walking and doffing his hat (like a little Rory Calhoun). I got what I maintain is an ace and extremely clever and original photo of myself doffing my cap in front of the time-lapse photo series of the guy walking and doffing his hat. It’ll be worth heaps in twenty years, just you wait.

There was a Japan section (which I felt self-conscious throughout because I was wearing my “Japan” hat, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was some kind of sad fan-boy for a whole country. Luckily I elected not to wear one or in fact both of my Japanese imperial army flag t-shirts that particular day. The Japanese furniture was quite funky in a “now I see what Ikea’s ripping off” kind of a way.

There were a pair of themed sculptures called “Courage and Cowardice” and “Truth and Falsehood” – each was a pair of personifications, the good vanquishing the evil in a tewwibly apt kind of way. I liked the poses in both – not really like anything I’d seen before, but after something as limpid and matter-of-fact as the Three Graces, they kind of feel a bit pretentious to me. I know, I know, “pretentious” and “high art” don’t exactly go together, but that’s just the way I feel.

Then there was another Canova – this time “Theseus and the Minotaur”, which really didn’t grab me in the way the Three Graces did. Not to oversimplify things, but at a very basic level, this may be partly due to the fact that Theseus, having vanquished the Minotaur, has clearly elected to seat himself precisely upon the Minotaur’s most symbollicaly portentous region. Not my sort of thing, but still a lovely piece of sculptage if you’re that way inclined.

The Cast Courts were next. These were two large galleries that spanned all floors of the building (someone put a rowspan=”6” on them) and housed massive plaster casts taken from famous buildings, monuments and sculptures from wherever mighty Britain could send her legions of carefully trained Plaster-of-Paris craftsmen. I guess she should be applauded – it’s kind of the sustainable tourist approach to museum building, really. The cast of David was bigger than I expected it to be, and he’s kept in excellent shape. I’m sure that his ass, being injection molded into the plaster cast somehow, is nowhere near as rock-hard as those of the Three Graces, but it looked significantly firmer. In a nice touch, they included the fig leaf which used to be trotted out to cover his manhood when ladies came to visit; presentation was everything. It was a nice little ironic twist to apologetically hide the fig leaf in a dark little corner down at knee-level on the back of the plinth David stands on, as if we should be a little ashamed that the fig-leaf existed, just as the people who made it were a little ashamed that David had a wang. Heh heh. Wang.

There was also some kind of a ziggurat-type thing that was about fifteen metres tall and had these ridiculously-detailed scenes carved into its three sides as they tapered up to a point. I took a photo of the whole thing as well as an extreme close up of one of the scenes, and you can hardly believe they’re from the same object. Also, I can’t see how they could have taken a plaster cast of anything so intricate without ruining it, and I can’t see how, once getting the moulds home, they could have formed anything like the original from them.

There was a ludicrously spooky white relief of John the Baptist (as a child for some reason) which looks a lot to me like a ludicrously spooky yellow-and-brown-ish painting we’ve earmarked as the artwork for the Laura album, so I took a photo. When it popped up just now on my eerie hotel room on the top floor of the 500 year-old hotel with the roaming ghost of a cavalier, I regretted that decision.

One of the last things I saw on Saturday was a little waxen Christ on the cross. There were a few things that I liked about him. One, I’ve never been a big fan of those massive carved Christ-on-the-cross numbers that are getting on towards life-sized. I don’t know why. This one was small, and I liked that. Two, he wasn’t all there – at some point, his legs and the actual cross had gone missing, so he was basically just a head and gaunt torso. Three, the presentation – rather than lay him down flat, or replace the missing bits, they suspended what remained on a standing perspex sheet; if you looked at it from the right angle, or walking at a rate of knots, you could be forgiven for initially thinking that he was hovering there. Anyway, I really liked that.

When they clear everyone out at 5:45, they take a reasonably scary approach. Bear in mind, there are about 160 separate galleries, with an average one maybe fifteen by twenty metres – it’s a laaaarge building. There’s an intercom announcement saying “The museum is now closing; please move towards the exit,” which is great, except that you’re on about a kilometre away from the entrance on level 5 in the westernmost gallery of the south-eastern clockwise outer-side inverted torus wedge, and you don’t know which way is up, let alone the way to the entrance. So the next thing that happens is that after four hours without being bothered by any attendants at all, suddenly one’s behind you and there’s another to your left, and they’re shepherding you with arms spread as if moving sheep up a hill. Each time they herd you into to a gallery one step closer to the entrance, they seal off the section that’s newly free of contaminating human presence with that horizontal belt-stuff that they string between poles at the cinema. It was all a bit too martial, disciplined and applied-psychology-ish for me, so I kind of broke into a half-trot as if I’d just realised I had a vital 6pm appointment on the other side of town so’s I’d have an excuse to get away from the creeping death. Writing it down now, I think I would have been more comfortable with them just tilting the whole building 15 degrees towards the entrance, greasing up the floors real good, and then agitating vigorously for about five minutes.

So, after experiencing truly effective crowd control at work, I sat on the front step eating my expensive sandwiches and watching all the other annoying touristy-types streaming out and tucking into their own expensive sandwiches in an irritating self-satisfied way.