A week has raced past since I did my last post. It is alarming how quickly time goes when you get a bit older. Had some very spring-like sunny weather last week, which always boosts the sprits, and on one day Philosopher and Battleaxe went to London to meet old friends at the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One of our friends is a volunteer guide at the Museum. Battleaxe has been before, many years ago, and I remember being intensely curious about John Soane the person… and this visit just intensified that curiosity.
For those who don’t know, the Museum is situated in interlinked houses, mostly containing Soane’s massive collection, but he and his household lived there as well. He had a wife and children, but his wife died quite early in his collecting career. The Museum areas of the houses are absolutely jam packed with objects, ranging from an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, original Hogarth paintings and a wonderful Canaletto, to odd fragments of carved stone. Some of the passages are so narrow it is hard to squeeze along them. As Soane was an architect, he had an eye for presentation and lighting – the atmosphere in the house ranges from spooky to luminous, often due to coloured ceiling skylights, glass domes etc… and hidden corners pop up unexpectedly… All very interesting, and the internet is groaning with pictures and descriptions, but what interests me is why? Why did he do it? What got him started? Maybe it is because I am a writer – I even toyed with the idea of writing a poem about it – but let’s face it, Philosopher and I tend towards the collector/hoarder end of the spectrum ourselves. (What do you mean tend – spaghetti poodles, anyone?). I already tracked down one book, ‘At Home with the Soanes’ by Susan Palmer, which is very informative about life in the house, what the servants did, how the drainage worked etc, but tells me nothing about the personality of the man, his motivation, and the process of acquiring his collection. For example, I gather he never travelled abroad. Was he not curious to see where his objects had come from? Ah well. Anyway, here are some pictures, some of which are not very good…
Here is Sally, our friend and volunteer guide. The guides in that Museum really have their work cut out to stop people touching things. Battleaxe is a real toucher. Show me an object and I want to feel it, smell it… looking at it never seems enough.
And now for somethiing completely different… a sunny view of Hastings beach. On days like this one feels blessed to live here.
But on the other hand, the little close round Battleaxe Towers is currently subject to constant racket and disruption. Firstly, it was Southern Water, to fix a mains leak beside our next-door neighbour’s house. Weeks of digging, roaring and mess. Then it is electricity, wanting to replace a transformer that hums away in a little fenced enclosure. They dig up all round there and discover another mains water leak. More blocked road, roaring and disruption. Our water was turned off altogether yesterday and when it eventually reappeareed, it was coming out of the taps literally and honestly black… When we drove back to the house on Saturday the road was impassable with a huge digger loading excess soil onto a lorry… and that is not the end of it. We have been notified that BTOpenConnect will soon be digging up the entire close to instal fibre-optic cable – and we have already had two lots, from Lightning Fibre and Virgin Media. And oops – update. While I am writing the above a man comes to the door saying we can expect a power cut due to the new transformer… What on earth is going on?
Ah well, at least Orban has been defeated in Hungary. Here is a final picture of Digby… still going strong at around 18, but slowing up…
