Collections and Crime Scenes

Sept. 13

The adventures started this morning at breakfast. You get cold cereal and white bread, if you can handle it, for free in the morning. It’s 5 pounds for the English breakfast buffet, and I wasn’t in the mood for eggs, tomatoes, and baked beans today.

I was working on corn flakes and reading a story in the New York Times about some strange title Cameron had to take in order to get out of parliament. 

A 17th century law forbids members of Parliament from resigning. 

To get around that, they have to take some royal sinecure that renders them ineligible. 

A man saw me looking at the computer and said, “Work never ends.”

Yes, it does. I don’t work. I play.

He asked if he could join me. OK.

He introduced himself as David, but added that David wasn’t his real name.

He was very jumpy and spoke rapidly, sometimes going into a stutter as he gathered his thoughts. He apologized and explained that he was trying to quit smoking cigarettes. 

That led to brief discussion of the distinction between habit and addiction. Habit is psychological. Addiction is chemical and physical.

Caffeine, nicotine, and opiates, for instance, work their way into your system and become almost like essential nutrients.

The topics of conversation kept bouncing around.

He was interested in invention and technology, in philanthropy, in learning more about life in America from me.

We got run out of the breakfast room a while after ten and he wanted to continue the conversation in the lobby of the hotel. 

Fine with me. He asked for my e-mail address. I consider that public information anyway and gave it to him. I also gave him the address of the blog. 

Can’t hurt. There’s always a spam filter.

I’ll see what happens.

First stop for the day was Sir John Soane’s Museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. 

I didn’t know about it until a couple of weeks ago. Joanna’s son Christopher told me about it and recommended it. Thank you, Chris.

Soane was an eccentric personality and a very successful architect of the 18th century. He collected all manner of things, but concentrated on Classical Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture.

When he died he willed his house and its contents to the city. 

He had bits and pieces of ancient buildings. Many are decorative details. There are replicas of Classical statuary, including a plaster reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere, copied from the original in the Vatican Museum.  There are also bones and a human skull mixed in, along with several life masks of different people.

Soane’s own bust is on a pedestal in a cellar-to-roof atrium under a skylight. Below him on one side is a small bronze Michelangelo and on the other a corresponding Raphael.

The house is so crowded with artifacts that I had to walk sideways much of the time to keep from hitting something precious.

Apparently, Soane had an imaginary friend who was a monk. As the docent explained, it is socially acceptable to have an imaginary friend if you are a little child (Soane wasn’t) or if you are very rich (Soane was).

The basement of Soane’s house, which occupies numbers 12, 13, and 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, contains the Monk’s Parlor. That looks out a window to the Monk’s Yard, where there is a Classical looking double arch.

Apparently Soane floated a story about how it was discovered when the foundation of the house was being dug. The docent said that it really came from a building that Soane was hired to restore. He replaced the weathered stone with new and shiny substitutes. 

He brought the old stones home and built the arch. Now, that’s putting construction debris to good use. It makes having an imaginary friend worthwhile.

The basement also has the sarcophagus of Seti I, and other funerary memorabilia, much of it Roman.

Soane had Hogarth prints (Rake’s Progress) and paintings (The Election), as well as pictures of the Grand Canal in Venice and ancient temples. They are in what’s called the Picture Room.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields is in some ways reminiscent of New York’s Gramercy Park. It is surrounded by homes and properties of the elite, and bounded by a black iron fence.

But the Fields are a park open to the public. People are even allowed to bring barbecue grills there.

Directly across the park from Sir John Soane’s Museum is the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses its own museum, called the Hunterian. The museum grew out of the personal and professional specimen collection of John Hunter, an anatomist, doctor, and member of the Royal College.

The collection today largely consists of jar after jar of perserved animal and human body parts, fetuses, and organs, some dissected to show internal details, like the electric organs of an eel or the digestive tracts of bees.

No, I’m not kidding.

The museum was crowded with students sketching body parts.

The collection includes the skeleton of a man named Byrne, “the Irish giant,” who stood 7 feet 7 inches tall. He had a hunch that his body would be confiscated after he died, so he paid to have himself buried at sea. Instead, his body was confiscated.

As much as there is today, much more was lost in the Second World War. The building housing the collection was hit by Nazi bombs in 1941. The display includes part of a mastodon jaw blackened by the fire.

Two or three hours of museum crawling can build a thirst. So it’s lucky for me that the Ship Tavern is two blocks from the Royal College of Surgeons. I headed to the Ship for a little recovery.

When I was there on Sunday, I saw a tap for Tribute Cornish pale ale.

I’ve had American pale ale, India pale ale, and plain pale ale. But Cornish? Ah, bring it on.

It was malty—that is, a little sweet—but not too much. It was light on hops, but had enough. I could try that one again some time.

I had a little bag from Soane’s museum and wanted to get rid of it, so I walked back to the hotel. I had a postcard, too, for Karl and Jeanie, and needed to learn how to mail it.

That was simple enough. I went to the souvenir shop in the Imperial Hotel and bought the appropriate stamp. The lady directed me to the mailbox. 

Well, almost. I had to stop at another hotel to confirm my directions. The man at the desk walked me to the door and pointed to where the mailbox was. 

The mailboxes are actually hard to see, if you don’t know what to look for. They are red enough, indicating that they are royal, but they look like royal trash cans. I had forgotten that.

I wandered for a while, passing the British Museum and making a couple of turns in a feeble effort to get lost.

I stopped at the Crown for a couple of half pints while I looked at my map.

I was in an area called St. Giles, but it wasn’t the old robber’s roost of St. Giles Cripplegate from Victorian times. That’s nearer to St. Paul’s I learned.

This Crown, it seems, is associated with the Samuel Smith brewery in Tadcaster. It had a couple of selections I haven’t seen in the States. 

The Old Brewery Bitter is a pleasant, nutty mix of malt and hops. The Sovereign Bitter is not so much so—a little sweeter, but still palatable.

I went upstairs where they serve food. I had a pie of pulled pork made with cider. This was not North Carolina pulled pork.

It was too sweet for my taste, but OK. I had that with something familiar, Samuel Smith India ale.

I started walking in the general direction of the hotel after dinner. Then I saw a local map. I was in Covent Garden, and the Seven Dials neighborhood was within a 15-minute walk. 

Hot damn, I had a destination. It was positively Dickensian.

The Seven Dials at one time was like St. Giles. Even the police were cautious about going there. The neighborhood is named for a pillar with seven sun dials on it.

A rumor once spread that someone had hidden a hoard of treasure under it, and there went the original Seven Dials. 

If I remember right, the current set is a replacement given to Queen Elizabeth by Queen Beatrix of Holland.

I was doing a video of the place and speaking to the camera. When I finished, a man tapped me on the shoulder. Having heard me discuss my interest in antique crime, he pointed to one of the streets that meet at Seven Dials. 

That, he said, is believed to be Gin Lane, the subject of a Hogarth print of dissolution and drunken debauchery (some of my favorite subjects). According to some people, he said, details in the background identify it.

I have no idea if it’s true, but he seemed sincere enough. Hell, fact or fiction, it’s a worthy story anyway.

Somehow, I actually found my way back to the hotel by a reasonably direct route. I am not traveling hard enough, gang.

I am writing this at the Night and Day, but can’t get online to send it.

I’ll dispatch when I get back to my room. 

Love to everybody. And stay out of bad neighborhoods.

Harry