11:24
Victoria & Albert Museum
(The Bat Tattoo)
I
crossed the road from the Science Museum, and feeling in my rucksack for an
energy-giving Geobar, headed along the war-damaged wall of the V&A towards
the main entrance. In an unused doorway of the bomb-damaged side someone had
made a makeshift bed from a green sleeping bag, so I put the Geobar on that
and carried on around the corner.
The
low-rising steps outside the main entrance to the
V&A
are where Sarah Varley first meets Roswell Clark: she’s sitting on the steps
weeping about a piece in that morning’s Times
reporting that Earth has only 500 million years left to live, and he’s on
his way in to see a favourite bat-decorated Chinese bowl. I’d wanted to see
the bowl myself and perhaps do something similar with my quote that I did with
the Klein bottle one at the Science Museum, but I looked at my watch and
decided there wasn’t going to be time. In any case, I knew that, as with the
Klein bottle drop, once I was inside it would be hard to leave after just a
few minutes – personally, more so than the Science Museum, in fact. So once
again I fell back on the old SA4QE chestnut of planting the quote in the phone
box outside the entrance.
Today there was no white van parked outside the V&A entrance but there was a blue and white coach, empty except for the driver who was eating his lunch under a sign saying NO FOOD OR DRINK TO BE CONSUMED IN THE COACH.
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