We walked down to the
Victoria and Albert Museum this afternoon. We wanted to see
the Great Bed of Ware but also just fancied an idle potter around a museum that, I am ashamed to say, I don't think I have ever visited before.
Along the way we had a look at Kensington Palace and the
Princess Diana memorial which less shamefully I have never visited either. It's an unusual choice to commemorate the life and death of a Princess, a big circle of cascading water, buffeting down in two directions towards a calm pool at the bottom. I don't quite see how that represents Diana's life to be honest, the only calmness she came to was in death, which is true of us all. But it was fun to see people paddling and splashing around in it and having a good time. It certainly wasn't sombre and everyone else was getting their photos taken there looking happy with their thumbs up. So I decided to have mine taken looking pensive and sad. I am pretty sure it's what Diana would have wanted. And I am sure it's what John Lennon would have wanted.
I think the fountain would be a more fitting tribute if Diana's remains were floating around in it, so that she was literally taking the journey down the water to the pool of calm every single day. Then maybe people would be less inclined to paddle in there and lark about. Maybe that would be impractical though, but maybe they could get the bodies of recently dead woman who look a bit like Diana who they can dress up as her and send those floating around in there too. I mean they could do it with a waxwork (or not do it at all) but what would be the fun in that? I bet you more people would go and visit it if it had an actual dead body in it. I bet you they would.
Of course this is just artificial craziness, but I was also sorely tempted to do something genuinely mad.
Whenever I am near water with my girlfriend I have an overwhelming desire to push her into it. Just to see her reaction. It would be almost funny, but would also just be massively inconvenient and ruin the day. She'd have to go home to change. She'd be cold and wet. It'd be horrible. But that's part of what makes it funny to me. The more dirty the water is the more appealing it is to me. Luckily so far I have managed to avoid doing it. But a part of me really wants to. Today I was quite tempted to push a stranger into the fountain. This would, of course, be even more unacceptable and surprising and less funny to everyone except me. What if I had pushed the chubby middle aged woman sitting on the edge with her feet in the water into the calm pool? Would I have been arrested? What if I had pushed a 7 year old child in? What would her dad have done as I stood there laughing and she lay there scared and crying? Would he have punched me in the face?
Yes, of course he would. So it had to stay being a mad thought rather than a mad action. But when I finally lose my marbles I know that I am going to cause stupid mayhem everywhere I go. I'll be swearing at strangers and pushing them into ponds and lagoons and it will be awful.
But still somehow funny.
I envy my insane future self. He has a freedom that the sane present me can never experience.
Luckily we soon headed down to the V&A without any wet clothes. I enjoyed it. We chanced across a room which was showing little snippets of film shot in the 1890s. More images of the dead, but amazing that those moments from over a hundred years ago can still be seen. I liked the posh ladies riding bikes in long dresses and the crazy Scottish dancers. But my favourite was (I think) "Comedy Chris" who was seen performing his crazy antics on what might have been a beach. His act seemed to be a sort of mixture between Rod Hull and Bernie Clifton's act, with a bit of the Lee and Herring character Nostradamus thrown in for good measure. Chris was "on" a horse, although it was in fact just a prop horse, with two legs (which were of course Chris' legs). He then seemed to just chase after some poor stooge, nudging him with the horses face. But it still made us laugh 110 years on. Comedy Chris is, I imagine, no longer making any of us laugh and nor is there a big fountain anywhere commemorating his life, but it was cool that this fifteen seconds of film still exists and still creating laughter.
