If you are only here because of the provocative title, the relevant information is about halfway through the post.

New Years Eve day I again walked the Compton Road loop and got drenched and did a trial pack of my suitcase. The outlook was not good.

Sue and Wendy were still “poorly.” Sue was so poorly, she had called the surgery (that’s what they call a doctor’s office) and bullied her way into an appointment with a doctor. Now she was taking anti-biotics, and inhaling something that she claimed didn’t work.

We watched Call the Midwife Christmas special and Midsomer Murder Haunted Christmas and went to bed early.

New Years Day was a melancholy one because it was my last day. I walked halfway to Baltonsborough to take pictures of mistletoe, which I had never seen in its native habitat. I only know the little treated horrors tied with a red ribbon and selling for $5 at Christmas time.

Mistletoe

Mistletoe

Then Wendy and I drove down into Devon to visit a part of the family I had been hearing about for 40 years but had never met. Hazel is the namesake of my Hazel, the first family member I had met in 1980. I stayed several times with Hazel in her cottage in Harrowbarrow, Cornwall and she showed me the cottage in the Combe where my great grandfather was born.

The Hazel I met on New Year’s Day is now in her 80s and she was a breath of Cornish air. She spoke with the Cornish accent that was reminiscent of so many memorable times in Harrowbarrow. We all chatted—she and her husband, Brian and their children Gaynor and Alan—and Gaynor had arranged a whole plate of gluten free fairy cakes. We had all spontaneously hugged each other and I was made to feel like family, which of course, in a byzantine way, I am.

On Jan 2, I took the train—soon to be on strike again– into London. I had gotten everything into my suitcase by dint of leaving behind my nasty old house slippers and my boots since one of the soles had split open and was letting water in. I immediately missed Somerset and the village. Most of all I missed Wendy and Sue. But I always feel that way when I’ve left them behind.

The next morning, I took Christmas candy, by way of thanks, to James, the concierge who had loaned me his phone charger and to Ziyad at the Royal Cambridge Hotel who had evidently made a trip to the Paddington Hilton on his own time to return to phone charger I had left there on my first day in London. See Part One: Preliminary Drama

Then I set out for two days of museums. I walked in the rain across Kensington Gardens to the Victoria and Albert museum where I immediately asked if there was a cafe. Behind me, I heard a couple ask the same thing and then felt them at my back.

I turned. “You know, it’s not safe to follow me anywhere, ” I said. The woman laughed and the man assured me in a shocked voice that they weren’t following me.

I fortified myself with a pot of tea and squash soup before starting around the exhibits. I particularly enjoyed the Beatrix Potter. Then because it was still raining, I took a taxi to Tate Britain and recalled that I had been there before so I found my old favorites. From Tate Britain I maneuvered back to my hotel on the buses.  I am proud that I can do London buses even though they take longer than the Tube. Between the buses and walking, I learn the city.

The next day, however the buses defeated me. It was too complicated to get where I wanted to go: all the way to Bethnal Green in northeast London. Earlier I had been looking for the Sir John Soane Museum when I had seen on the map the unlikely attraction, The Vagina Museum. I looked up the web site and booked an appointment. Sir John Soane was going to have to wait. The Vagina Museum had a gift shop and for no other reason, I had to see what that was all about.

When I emerged from the Tube onto Cambridge Heath Road, I saw that I was in a neglected part of the city. Within five minutes I had been approached by three people asking for money. I gave some to a woman who I knew would use it for nothing good and who then asked for more.

I escaped into the Sainsbury Local to get my bearings, then found my way across the main intersection and down Victoria Park Square. I turned onto a path called Sugar Loaf Walk, which in my overactive imagination, resembled a kind of canal, like a vaginal canal. We’ll pass over the connotations of sugar loaf at this point.

The museum was run by young women, not surprisingly. One exhibit displayed how women have managed their menstrual periods over the centuries. Sphagnum moss was an early Kotex. Another exhibit followed some of the horrific shaming and shunning of women’s bodies and monthly bleeding. Pregnancy, labor and birth was presented.

Photographs of 56 different vaginas filled a wall. I had no idea there was such a variety of configurations. I’ve known a lot of women who thought there was something “wrong” with theirs. I wish this sort of information was as Out There as this museum, especially to young women.

“I can’t describe how it feels to see products I used in the 60s in a museum display case, “ I told the young curators. I swept my arm around the room. “But I think this is wonderful. I am thrilled to see it. Do many older women come in?”

“Yes, we get a lot of older women and they all say exactly what you just said!”

Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum was my second museum of the day. It is dedicated to the history of foundlings in London. Orphans. Babies and children who for whatever reason were abandoned by their parents. The first floor was a melancholic place. The stories were upsetting and the little tokens that identified the children were heartbreaking. These were small lockets or chains or thimbles mothers left in order to identify their children should they ever come back for them.

Handel Scores

The top floors were the P.R. floors. George Frideric Handel and Charles Dickens had both been benefactors of the museum, raising funds and advertising its existence with concerts and readings. The upstairs opulence and elegance were a sad irony to the starkness of the first floors. They also gave me a little relief. Handel donated all his original scores to the museum. Not sure how that would have helped a destitute child but it was interesting to me. There’s a Handel Museum over by Claridges and I bet they’d love to get their hands on those scores. Handel and Dickens are two of my favorite historical figures.

Back at the hotel, I got packed and left early the next day without any interesting incidents that I can remember. Thank you for reading my chronicles. It was fun to relive them.  I’ll leave you with links to Catseye Images where you can purchase Sue’s lovely photographs and the link to No. 96 Chapel Lane, the airbnb in Butleigh, which all the best people book.