...Victoria & Albert

I had breakfast with John on Monday morning before he went in to the office, so I was v. early for the Victoria & Albert museum. I got there just before 9 and they didn't open until 10, so I went and had a coffee and read the rest of the last Ya-Ya book and took this picture of the outside of the museum.

Here's a picture of the plaque at the outside of the museum...I love the part about India. How colonial.

The museum itself is quite something...it's like a cross between your grandmother's attic and an encylopedia. There's just so much STUFF. Most of it is very well curated and organized, although some of the rooms are so full that my first reaction upon walking in was to go "ACK!" and turn around, walk back to the hallway, take a few deep breaths, and then try again. The musical instruments exhibit was by far the WORST I've ever seen, but their display of the different media that artists use (grouped by method, rather than by region or time period) was REALLY great.

This is the picture of the room full of copies of Italian artifacts, brought back for British students to study (a hundred years ago? not sure when), when travel wasn't as easy. Cool.


I've been getting a lot of headaches lately, so I went to Boots this morning to get my eyes tested. It turns out that I have the optical equivalent of 'duck feet' (where your feet turn outwards). My eyes' default position is to be slightly turned away from each other (not anything that you could see by looking at me), and so it makes it especially tricky when I'm looking at anything that's closer than an arm's length away, hence the headaches. The optometrist said that the best thing to do would be to 'prism' my glasses- basically to embrace the 'duck-footedness' and let the glasses do the work of putting the two images together for my brain. Apparently I've had this for a long time (and hadn't really noticed the fact that the double-vision I had was actually double-vision...it just seemed normal to me). The new glasses should arrive in about two weeks...yay!!