On Being Tourists At Home

This weekend, Husband and I celebrated Easter by feasting on the museums in South Kensington. We've lived in London for three months. It's high time we started taking advantage of the reasons we moved here in the first place! The price you pay for living in one of the world's treasure troves is that all too quickly you become jaded. And when you are tired of London you are tired of life, or so it is said. If I am to eventually take these delights for granted, I'd better have sampled them first. So on Saturday I coerced my sceptical love onto a bus, for one of the only moments in his life. This is a man born with a bicycle clamped between his thighs, to whom the bus is a natural enemy. But as my bicycle is undergoing cosmetic attention (more on that next time), and it is lunacy to drive in London, a bus was the obvious alternative. We bought Oyster cards, waited for all of three minutes before the 345 rolled up at the stop outside our front door, and even got the front seats on the upper deck. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have a convert on our hands...

On Saturday we dived into the Science Museum. Incredible that you can wander in off the street and stare at such lovingly crafted machines or fragile relics of man's haphazard climb up the tree of progress. We spent an hour staring at steam engines and I loved watching his face radiate enthusiasm as he explained the process of creating energy from steam. There was a model of a beam engine, originally owned by the engineer James Watt, that was so gloriously animal-like in it's motion. I saw a giraffe bending to drink as the beam was sucked down towards the chamber, and a praying mantis as it lifted free, as though holding it's arms elegantly tucked. There was also a well laid-out display of Formula One's contribution to modern convenience, with it's different components on display with their accompanying developments. Like the excruciatingly expensive Factor 001 bicycle, or the curious health monitoring pod, that looked like a futuristic armchair in a plastic bubble and a very cosy place for an undisturbed nap. A canny PR exercise it is that Formula One remind us of their importance to every day living as cars lose ground in popular opinion as we see the planet start frying... Another treat was the lunar module that brought Apollo astronauts safely home through the Earth's atmosphere.

Today, Easter Monday, we hopped aboard another bus and scratched at the surface of the iceberg that is the V & A. After a fascinating stroll through a lot of ludicrously ornate religious silverware and some exquisite stained glass windows, we found the Performance and Theatre gallery. Some highlights here were incredible videos and stills photographs of past glories. I loved the detailed mock up of Kylie's dressing room from her Showgirl tour, the floor strewn with glittering, tiny shoes. So did a gentleman beside me, whose daughter was rummaging among the rail of crazy costumes for something to try on, but the rail was beyond her reach. Daddy was a little too engrossed to help... There were exquisite set models of previous productions, and a sweet model of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, featuring the grisly star traps that used to shoot unlucky performers up through the stage floor from a spring loaded platform by way of a sharp-toothed star shaped platform. I've been on enough rickety stage traps to be incredibly grateful these things are now illegal.

I could have drifted happy and agape through the sumptuous rooms of magnificent paintings, each a tale jostling to be unravelled. But David began to glaze over and take on the look of a man in the dentist's waiting room, so for the sake of marital harmony we escaped into the Spring sunshine, reeling from cultural overdose. We went to Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian place around the corner from South Ken station, where the bread basket comes with their luscious homemade chocolate spread. It is something that sustained Amber, my favourite Kiwi, and I through a long miserable winter when we were shopgirls working on Brompton road. After the coffee was done and we had had our fill of people watching, we happy two sauntered home through Chelsea and Battersea, ogling the beautiful brick apartments.

It's thrilling to know we could spend every weekend doing this for as long as we pleased, and never run out of something new to discover. It's yet another reason we knew we had to escape Johannesburg and become Londoners.