We had a lovely day up town yesterday. On Friday night, as we lay in bed, Gav and I discussed catching the train to Brighton the next day. We decided to go for it as long as it wasn’t raining. Fate intervened. When the babies forced me to get out of bed I peeked out of the window and found that it had been raining in the night. It was hard to determine quite what would happen with the weather, as there were ominous, heavy clouds as well as blue sky. We decided to go the safe route, avoid the seaside and to take a trip into central London instead. First we looked at the zoo but discovered that it would cost over £50 to get the six of us in! Instead we turned our attention to the museums. We revealed our plans to the children. The girls were really pleased. They wouldn’t have been so pleased if they realised we’d forfeited a trip to the seaside and the zoo for this choice!
The day was mission successful although it was gruelling. The girls enjoyed the train journey in. Gav stayed with the babies beside the train doors as I sat with Cara and Zadie playing ‘I spy’. Arriving in London we decided to show the girls Trafalgar Square. There had been grass there randomly for a short time but sadly it had been taken away. Spotting the National Gallery I suggested going in to show Cara Monet’s work. She’d learned about Monet recently and was developing a real pride in her knowledge of artists. I have also sent her into school with a few gallery brochures that I’m on the mailing list for. She’s proud of this little role that she has and I thought it would be very good for her to see the real artist’s work so that she could not only say that she’d seen the real artist’s work but so that I could show her how he painted. We found an entrance which wasn’t too difficult to manoeuvre a pram into, scoured the plan for the room with Monet’s work and set off to Room 43 on the second floor, thankfully by way of lift! It was hugely exciting. I was touched to see that Gav stepped aside a couple of times to look at details of some paintings. He admitted afterwards that he had been really moved almost to tears by some of the work because it was so enormous and must have taken ages to paint. It struck me that my feelings had been exactly the same when I first visited the gallery when I was seventeen. These days it’s very different because I’ve been there so many times that I can happily dash in and out and home in on the one or two pictures that I’m interested in. It was the only thing to do with the little ones. Their attention span wasn’t going to last too long and we had the threat that Cerys and Thomas would start to cry as they were due their morning nap, interrupting the reverent peace of the high, bustling rooms. Reaching Monet’s rooms I led the children straight to Monet’s water lily paintings. First we looked at The Water Lily Pond, the famous painting with the bridge over the lilies. Cara had been drawing water lilies since being shown the most famous ‘Water-Lilies’ painting at school. Sadly that one wasn’t there, or at least we didn’t find it but it was good to show her the pond and the flowers. I had more fun though showing her the coarsely painted ‘The Japanese Bridge’. This bridge is in a few of his paintings but in this particular painting it is nearly abstract. It was fun to show because I have told Cara for a long time that she doesn’t have to stick to lines when colouring in, she can scribble when drawing and painting. Artists do whatever they want! She was initially very dubious about the idea of artists scribbling. On the web I’d shown her Pollocks’ dribble art and it was brilliant to show her some of Monet’s work which was created by using harsh brushstrokes combined to make a canvas full of scribbles.
“When we stand close it looks like lots of scribbles doesn’t it?” I asked Cara. She nodded, “See how some of the paint is really thick and some isn’t. The brush strokes are curly, just like scribbling. I bet you didn’t think you could scribble when you paint did you?” Cara nodded smiling. “Right, let’s back up a bit.” I was carrying Cara. We stepped back a few paces, through the crowds. “Now what do you see?”
Cara tried hard to see. It was tricky but I was able to point out the shape of the bridge by comparing it to the other, more clear painting. Cara was really pleased when she worked it out. After Cara had had a look I picked up Zadie to show her the picture too. Zadie was pleased to have that moment to look at the paintings with me and followed my swift narrative happily enjoying picking out the colours she recognised. Gav caught up with me and pointed out that Cerys was a little distressed about being left a few paces away so we made sure she was with us for our next painting. I moved the girls on to see Manet’s work and we stood a few moments in front of ‘The Umbrellas’. In this picture I explained a little about the colours that were used. I asked Cara what colour she thought the lady’s dress was. Cara replied ‘Grey’ which I found quite interesting because Cara is usually spot on with colour and obviously the woman’s dress is a blue but I think that close up in front of this large scale painting she was a little thrown by the complexity of colours painted. Cara understands how colours are made so I explained briefly how the Impressionists used complimentary colours, opposites on the colour wheel to give vividness to the painting. On this painting the highlights on the blue were orange, the direct opposite on the colour wheel. I told her how generally they tried not to use black, the colour of darkness but to use the colours to create works of light. I’ve brought up the children to understand that colours are colour, black and white aren’t colours but a darkness and a lightness and I was pleased to see that she understood. With Zadie I pointed out the child’s face looking out of the ‘Umbrellas’ painting and her rosy cheeks. Zadie is learning to draw faces now and we talked briefly about the features the artist had painted. Moving on we hunted out the Sunflowers.
“It’s one of the world’s most famous paintings,” Gav and I told Cara and Zadie.
“Do you like it?” I asked them.
”Yes,” Cara replied loyally.
“I don’t,” I grinned, “I think it’s a bit thickly painted and the colours are sickly. I prefer that one,” I said pointing to ‘A Wheat Field with Cypresses’. “I love the curly painting on that one too.” Years ago I’d painted a copy of that painting and it had inspired me to paint using my fingers in oils for my A-Level mock, earning me a grade A. Sadly in the A-Level finals I messed up the proportions on my friend Anna’s face and only reached a B grade, giving her a rather large nose. We laughed about it afterwards.
“I think it’s a bit pants,” Gav contributed quietly and we laughed, enjoying the irreverence in the thick of the throng of silent visitors who had travelled from far and wide to see this very painting.
The final picture I showed the children was Rousseau’s ‘Surprised’ with the tiger. We didn’t get the chance to discuss this one as patience was wearing thin but headed out then. We stopped off at the shop so that the girls could buy a postcard each before leaving. Cara chose a close up of the little girl out of Manet’s ‘Umbrellas’ and Zadie randomly chose a picture of the interior of the gallery.
We headed up the street, aiming for Tottenham Court Road to reach the British Museum. At the bottom of Charing Cross Road we stopped for a Pizza Hut lunch. It was a real treat although at the moment Gav and I are slightly sensitive about quite how obvious Cerys’s spots still are. Sat in a high chair being a monkey, enjoying the limelight it was hard to hide those spots. A kindly woman stopped by and sympathised with us stating, “chicken pox, I’ve been there too.”
While we were in the restaurant it began to rain quite heavily. Thankfully I’d packed raincoats for the kids and myself. Gav being as brave as ever had ventured out in his teeshirt. When we stepped out we headed up towards Tottenham Court Road.
“Borders suddenly looks really attractive!” Gav said as the rain started to get heavier. We passed the old Salsa bar we went to once together. It was a dire night the night I took him. I still remember being disappointed as I’d had so much fun there with colleagues from Sight and Sound beforehand. When the rain eased off we left Borders, the girls clutching a Bratz sticker book each. While it was raining I’d tried hard to find them a good intermediate book to read to them, a book with mostly text but a black and white picture on each page. I hadn’t found any that quite fitted the bill disappointingly.
We had been humming and ahhing over just going back to the train because of the weather but with a break in the rain we braved the mission finale of getting to the British Museum. I’m now so glad that we did. It took more walking for little legs. I really felt for the girls as I was starting to want to sit down by then. The mission this time was to get to the Mummies as Cara had been learning about the Pyramids in school. Again it was good to have an objective. The first objective though was to find a toilet. Poor little Zee began to need the loo when we were half way down the street on the way to the museum. We hurried along knowing it was nearby but of course reaching the museum it was like getting down another street to find the darned thing. When we got to the loos we found a queue of women about fifteen deep. With a stressed Zadie and Cara in each hand I eyed the queue and grinned to myself as I remembered the nurse’s words in hospital when the babies had RSV.
“When it comes to our children we each have a tiger in us,” she’d said. I doubt I’ll ever forget those words because it’s so utterly and purely true.
Addressing the woman at the front of the line I said,
“I’m so sorry, would anyone mind if we sneaked to the front. I have a very little girl here who is very, very desperate for the toilet.”
Fifteen faces turned towards us then down at the children. Zadie and Cara looked back at those fifteen faces with dark, anxious eyes, hopping innocently from foot to foot and the waves parted. If they hadn’t goodness knows what would have happened! I didn’t fancy continuing around London with two poor children in wet pants and would probably have removed their undies as a precaution!
We found Gav outside the museum doors. He’d managed to push the two single buggies into a disabled platform lift to get outside the doors but it would have been nearly impossible for him to have got the pair through without help as the crowd going through was incessant. The girls contributed some money to the large box at the front then we ventured back in. Gav and I looked at the roof and mused over what the old museum would have looked like. It’s very impressive in the main area with the large circular building in the centre with the glass roof, patterned with triangle shapes.
Finding directions to Africa we zoomed through the crowds, not really stopping to look at the amazing Aztec statutes for more than a brief moment. The girls’ reception to the Egyptian mummies was muted. Zadie looked deeply concerned by the bandaged mummies themselves, peeking at them around the pram. Cara is very interested in ideas about the after life at the moment and I briefly talked her through my understanding of why the Egyptians chose to bury people in this way. They were slightly overwhelmed by the displays and Cara demanded to be lifted to look at a painted face on one of the mummies. We moved on and I showed them the hieroglyphics, the intricate paintings of the eyes and wings and more on the sarcophaguses.
“Look, there’s bones!” Cara said. I thought she meant on the hieroglyphics and scanned them to find some that resembled some but then laughed as I saw her line of vision. She was eyeing a human skull through a gap and was desperate to get round to see it. We wound our way through the crowds to the other side of the cabinet and Cara and Zadie made impressive ‘ewwww’ noises as they looked at the skulls on display.
Gav and I nodded to each other at this point that it was time to escape and head back. Zadie had tugged my sleeve and asked,
“Are we getting the train now mummy?”
They were tired and we had a long walk ahead.
The walk back took a while but we broke it up with a quick zip into Virgin Megastore where I sat with Thomas and Cerys. It’s funny because out and about with the babies at this age you can almost forget they are there until you actually sit down with them. They’re still happy to watch the world go by from their prams for most of the time still. Cerys had relieved her pram boredom by laughing at Cara a few times as Cara had pulled faces at her.
It was then a race for the train. We caught one with minutes to spare and were grateful not to have to wait too long. The double bonus was that the train wasn’t too crowded. On the way back the girls sat together admiring their Bratz sticker books while Gav sat with Thomas behind Cerys and I. Dear spotty Cerys spent much of the journey playing a very lively game of Peep-Bo with Thomas over the seats.
Day over. Enough said. Lots of fun.
As an afternote Gav has reminded me of a couple of things. Firstly that we would love to go back either with the kids when they are older or to spend time there without children to actually spend time seeing what is there. Also he pointed out our laughing about one placard which had noted that the statue was graciously donated by Queen Victoria and we’d laughed about how actually that meant ‘robbed’. Also, we’d thought about how amazing it was that with so many of these amazing historic creations that the artists would never have imagined quite how immortalised their work would have been, on view to the whole word. In the case of the mummified royals the bones of what would effectively have been their gods would have been only feet away from far the masses, for centuries to come. It’s bizarre and so hard to comprehend.
