After the demo, there was a free Magic Numbers gig going, but I didn't fancy it. Instead, I went to the Royal Academy to see the Paul Sandby exhibition. Paul Sandby was a watercolourist and engraver who began his career by satirising Hogarth and ended by being nudged out of style by young gun JMW Turner. He spent most of the time in between painting views of the United Kingdom. As many of his contemporaries jaunted off to Europe to paint ancient Roman ruins, Sandby left us with a unique visual record of Britain during his lifetime. The landscapes are calm, ordered and beautiful. But he also had a cheeky sense of humour, so there are often funny characters in his paintings: like a grand vista of rolling green hills with a folly at the top, and if you peer inside the folly, you can see a cad trying to persuade a reluctant woman to have a cuddle. I was also tickled by the painting of an army encampment in Hyde Park which featured, in the bottom left-hand corner, a soldier doing a wee against a tent.
I love stuff like that: quirky details in art which remind us that people in the past were as witty and silly and ribald as we are now. While I was recovering from my laser eye surgery, I spent a lot of time listening to the History of the World in 100 Objects podcast. I was so excited to have my sight return -- it usually lasted about half a day before I needed to go and lie in the dark -- because I was desperate to visit the British Museum and see some of the objects I'd been learning about. It was a little frustrating, as I had to pause and sit on a bench by some Babylonian clay tablets to take my regimen of medicated eye drops... And there was also a tiny, detailed gold chariot, and I peered at the panel text and it said, 'an image of the Egyptian dwarf-god Bes can be seen on the front of this chariot' and I thought resignedly, 'can be seen... pfft.'
Anyway, there was a set of Celtic flagons which had been described in the podcast as 'funny and really rather moving.' I wondered in what way they were moving. The handle is a model of a dog, and there are two dogs moulded onto the lid of the flagon too. They are chained up. On the spout there is a little duck -- so when wine or mead was poured out, it would look as if the duck was swimming away, while the dogs were straining to get at it. And at first I thought that was a funny gimmick, quite charming -- and then it hit me, that these were our ancestors and this was their little joke -- and not a hilarious one, perhaps as chucklesome and surprising as Big Mouth Billy Bass, but still, it was a gag that dated from 450BC and it still made me grin today. It made me think of its makers as living people with a sense of humour, rather than vague, unknowable figures from the distant past. A hand reaches out from the mists of time and you take it, and you find it's holding a hand buzzer. A lame joke by a jolly uncle; one who lived several hundred generations ago, but still family. Bzzt. I welled up; but that could also have been the eyedrops.
Back to Saturday. Having spent the hottest part of the day in the aggressively air-conditioned RA, I went to buy a book from Hatchards with my birthday book token, then had some sushi. After that, I caught a bus to Hyde Park, and sat in the last of the bright sunlight, reading and enjoying the greenery.
When I got home, I found that the water bottle in my bag had leaked all over everything. The only thing it didn't get to was my phone, but everything else was sodden. Including my nice new birthday book, which looked as if it'd been dipped in a bath. I put it in the airing cupboard with some weights on it, but it refused to dry out or unripple itself. Three hours, I managed to keep that nice.
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