Changing Rooms, Soane-style

This bland façade at 13, Lincoln’s Inn Fields hides an Aladdin’s cave of artistic quirk. It is the Sir John Soane’s Museum – a bewitching magpie’s nest cluttered with curiosities in stone, plaster and paint.
Soane, an architect best known for designing the Bank of England building, seems to have been an early DIY renovation fanatic. He began in 1792 with a single house containing living areas, a library and drawing room where he schmoozed his clients. Over the following 30 years, however, he undertook an extreme home makeover, demolishing and remodelling, gradually spreading into the two neighboring properties. His aim was to create the ideal space to display his extraordinary collection so that “amateurs and students” of architecture could appreciate and learn from the classics.
Apart from an abundance of antiquities (including a cross-eyed Hercules looking for all the world like a dim-witted quarterback), there are countless fragments of architecture: plaster casts and marble cast-offs perching and crowding every inch of space. It must be hell to dust. There is even the enormous alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, which the British Museum couldn’t afford, and had to be installed though a demolished wall. Soane threw a three-day party to celebrate its arrival.
My favourites however were the paintings: three Canalettos, glorious expanses of Venetian detail and light, and an embarrassment of Hogarths. An entire room in fact full of two Hogarth series: A Rake’s Progress and An Election. I could have stood for hours, gasping with recognition of the funny, brutal and poignant characters in these canvasses.
The star of the museum, though, is the building itself. Soane’s wonderfully modern eccentricity shines through in the way light is coaxed into every corner of the house, through glass domes and metal grilles, so that unexpected shafts illuminate even the depths of the sepulchral chamber. Here, you really do feel like you are exploring a crumbling crypt or the half-excavated streets of an ancient city.
Just as Soane, in his home-reno makeover madness, intended.

AUSSIE IN CHIPPY FROGGY TITTY SHOCK

We arrived in London last Thursday. The first thing I noticed was the sickly-savoury smell of hot chips, wafting and soaking entire stretches of street. Chip shops here as common as boulangeries in Paris, and while the warm greasy pall is perhaps not as exquisite as butter-pastry bouquet de baguette, it must have spoken to some deep need within, for my first meal here was fish and chips with a pint of Guinness.
“Oh la la, mais quel cliché, le fish and chips, c’est so British!” This was the next surprise: almost every second person you overhear seems to be speaking French. I had heard that there has been a massive influx of young frenchies to London, keen to gain experience in the anglo-saxon corporate world, but I was not prepared for the sheer number. Someone told me before leaving Paris that London was now the second French city in the world by population, and I find that utterly believable. It’s quite comforting to hear the familiarity of French all around, making the cross-channel transition softer somehow. But I’m ashamed to admit how often I feel a mean surge of schadenfreude when I see a poor frog-out-of-water grappling with English. See what it’s like? See?
Language is just one reason why I am feeling instantly comfortable here. So many unexpected idiosyncrasies seem to remind me of Sydney, from red-tiled terraces to the way shops are strung out along the high street. Sunday trading! Customer service! And – bright zenith of pleasure - fat weekend newspapers!
There are of course other aspects of life here which strike me as particularly British. Bosoms, for example. Our first night in London was a marvellous introduction to that unique “oo-er” naughtiness which is so very English. We went to a taping of The Sunday Night Project hosted by Alan Carr, the current Queen of TV innuendo, and his guest Barbara Windsor, of “Carry On” fame. We enjoyed classic clips of Barbara’s bra pinging off and giggled at character names such as “Doctor Nookey”. It may be a French(ish) term, but the double entendre is, to me, quintessentially English. Take this smutty gem from “Carry on Columbus":

Marco: I wouldn’t if I were you, miss. I’ve heard these waters are full of man-eating sharks.
Chiquita: Oh no! So if I fell in, do you think they’d swallow me whole?
Marco: No, I’m told they spit that bit out.

Ah, England. The land of Charles Dickens, tabloid headlines and Mrs. Malaprop. I feel at home already. Yes, we’ll miss Paris. Painfully. But so far it’s been an encouraging opening (fnar!) to our cross-channel odyssey.
Or, as the Rev. Spooner might have called it: “A Sail of Two Titties”.*

* With apologies to Monty Python.