Great Court at the British Museum

I used to be a once-a-week regular at the British Museum – so much so that I got bought a coffee there by a couple of BBC researchers after someone to chat with for a programme they were making.

Since travelling to Greece and visiting the Parthenon and Acropolis, though the place has somewhat lost its appeal. The Greek authorities have been very good about pointing out, in a constructive and low-key way, that many of the site’s real treasures were boxed up and shipped off to London in the early 1800s and can now be found in the museum’s London galleries.

The same could be said for many artefacts found in other rooms there, including Egyptian mummies, French clocks and Iranian pottery. The most impressive British artefacts, such as the relics found in the Sutton Hoo longship, are discretely tidied away in a fairly anonymous corner, almost like they’re an embarrassment.

As such, the whole place now feels like a bit of a looter’s stash, and that’s unlikely to ever change since the British Museum Act 1963 makes it illegal to return many of the foreign artefacts to their original countries once they have entered the collection.

So I’ve been less often of late, but that didn’t stop us dropping in to check out the late night opening on Friday, when around half of the galleries stay open until 20h30, and the Great Court welcomes visitors until 23h. You don’t get to see everything, but it is a great time to visit. There are few tourists and no school groups, and you can still get in to the most impressive and controversial exhibits, including those mentioned above.

Despite the morals of having all this plunder on display, the British Museum is a great institution, and the late night openings make for an interesting evening out. It’s just a shame the description couldn’t really be any more inaccurate if it tried. There’s very little British about it.

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So the new Bond film is called Quantum of Solace. A strange choice, it sounds like sci-fi, but the actual story behind the name was nothing of the sort. It first appeared as a short tale in For Your Eyes Only, the volume of stories that also contained A View to a Kill.

But just as View to a Kill’s producers took nothing but the story’s title when they made it into a film, I can’t see much of the original Quantum of Solace making it to the screen, either. For starters the story doesn’t involve Bond; it’s merely recounted to him by his host at dinner.

Yet the name could still be appropriate. The new film picks up an hour after the last one ended. Bond is emotionally broken at the close of Casino Royale, and the unfortunate central character in Fleming’s account of Quantum of Solace is similarly damaged by his wife’s wandering ways.

I’m still not convinced it’s a name that will line up well against the likes of Moonraker, Tomorrow Never Dies or Dr No, each of which had a clear and easily definable link to the story’s driving force. Daniel Craig claims that it ‘also alludes to something else in the film’, but I hope that ‘something’ is not too obscure.

Anyhow, it’s months yet until the film comes out. It’s been put back to 7 November, which is a better time for Bond anyway, as it’ll be two years since the last one. My only worry is that the fantastic rebooting of the franchise we had with Casino Royale may be lost as Quantum of Solace slips back into the habits of the Brosnan days, when Bond was more about explosions and chases than character development.

And producer Michael Wilson is promising ‘twice as much action’ as they had in Casino Royale.

Hmmm.

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We watched Goldfinger at the weekend. Rich had never seen it before, but he made a very good point: Bond doesn’t actually do anything.

M and the Governor of the Bank of England put him on to Goldfinger, so he does nothing there. Felix points him out in Miami, so he doesn’t even have to stalk him. The Bank of England comes up trumps in getting him a game of golf with the man himself, where he manages to plant a bug in Goldfinger’s car.

He follows this over to Switzerland where he gets easily captured (his own stupidity: he crashed into a wall) and flown to Baltimore by Pussy Galore. There he’s held prisoner at Goldfinger’s ranch, until being handcuffed to a nuclear bomb and locked in Fort Knox. A battle rages outside the fort in which, for obvious reasons, Bond can’t take part, and then someone from the CIA bursts in and defuses the bomb. Apart from a little fight on a plane in which a window gets accidentally blown out and Goldfinger is sucked into outer space, that’s it.

So what was Bond’s contribution to the story, considering even his attempts to warn the CIA of Goldfinger’s plot were thwarted?

He seduced Pussy. That’s all. One literal tumble in the hay and a bit of quick kissing (or maybe more, but we’ll never know as this was the 60s and they didn’t show such things back then) and she was turned. She phoned the CIA (where did she get their number?) and double-crossed her employer. End of story.

Yet Goldfinger is held up by many as one of the best Bonds of all time. The third in the series, it was the one in which the team got into its stride. I still like it a lot, but it’s strange that it took a first-time watcher to point out something I’d never noticed before; this isn’t really a James Bond film at all. It’s the story of Pussy Galore.

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I was late for work this morning. Why? Because the route I cycle to the station was flooded.

It’s been raining for days, and it was inevitable there would be a slight delay before the main wash made it down to us. As I came out of the house and cycled into the nature reserve and on over the bridge it was obvious the river was much higher than usual, as it had spilled over the banks and marooned a bench and the large willow that had been snapped by the high winds in autumn.

It had flooded a long way into the horses’ grazing pasture, and the horses themselves were nowhere to be seen. In their place, a flock of excited ducks swam around in a newly-formed lake.

It looked like things were going to be alright until I got to the back of the university, where the river was gushing over the banks, across the path and into the little wood beyond. One intrepid commuter took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his suit trousers and waded in, giving a sneeky smile to those of us watching him go, but soon coming to regret his rash actions as the water got higher and higher and fast approached his knees.

He stood on tiptoe, but the height of the water increased far faster than the height of his legs, and we all left him to his fate. We turned around and cycled back, all the way along the river and through the reserve, back past home and down a higher, less vulnerable path to the station. I got there in the end, late but dry. I wonder when the wading commuter finally dried out.

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Ten days. It’s been a while, hasn’t it. It’s been a very strange start to the year, though. We all went down with family colds, and then just as we got over them a new one struck and took down half of us all over again. It must have been a different one because you don’t get the same cold twice so close in succession. Not me, fortunately, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

In the meantime, there’s been a very nasty case of food poisoning over in Galleywood and then the dreaded norovirus.

So they year could have started better.

And yet there have been some lovely moments, like digging over the plot last weekend to get rid of all of the weeds; laying in bed on Monday night when the rain was hammering so hard on the bedroom’s sloping roof that you couldn’t hear the radio; Oscar taking his first tentative steps outside, working out how the cat-flap works and sniffing his way through the back of the garden and out into the allotments.

And this weekend dad is back. He was picking up the keys to his new flat, which gives a fantastic view over Chelmsford. In fact, not just Chelmsford, but miles and miles and miles beyond. You can see at least five miles out to the church on the hill in Danbury, and probably a lot further if you know where you’re looking.

You also get a great view of the toy-like train line I ride to work every day, and all the little trains that run along it. On a sunny day it’s the kind of view you could look at or hours.

All that and we’re only two weeks into the year.

I cycle to the station and back each day. It’s one of the best parts of the day, and it’s certainly faster than either walking or driving. It’s not a long journey, but until now I’ve never really known how far it is. I was guessing a mile or so, and I wasn’t far out.

The actual distance is a mile and a third. I know because I measured it this morning using the cyclometers Kelloggs is promoting as a part of its Cycle10 campaign to get the nation fit.

It’s a snazzy little device in shiny white plastic, its design perhaps influenced by that of the iPod, with a circular three-way button set on the front below a large LCD screen.

I don’t know whether it’s spot-on accurate, as it had a strange fascination with four speeds: 6.7mph, 9.49mhp, 10.53mph and 11.57mph. Looking at Google Maps, though, the slightly longer road route to the station, avoiding all the cycle paths, is about a mile and a half, so I do trust the mile and a third it measured on all the shortcuts today.

That’s not actually far at all, so I was surprised to see that to complete the Cycle 10 Challenge Kelloggs has built around the cyclometer (and be in with a chance of winning a prize) you don’t have to do 10 miles a day, but 10 miles a week. I’d do that passively on just three and a half working days, so I’m hoping nobody will be signing up and kidding themselves they’ve started a rigourous fitness regime.

According to a variety of online calorie calculators I’m burning off about 50 calories for each ride, which is the equivalent of a peach, a kiwi, half a pear, a single slice of rye bread or half a cup of cornflakes.

So not much.

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Oscar seems to have settled into a fairly set routine. He comes down for breakfasts, hangs around for a bit of a chat (very one-sided, as it’s all meowing from him), then naps under the bed in room 2 for most of the day and, in the evening, comes down for dinner and a bit of company. At night he sleeps at the end of the bed, and is an absolute gentleman, never stirring until the alarm goes off, when a single solitary mew checks you’re awake.

It’s all very nice.

And now he’s taken to helping me with my work. As I sit here with the MacBook on my lap, he’s sitting half way between me and the keyboard, making sure I’m not messing up my spellings.

Look – we’ve done a little picture in Photo Booth.

We did a fisheye one, too, but he said it made his nose look big.

Well there’s a surprise. The meticulously-planned works that have kept Liverpool Street station closed since 23rd December have over-run. The bridge they were removing has gone, and the scheduled upgrades to a handful of stations have been completed, but now they have problems with the overhead lines, and the station is stranded, cut off from the rest of the network.

Advice from the rail company is not to travel until they’ve got it fixed, which is now not expected to happen until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Advice from commuter groups is to demand a refund. This is doubly embarrassing coming on the day the rail companies rolled out price increases of up to 11% – twice the rate of inflation – across the national network.

So it’s a day of working from home, which is far from ideal after two weeks off. Let’s hope tomorrow’s predicted snow and negative temperatures don’t delay the fixes any longer.

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We didn’t spend it in New York, Paris or Rome. We didn’t fly to Edinburgh for Hogmanay. We didn’t buy fireworks, or tickets to an expensive pub that would welcome you through its doors for free any other night.

Instead we spent new year at home, with the cat, some warm sloppy camembert fresh from the oven, and a bottle of something with fizz to mark the passing of 2007 and the start of 2008.

2007 has been a pretty good year, all told, marked by the purchase of a new house at the start, and finally moving into it at the very end. It’s been a year of builders and rubble, dust and tools. Buying furniture, choosing colours, digging seeds into the vegetable plot and eating the produce.

I became an uncle a third of the way through and, for the first time in about the last 15 years, went no further than Paris in the whole 12 months, yet still had the best holiday I can remember.

I don’t know what 2008 holds in store. I have no plans beyond settling into the house, working some more on the plot and enjoying whatever comes along.

Let’s see what happens… just as soon as I’m over this cold.