.

A sporting life
Montpelier school, that’s the one with thirty-four first languages spoken by its pupils, had its senior sports day last week at the Brentham Club just down the road and we were there. With these thirty-four different spoken languages it may be fair to assume some of the children cannot understand each other’s native tongue, but it appears that competition is a universal language, particularly with parents.
It would be fair to report that Ali Moodie’s interests are more intellectual than sporting; although while we thought he won his egg and spoon race he was judged to be only second, and he would have been placed in the sprint had he not pulled up lame with a groin injury with only ten metres left to run. Such are the trials and tribulations of top-level sport that Ali performed with distinction in the sack race but struggled with the skipping-rope-dash, managed not to drop the tennis ball balanced on the racket, and maintained superb control in the soccer dribbling. We felt he was at a disadvantage in the foam-tube-javelin throwing, some of the rocket-shaped javelins, including his, sagged in the middle resulting in unsound aerodynamics. The final race, which we are ashamed to confess to missing, was the one with competitors running while balancing quoits on their heads.
For our cerebral and cultural nourishment it was to the Victoria and Albert Museum we went, passing all twenty-one Rodin sculptures for the theatre and performance section, a star billing being the remains of a Les Paul Goldtop Delux guitar used and smashed by the Who’s Pete Townshend believed during a performance in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was a rather vague description, clearly unable to identify the actual destructive event the museum lists Townshend as the first guitar-smashing rock artist. The original art work for the Sex Pistol’s God Save the Queen was on display but not so the artwork for the Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo which the museum brought at auction for $US92,500. Also on display a fine collection of performance memorabilia, costumes including a tiny 1972 jump suit worn by Mick Jagger, posters, one advertising prices to a Led Zeppelin concert at £2.10, original musical scores and even a replica dressing room from a Kylie Minogue tour. There are more than 3,500 pieces here, ranging from the eighteenth century to the modern day, covering drama, opera, ballet, musicals, pantomime, rock and pop, music hall, cabaret and circus.
Then there are the overseas works, most of which we didn’t see as it all gets a little overwhelming. Chinese, Islamic, Japanese, Korean and South-East Asian sections, there is a huge European section with medieval exhibits going back as far as 300 AD. Intriguingly there are plaster copies of Roman columns and monuments including a thirty metre high column cut in half, the pulpit from the Pisa cathedral, and Michelangelo’s three David’s
The V & A, as it is abbreviated, is billed as the largest museum of decorative arts and design in the world and houses more than 4.5 million pieces within its 12.5 acre complex. There seems surprisingly little written about the building itself, but like all of these grand London places it is quite stunning. Even the cafeteria has ornate columns and tiled floors and ceilings, and sometimes it is easy to become so absorbed by the beauty of the architecture that the exhibits seem almost secondary. It is one of those places, like the Louvre, that require a number of short visits so as not to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of exhibition.
It took more us than forty minutes last night to load SatNav Ken with the latest maps of Central and Eastern Europe in preparation for a drive, starting next week, from Budapest to Lake Balaton in Hungary and on to the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia. Then, at the end of the month it is to Northern Italian lakes with the Moodies as we’ll need a holiday by then to recuperate.