Travelling to London to get a plane to Amritsar was a perfect excuse to spend a day at our favourite hotel, Saint Simeons in South Kensington. It is named, for some godforsaken reason, after Simeon Stylites, a lunatic who spent 37 years on top of a pillar in the belief that it took him closer to God. His acolytes gathered round the foot of the pillar, sending up food in baskets pulled up by a rope while his leavings were sent down in the same basket. This all happened in the 5th century in Antioch (Turkey), not South Kensington. The hotel’s rooms are small but clean and comfortable and the breakfast is excellent. It is a short walk from the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum of which we are members having paid £122 last year. While the Museum is free to enter, being a member allows us to go to the exhibitions free of charge and also to enter even when the museum is full, so we can enjoy the pleasure of walking past American tourists who are being turned away.
The exhibition we went to see was about Marie Antoinette, the queen of France’s last king, Louis the 16th . She is reputed to have said “let them eat cake” when told that peasants (whose labours had paid for all her wealth) were starving and pleading for bread. We saw some of the ridiculous clothes on which she spent zillions of francs and pictures of her increasingly ridiculous hairdo’s. Her wedding dress is also on display; there is so much gold on it that it weighed too much for her to walk in it. Some poor jobsworth had to trot along behind her with the train of her dress on a wheelbarrow. The bit of the exhibition I liked best was the actual guillotine used to chop her head off. Madame Tussaud was at the day’s festivities and somebody managed to get a wax impression of her head which was then reproduced at Madame Tussaud’s in London. Jennifer tells me that she became incredibly popular after being beheaded; Kier Starmer might take note.
We then went to eat in the Members Restaurant so as to dine with personages of breeding and distinction, rather than slumming it in the cafeteria with the hoipolloi eating peas with a spoon and dropping handfuls of mashed potato down their trousers. After recovering from the trauma of seeing the prices we ordered delicious meals although the portions were small.
It seems that I’m not able at present to add text after the pictures, so the explanations are as follows: portrait of Marie Antoinette, her golden wedding dress, her jewels container, her incredibly valuable necklace, her wax head, her bible in which she pleaded to God to save her, her execution (sadly my picture of the guillotine did not come out), the Ardebil carpet at the Islamic Asia part of the museum (the world’s earliest dated carpet and the largest), tiles from Iran’s Safavid dynasty, the “Chelsea carpet” made in Safavid Iran and the bust of a 4th century Iranian king.
