Flashback: This week last year

My Diary for this week last year tells me that I was…

Enjoying several days at the great London museums and galleries we are unable to visit right now because of The Covids.

First up was a preview at the British Museum for a big exhibition, Troy: Myth & Reality. Here is what I wrote on Trip Advisor: “The stories have been imagined and re-imagined, told and retold, so many times… And the big themes endure: courage, valour, loyalty, heroism, bravery. It’s all here in these mythical figures. The characters are stock archetypes. Odysseus wants to go home. He’s a bit of a whinger about it. And home is where his love, Penelope, is. Epic stories and bitter, violent rivalries run riot.” 

Next we visited the Barbican for Into The Night, a crawl around the bars, cafés and cabarets most frequented by trendy artists from the 1880s to the 1960s. We even got to neck the cocktails they once served in Vienna’s Cabaret Fledermaus bar.

My favourite ‘room’ was from 1920s-30s Germany, and I managed to set the alarm off in Le Chat Noir in Paris when I got too close to a pair of woman’s shoes.

Back at the Barbican later in the week we met friends at the Museum of London for London Calling, a memorabilia collection of guitars, posters, notebooks and lots of fan worshipping to celebrate 40 years of The Clash.

For those of us old enough to have seen the band in peak punk it was a chance to relive some of the most telling moments of our youth.

See all of my Diaries.