Day out

Rosie and I had a lovely day out today. We went into town to the Victoria & Albert museum. My friend Natasha works there and we made plans to meet her for lunch in the garden. Rosie and I got there early and looked around. The place has changed so much since I did my internship there years ago.

It used to be a musty dusty treasure trove of beautiful things but it's been tidied up and is all shiny and clean now. My favourite room was the Northern Renaissance room where they have lots of triptychs and reliquaries. I loved it because you could smell the woody scent of the objects but now they're all in glass cases and all you can smell is the new cafe. Ah well, I guess time marches on. I did manage to find three of my favourite things in the whole museum - a tiny carved rosary bead, a St Sebastian reliquary and the Vivienne Westwood Watteau dress.

The reliquary was the last object I worked on when I was at the Art Fund and when I stumbled across it in the museum today it was like bumping into an old friend. He came to the Fund when the committee was deciding whether or not to make a donation towards its purchase and I gave a talk to the staff about the reliquary. It's a beautiful object.

Part of the museum's revamp is an open courtyard garden with a big wading pool. Rosie loved it. Of course, within seconds of wading into the pool she slipped and got soaking wet. She brought her dolly Baby Boy out with us today and of course he had to take a dip too. Rosie carefully undressed him and as she carried him into the water a group of school girls near us started screaming and laughing. You see, Baby Boy is an anatomically correct doll and his little plastic willy caused a lot of excitement.

After lunch I dried Rosie off as best I could, which wasn't very well. She had discovered that if she threw Baby Boy onto one of the spouts shooting water into the pool it made water go everywhere. She was absolutely sodden. I had come completely unprepared for this so we went dripping off to the gift shop to buy something dry. The only thing they had in child sizes were a selection of Liberty sun dresses for L55.00 each! Rosie had to make do with an adult size T-shirt but with a little knot tied in the back she actually looked pretty cool.