Museums, libraries, and London
A love letter to all three through the lens of tax-payer pounds. Plus some other things.
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The other night — Saturday night, to be precise — I was over at my friend Kiana’s place for dinner with our other friend Summer. Kiana had made the most beautiful Persian meal of Tahchin (baked saffron rice with eggplant and chicken mixed through and barberries on top) which we ate with a cucumber, tomato, and feta salad, tzatziki, pickled peppers, and a bottle of champagne.
We solved lots of the world’s problems as we ate, but a portion of the conversation that has stuck with me this week was about taxes. I fundamentally agree with the concept of tax, even though sometimes it is a little hard to see where that money is going. It’s what gets us free education and healthcare (as dysfunctional as the school system and the NHS may be), national parks, museums, local libraries. A lot of it also goes to less wholesome recipients, but I’m not in the mood to moan about that today. I’m going to focus my efforts on the last two in that list — libraries and museums — because I’ve had a lot of love for them this week and I think libraries in particular need as much love as they can get.
The Wednesday before the dinner and the chat about taxes, I finally signed up to my local library. Coming from a family of booksellers, I had always felt compelled to just buy the book, but with limited shelf space and an enthusiastic recommendation from my lovely neighbour Emily, I decided it was time to join one. It took me all of three minutes to sign up online, then all I had to do was wander down to Balham, show them my driver’s license, and pick up the card.
“So, you can borrow up to 50 titles at a time from any of the 11 Wandsworth libraries,” the librarian told me. “You can take them for three weeks, but if you’re not done with them after that you can extend up to 25 times.”
11 libraries, 50 titles at a time, for 3 weeks, which you can extend up to 25 times.
“Oh, and the late fee is 25p per day.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a more generous offering! Apparently before COVID, you could take out 25 books at a time, but they increased it during the pandemic and never brought it back down again: “We get our funding based on how many books are borrowed, so it’s best for us to keep it high.”
I didn’t borrow anything that day — my hands were full of clotted cream, jam, and self-raising flour because we were having our other neighbour Rachel over for scones and I’d forgotten to bring a bag — but I went back on Monday.
I was delighted, first of all, by the range of books this relatively small library held, although the thriller section is disproportionately large compared to the others. And second of all, by the people who were using it. There was a mum with two young boys sitting on the floor reading books about drawing (I think the boys might have been geniuses because their vocabulary was truly sky-high). Men and women browsing the aisles and reading in armchairs. There were parents with babies who had come for the children’s group, and an elderly man requesting Ellen MacArthur’s book about her round-the-world sail, which I found very heartwarming.
Since the limit for how many books you can take is so high, and it is the number of books borrowed that decides how much money libraries are allocated, my only limiting factor was how much I could carry. So I took four. Sister Outsider, a book of essays by Audre Lorde that I had been meaning to read since my master’s almost four years ago, two novels by Evelyn Waugh for some inter-war humour and a good old romp, and The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton which my dad and I had spoken about the previous week.
There is no way I will get through all of those books over the next three weeks, but from the short time I spent flicking through them over lunch, I already got my money’s worth without spending any money from these couple of passages:
Those few minutes spent flicking through my finds made me realise that a library, like a bookshop, is a portal to infinite worlds. But unlike a bookshop, a library has no barriers to entry. They are free spaces for learning, escaping, teaching, healing, searching, entertaining. They are safe and kind and have free internet and you can even do your printing there for 10p per sheet. So after a big chat about how crummy it can be to see so much money go to the tax man, never to be seen again, it felt nice to see a very small bit of it come back in the form of my local library. So, if you could please go and join yours and borrow lots of books at a time, we can all do a good thing, read some good books, and save some money while we’re at it.
On Sunday — post-dinner and tax chat — I had arranged to see my friend
. We have this lovely friendship where we always see each other one-on-one, visit an exhibition, and catch up about life and work and whatever we’re reading. The last time we saw each other we went to quite a political exhibition, so this time we thought it might be nice just to look at some paintings at the National Gallery. I hadn’t been in years and if you want to look at paintings, it really is a good place to go.What we had failed to realise was that the entire area, from Charing Cross Road and China Town down to Picadilly Circus, was consumed by Lunar New Year celebrations. Coming out of Leicester Square station, I couldn’t believe how busy it was, but with the streets all pedestrianized and everyone in such a good mood, I also couldn’t help but feel lucky to call London my home.
I walked down to Trafalgar Square where there was a big performance going on with dancing and music, and realised that the queue to get into the gallery was about half an hour long. Ordinarily, I would walk away from a queue that big, but I was early and it seemed like it was moving at a reasonable pace so I jumped in line and chatted with the man in front of me who had come over from the US for a few months to “clear his head”. Margaux arrived right as I was getting to the front and we waltzed on in, admiring the mosaic floors as we went.
For the length of the queue, it wasn’t as crowded as I had thought it would be, and honestly, wandering those halls and looking at all the priceless works of art with my lovely friend who knows so much about them made me feel warm and happy and unbothered by any heads that might be slightly in my way. There were cherubic bottoms and mystery pickles and Eve getting up to all kinds of mischief in the Garden of Eden. Monet’s waterlilies and Renoir’s good times and Rousseau’s jungle.
Listing all these now, there definitely weren’t enough female artists hanging on the walls — especially given the number of female nudes — but I did love these flowers by the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750).
I didn’t realise this until I looked it up the other day, but universal free admission to museums has only been a thing in the UK since 2001 when the Treasury and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport teamed up to make it happen. I sort of thought it had always been that way, and even though it’s my own tax dollars (and yours too!) that pay for it, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for it. Grateful that anyone can walk in off the street and find inspiration or peace or confrontation or even just the toilets if that’s what they’re looking for.
I know that sometimes people are put off by museums and galleries because they “don’t know anything about art” or they get cripplingly sore legs, but I think they are putting too much pressure on themselves to look at every single painting. I’d really recommend — like Margaux and I did the other day — going with a friend, stopping to look at the paintings that catch your eye, and taking the route less travelled around the rooms to avoid the overwhelming crowds. It’s a walk and a talk and it’s something nice to look at and if your feet get too tired then they do have benches for that. Just sit for a while and look at the ceiling, because that’s worth a moment of your time as well.
Some things
aside from libraries and museums that I have been very into lately:
I discovered
’s fantastic newsletter when I saw that the ever-tasteful had liked one of her posts, and I am nothing short of obsessed. The food, the flowers, but most importantly the films! Katie is a rare breed of human who visits a video store and her movie recommendations really are top class.
A few movies, inspired by Katie’s recs, that I have watched and loved lately (I am on a movie-watching roll at the moment):
Crossing Delancey (great 80’s vibes, Jewish grandmothers, love, lust, pickles!),
You’ve Got Mail (peak 90’s Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, David and Goliath, bookshops, boats, more love)
Charade (Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. What a romp)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (the hair! the lace! the landscape! the mystery!)
Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (the dance moves in this are too much)
Running without headphones — my AirPods case dropped out of my pocket the other day (very annoying) which meant that I went running without headphones on Monday and it was actually great. So many woodpeckers knocking about at the moment!
Vegetables for Valentine's Day — Supermarket roses don’t even smell good and just looook at all the radicchio that is in season at the moment.
Camelias — these beauties are thriving in our garden at the moment and they make me think of my Gran.
Earlier, I procrastinated writing this by making a slice of toast with butter, sliced banana, tahini, cinnamon, and flakey salt on top and it definitely deserves an honourable mention.
See you in the next one!
Annabel
Oh yes, I love the library! I find I pick up a greater variety of books when I'm there ... the stakes are lower. If I don't like it, I can just return it!
Thanks for the reminder to join the library! I get an overwhelming number of free books from work (poor me) which I think is why I haven't yet but I didn't realise it was my duty as a citizen to borrow lots of books! My local library is beautiful too (glass ceiling ❤️)