waiting for the girls to play us a bit of corelli in the norfolk room

competition time

a double first question, indicative of the author's distasteful curiosity about the enigmatic gender:

about the lady who wore this dress ... might she have swayed ? or wriggled ?

and a question of taste for the aesthete:

which of these teapots from the same small room in the V&A might she have chosen for brewing the first cup of the day ?

3BT, well maybe 2not-quite-soBT at the V&A last night

A Dickensian/Gothick tableau in the darkened cafe ... an actor face-painted in red personifying Death, sits down at long straight table with an imposing retinue of sinister companions, some of the men with tall hats, the women plumed or tiara-d, each one strikingly elegant and sinister in black.

In the Japanese gallery, a treasure house of joyfully aspirational marvels and perfections, a row of very young people, too young to properly know the tragic passions and the deadly sins, sitting cross-legged in eager anticipation to watch an old black-and-white fillum of the visceral Japanese ghost tale, Onibaba.

The luminous and never ending life-stream of interesting bodies and faces and fashions and fancy-dress entering this great museum as if it were their second home.