Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 13/28

11:24

Victoria & Albert Museum

(The Bat Tattoo)

I crossed the road from the Science Museum, and feeling in my rucksack for an energy-giving Geobar, headed along the war-damaged wall of the V&A towards the main entrance. In an unused doorway of the bomb-damaged side someone had made a makeshift bed from a green sleeping bag, so I put the Geobar on that and carried on around the corner.

The low-rising steps outside the main entrance to the V&A are where Sarah Varley first meets Roswell Clark: she’s sitting on the steps weeping about a piece in that morning’s Times reporting that Earth has only 500 million years left to live, and he’s on his way in to see a favourite bat-decorated Chinese bowl. I’d wanted to see the bowl myself and perhaps do something similar with my quote that I did with the Klein bottle one at the Science Museum, but I looked at my watch and decided there wasn’t going to be time. In any case, I knew that, as with the Klein bottle drop, once I was inside it would be hard to leave after just a few minutes – personally, more so than the Science Museum, in fact. So once again I fell back on the old SA4QE chestnut of planting the quote in the phone box outside the entrance.

Today there was no white van parked outside the V&A entrance but there was a blue and white coach, empty except for the driver who was eating his lunch under a sign saying NO FOOD OR DRINK TO BE CONSUMED IN THE COACH.

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