London

We have been in London today, to visit the exhibition of an artist friend in Islington. We met him, his wife and two friends for lunch first at the Quaker Meeting House in Euston, and afterwards dropped into the Coram Foundation en route for a rather brief look at the huge Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum. This gentleman was picnicking as, on a beautiful Autumn day, we walked through Brunswick Square.

Another bear

Having had a full picnic of bears on Saturday (in Warwick), I was confronted with another a couple of days later, this time at the British Museum. Grayson Perry's residency ends this week, so we thought we ought to make the effort to catch it, to see what all the fuss was about. No regrets, particularly with admission to Room 35 at half price on Mondays for oldies!

The only photography allowed was outside, this being a detail of the pink bike parked by the entrance to Room 35: on it, Perry rode to Germany a couple of years ago, carrying his precious bear, Alan Measles, in a shrine mounted on the back. “The Germans were the default enemy," he explained, "and so they became a metaphor for all that was bad in my experience. Alan and I needed to make peace with our old imagined adversary.” Bravo!

“Only in Britain,” said a German present when Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003.

Animula vagula blandula

Half a century ago, almost, I was set to learn the poem of which this is the first line. It didn't mean much to me then, nor could I have told you who wrote it. But it's up in large letters at the British Museum, as part of the Hadrian exhibition. It came back to me when I was ploughing through Margaret Yourcenar's historical novel before last month's meeting of our book group; and again on Thursday, when Caroline and I visited the exhibition. It's well worth seeing: on till 26th October.

Hadrian wrote these verses contemplating his life's end, when he clearly sees the soul as departing in a different direction from the body. But where? Becoming Emperor less than a century after Jesus's crucifixion, Hadrian was relaxed about the Christians, but there is no evidence that he entertained Christian beliefs to help him answer that question.

Still less did Hadrian embrace Judaism: indeed, his harshest treatment was reserved for the Jews. On display in the BM Reading Room is a house key. It belonged to a Jew who had fled his home to take refuge (with many others) in a cave: trapped there, he was butchered to death. Hadrian's savagery contrasts with his love of beauty in so many of its manifestations. In the same way, Radovan Karadžić also wrote poetry; and Hitler loved Wagner's music.

My photograph shows Hadrian's lover, the beautiful Greek youth Antinous. He drowned in the River Nile on the day Egyptians were commemorating the death of their god Osiris - from drowning in the Nile. Hadrian had Antinous portrayed here as Osiris, suggesting that he too was reborn as a god from the waters of the Nile.


This statue was found more than 250 years ago during excavations at Hadrian's Villa, near Rome. Only last year, a huge, undamaged head of the Emperor himself was uncovered in Turkey: this magnificent object is the first sculpture you see when you enter the current exhibition. And last week I read in the paper that there were sarcophagi of the same era found, which had been buried up near Hadrian's Wall. How many other discoveries remain to be made?