Morning:
9°c
It was 250 years ago this month that the British Museum opened its doors. "It is a matter of bafflement to many people why it is called the British Museum when such a small percentage of the objects in it are British," director Neil MacGregor observes, before outlining his brilliantly Jesuitical plan to defuse fury over the museum's appropriation of Elgin Marbles, the Lewis chessmen, etc - to rebrand the image of the British Museum as "the private collection of every citizen of the world".
We went at the weekend. Our experience was exactly as the director claimed - "a walk through the world, and through time". But it was still very British.
In the disputed Parthenon Galleries, the cynosure of all eyes was not the friezes but the hollow golden statue of supermodel Kate Moss, feet tucked behind her ears, by Marc Quinn. All the artefacts in MacGregor-GloboMuseum may - as Neil protests - belong to everyone. But there will be a corner of our Kate's gusset that is forever England.
John Updike and I were named joint "winners" of the Bad Sex prize in November. He sent a gracious email accepting his lifetime achievement award, which was sporting. As Martin Amis says, a cold day for literature. And for bad sex in fiction, too.
Made it into the London Library for the first time since 2008 - only to find every desk in the reading room already occupied by scribes and scholars. Then I remembered. A fellow member had told me she had started to use another, newly opened reading room (with wifi, loo etc).
Full of hope I struck out, like Amundsen in search of the North-West Passage. I went up, I went down. I even traversed "the levels", passing dusty white-haired men in tweed peering at shelves.
There was only one solution. I crouched in the Ladies.
"Where is other laptop room?" I texted.
"Take main lift to 2nd floor. Follow purple footsteps to broken lift in new building, down two flights of stairs + follow signs. See you in about a fortnight."
So it was that I finally found the novelist Daisy Waugh (below) in the spanking new Eliot Reading Room. I plonked down, exhausted. Then my mobile blipped.
"I'm starving. Lunch?" her text read. And yes, yes. I do know mobiles should have been switched off. Don't care. Without it, I'd still be lost in the stacks, and very hungry.
