Arriving at South Kensington, I gave the tunnel walk a miss and came directly out of the station. Despite the grey skies, the Natural History Museum greeted me like an old friend, slightly muffled by the boards of an ongoing facelift.
Needing to get to the Darwin Centre part of the NHM, I made my first ever trek to the temporary Queens Gate entrance. The road and the front of the museum were awash with busloads of school children in their different uniforms, getting ready to go back home. It was slightly surreal going in through the public entrance with no queue because of the lateness of the afternoon.
I stopped off at the Cafe for a tea and a (slightly stale) blueberry muffin and chatted to one of my Quekett contacts who was there a couple of hours early before the Quekett AGM. It was then off to a pre-meeting beforehand.
By eight pm, getting out of the museum when everything is locked up and closed is quite an adventure. Our Quekett meeting was in a room below the Flett Theatre, close to the entrance on Exhibition Road. To exit after hours, we first had to migrate into the museum, through silent halls, where the exhibits intermingled with the shadows in the dim light and our steps and slightly hushed voices echoed off the marble floors. There was an unexpected turn and a lift journey into the maze below.
One of our group of 7 remarked on the way that they had once been trapped in one section of a corridor beneath the NHM, where they were faced with three automatically locked doors. They were released only after banging on one door till a researcher working late came to their rescue. Primed by this story, we were therefore quite perturbed when our leader with the magic card encountered a door that didn't open. He dashed off through another door and - we were left standing in a corridor with three locked exits!
Fortunately, the key bearer returned and the journey continued until we were released form a side entrance - just a couple of metres from where we had originally set off in the building.
Kings Cross station was also looking emptier when I arrived. With a half hour wait for the return train, I stopped off to get a Prezzo Pizza. Here I had the privilege of buying a lite pizza with fewer calories but at a higher price than a more calorific one. It did feed body and soul as the train trundled back to Waterbeach under a rising gibbous moon.
Brexit and Trump news? Don't care today! Humanitarian catastrophe in Africa and Yemen more of an issue at the moment, as are the increasingly vitriolic ravings of a future tyrant on the continent.
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