This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.
What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities.
This is the courtyard of the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.
Kathy purchased a similar pic when we enjoyed a wonderful visit there.
It hangs in our home and I am glad of the memory it keeps warm in my heart.
Kathy took me places I would never think to go.
I love her for that.
