Holding on to the old stuff

A full-on proper day out with Dex, into town first thing to pick up a repaired amp. Via Hackney Downs to Liverpool St, Dex’s spanking new 11-16 Oyster Card bulging with a £20 top-up and all sorts of grown-up swiping in and out again. Off at Holborn to the model shop for primer for toy soldiers, ducking then into a café for breakfast. Dex traced the wood panelling with a miniature skateboard retrieved from his pocket, and I droned on about proportional representation. Time for a sneaky detour to the greatest day-out stop-off of all — The British Museum.

We did mechanical clocks. The beautiful 15th Century iron turret clock stands at the entrance to the gallery, the immaculately hand-wrought works gently spinning in perpetual motion. These are not inventions. Daz, that’s an invention, or the windscreen wiper, or socks. No, this is a portal for human engagement with universal physics. A weight suspended on the end of a rope rolled around a drum. Left to fall, the weight crashes to earth, and a nifty mechanism nips the plunge into tiny increments. Escapement, controller, pallets. All just a simple jig to regulate free-fall. Five essential moving parts.

At the museum, they have little scoops to pick your jaw back up off the floor. You can get them at the cloakroom. They’re handy in the Roman glass gallery, and are pretty useful in the ancient Egyptian exhibits, in the Sutton Hoo hoard, in medieval silver, and especially in the Byzantine ceramics. And each time the wonder comes from a different impetus. The beauty, the dedication, the craft, the age, the significance, and more than once the silent shock that the object still exists, that time hasn’t managed to render a precious, fragile relic into dust. We came across Davina, who had a tray of hand tools we could handle. A stone-age flint scythe, 4000 years old, a bronze-age cast axe head, a Roman silver platter, a little bronze pickaxe. A proper show-and-tell. We turned them over in our hands, gently stroked the surfaces with our thumbs, held the edges of things up to the light. Made gestures with the tools, pictured the work, and gossamer threads of imagination ran off and away from the treasures in our hands out into history behind us. We got chatting. She still shared the wonder, it was warming to see. She had been on a dig in Crete, and had unearthed a little ancient Roman era glass jar. It would have been used at a funeral to catch the tears of the mourners and buried with the dead.

Japanese noodles and the charity shops on Goodge Street, finding a Mr Rude t-shirt for Dex, and around the back of Charlotte Street for Hobgoblin Music, the computer game swap shop and a Banksy, then all along Eastcastle Street to avoid Oxford Street. Dex is a good walker, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to get about in central London.

No real problem with jaw-dropping wonder at the Apple Store. I want replacement keys for my new French-bought laptop. It’s all é & ç & ù and all in the wrong place and I want proper symbols like £. I’ve changed the positions of all the letters over, little pieces of plastic pinging all over my office desk and restored with sweaty grunting patience, but I need symbols, brackets and semicolons. At the Genius Bar they suggest I might want to buy a new keyboard for £160. With Dex safely browsing the lego at Hamleys nearby, I suggest that’s not really genius, and that I might be better off going back downstairs to pick off the individual keys I need from the demo laptops. My genius visibly bristles. A neighbouring genius is unable to stifle a wide grin. On my way out to Hamleys, I’m shadowed by a pair of less-than-genius men with ear-pieces. This morning, on a French Mac forum, I found a Frenchman with the opposite problem, and hopefully we can arrange a simple key-swap. Genius.

Hamleys is a nightmare. You want to love it, because it’s huge and it’s ancient and they have everything. But actually it’s rammed with overawed kids and baffled parents. You are hit by a wall of, er, dunno but you want nothing more than just to step back outside again immediately. The scooter selection was rubbish. Lots of lego, obv., but mainly it’s bears you can customise, tiny battery-powered remote controlled helicopters, and astrojax. Turns out, astrojax are the biggest-selling toy in the entire world ever, and after watching the demo a couple of times we were powerless to resist. For sixteen quid you get three plastic balls on a piece of orange string. The balls light up. It may just be that some archaeologist in the year 2510 will proudly tell the tale of how they dug up a fine example of this early toy, miraculously preserved against the ravages of time. But I doubt it.

By the time we left, the rain was cascading off the canopies onto the pavement, soapy from the bubble machines. Heather had bullied us into taking umbrellas, and we were grateful. The entrance to the tube at Oxford Circus was closed due to over-crowding, everyone diving in at once as the heavens opened, so we legged it back to Tottenham Court Road jumping puddles to pick up the amp and running back out into the torrents just long enough to hail a cab for home.