Museum Trip

I can not decide what colour to make this wretched blog. This is starting to irritate me massively. Please bear with me until I make up my mind. Also, if the background image makes things hard to read, or is not tall enough, please can somebody tell me.

Not that I really do much at the moment besides crafting increasingly outlandish covering letters, but I suppose I'm due for a update.

The highlight of these last few days has, I suppose, been my jaunt to the British Museum to see the Renaissance drawings exhibition and my interview with the British Museum's publishing company afterwards. One thing at a time.

On Tuesday lunchtime I trundled down to the BM and finally gave in to my urge to get a membership. For a moderate sum of cash, I now have free access to all the exhibitions no matter how many times I choose to visit, invitations to members' evenings, invitations to lectures, free use of a members' room in the west wing, and, of course, the obligatory tri-annual magazine. Lovely. I've put in a little extra too, so that I can haul a guest along for free to all events. Now I just need to find a friend who's interested.

(There's actually a members' evening on Monday, which I'm quite excited about as the lectures sound pretty interesting and I've managed to get one of the lats tickets to the one I'm most interested in. But I digress, I'll tell you how that goes once it's happened.)

Immediately utilising my rapidly dog-eared receipt (my membership card will hopefully show up in the post in the near future) I bypassed those queueing at the door to the Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition on my way in. The current transformation of the circular reading room is pretty impressive. If you don't know what it usually looks like, here it is. Yes, I have borrowed this for my background.

For the exhibition, however, the desks have been covered by decking to form a new floor, the windows blacked out and a number of walls erected to hang stuff off. It's eerily quiet, except for the shuffling feet of those with audio guides, and the lighting is almost atmospheric (this is somewhat ruined by the result being that you need to be a lot closer than you would usually to see the items). The domed ceiling looms unlit in the shadows above. It's a nice setting for the content, bar some of the lighting. But perhaps a bulb or two had blown.

The drawings themselves are ordered to demonstrate the move from the Gothic period to the Renaissance, though not necessarily chronologically. There are a couple helpful video projections telling you about techniques, materials used, and such. I think I have a soft spot for silverpoint. Anyway, I obviously can't describe the pictures, but there's enough in there to keep you occupied for an hour or so if you're reading everything. I definitely would recommend trying to go when it's quiet though. I was there at around 12:30 on a Tuesday, and I was having to wait for people to get out of the way to look at things. Perhaps it's the aforementioned lighting, or the average age of the visitors I saw, but a lot of people seemed keen to stand with their noses a couple of inches from the glass for overlong periods of time. I get that they wanted to appreciate the detail, but so did I, and it's tricky when somebody's head is obscuring the entirety of a small sketch.

Bizarrely, the thing that most caught my eye was a very dark drawing by Benozzo Di Lese - 'Totila's Assault on Perugia' (c.1461). I have likely seen it before, as it normally lurks in the lovely Uffizi in Florence and I did spend some hours wandering its corridors back in 2008. Perhaps that's why it caught my eye. Apologies for the quality of the picture, but there seem to be no images online so I have photographed from the paperback catalogue that officially accompanies the exhibition and tweaked it to make it more intelligible. It's better in real life, of course.

Unfortunately, my mother rang me halfway round so (being intimidated by the library-esque atmosphere – well, I suppose it was in a library) I had to breeze through the second half of the exhibits in order to return her call. I intend go back to finish the tour in the next couple of weeks.

From there I made my way out of the north entrance to Russell Square and the British Museum's publishing company. I applied for the 3-month, part-time, September-start, sales/marketing/publicity/rights internship a week after the deadline, so I was surprised to be offered an interview. Yet I was, and I had quite a pleasant half-hour taking to a couple of ladies about how I was so keen for the experience that I'd probably gnaw my left foot off to get it. I did, of course, express this slightly more eloquently, and was told that they'd be in contact to let me know if I'd gotten through to the second round of interviews. I thought it went pretty well. I usually struggle to express my enthusiasm for things in interviews, but in this case I probably looked like I was taking personality tips from Mr Bingley. Excellent publishing experience + working for the British Museum =  Hell yes.

So, off I skipped to hassle other people for work (including a part-time job with a literary agent that would compliment an internship like that perfectly).

Well, perhaps my luck is changing, because I've just had a phone call. Apparently they liked my foaming-at-the-mouth verve. Never mind round two, they've offered me the thing! YES! And apparently, it might yet be extended to four months to start in August. I am quite keen for this. Admittedly, I'm probably going to have to flog myself to a pulp in some part-time job for three days a week (with three at the BM) in order to have enough money to live, but I suppose I can man up and deal with that. I am pretty happy.

I have another job interview for a marketing assistant position next Thursday. Knowing my luck, I'll get it and have to choose between a paying job and something that I'd love to do. That would really suck and probably be just my luck. But we'll see. Fingers crossed.

Well done, by the way, to all of you who've finished your degrees! You all seem to have great results – I hope you are celebrating appropriately! Pimms and barbecues ahoy!

Charlie's coming to visit for the weekend tomorrow. I am excited about this, but the flat is disgusting and everyone else is out (Boydy is at terminal velocity somewhere in Spain, and Laura is in South Kensington with her beau, despite maiming her feet in a way that makes her walk like an Igor) so I guess it's up to me to tidy up. Damn.