Blast, I see the Americans have gazumped my museum idea, which I've been brooding over ever since I recently walked down an eerily deserted London street, a Costa coffee carton bowling along like tumbleweed, the only artefact suggesting some distant period of human activity.
When I first came to London all the pubs and the cafes in the City closed as soon as the suited lemmings shot over the cliffs on Friday afternoons, but Fleet Street was still thrumming on a Sunday, busier at midnight than morning, a good story to be picked up on any street corner, a good fight in any of the pubs.
On that desolate Sunday, as I trudged down from St Paul's, it seemed sad there was nothing left of that extraordinary lost world and a technology barely changed from Caxton. When my infant colleagues hear I started in hot metal newspapers, they look as stunned as if I confessed an apprenticeship on the footplate of a steam train.
By the time I reached the tube I had perfected my scheme to annex the Express's jaw dropping Black Lubianka building as a museum of the dark arts of journalism. But the Americans have got there first with their $450m dollar Newseum in Washington, with Rupert Murdoch as the equivalent of the Science Museum's eye blazing prey slashing robot dinosaur.
So now I'm plotting the Museum Museum (to be housed in Kensington Palace now it is emptied of princesses) to gather up and cherish all those must-haves forced on whimpering curators by cutting edge designers (only to be ditched with contempt by the next one along) - the painted hessian of the 1970s, the sinister talking heads of the 1980s, the touchscreen interactives of the 1990s, whose state of the art technology always so tragically lagged behind the Tamagotchi key rings of the child visitors
What shall we keep from the noughties? Time will tell, but at the moment my money is on Sir Roy Strong, so awesomely reinvented, as transfixed viewers of The Diets That Time Forgot can testify, as The Animatronic Eminent Victorian.
When I first came to London all the pubs and the cafes in the City closed as soon as the suited lemmings shot over the cliffs on Friday afternoons, but Fleet Street was still thrumming on a Sunday, busier at midnight than morning, a good story to be picked up on any street corner, a good fight in any of the pubs.
On that desolate Sunday, as I trudged down from St Paul's, it seemed sad there was nothing left of that extraordinary lost world and a technology barely changed from Caxton. When my infant colleagues hear I started in hot metal newspapers, they look as stunned as if I confessed an apprenticeship on the footplate of a steam train.
By the time I reached the tube I had perfected my scheme to annex the Express's jaw dropping Black Lubianka building as a museum of the dark arts of journalism. But the Americans have got there first with their $450m dollar Newseum in Washington, with Rupert Murdoch as the equivalent of the Science Museum's eye blazing prey slashing robot dinosaur.
So now I'm plotting the Museum Museum (to be housed in Kensington Palace now it is emptied of princesses) to gather up and cherish all those must-haves forced on whimpering curators by cutting edge designers (only to be ditched with contempt by the next one along) - the painted hessian of the 1970s, the sinister talking heads of the 1980s, the touchscreen interactives of the 1990s, whose state of the art technology always so tragically lagged behind the Tamagotchi key rings of the child visitors
What shall we keep from the noughties? Time will tell, but at the moment my money is on Sir Roy Strong, so awesomely reinvented, as transfixed viewers of The Diets That Time Forgot can testify, as The Animatronic Eminent Victorian.
