Last Thursday I and a number of other Red Hat ladies from my Crimson Crumblies Chapter in Chelmsford in Essex made a long planned visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington.
It all started after the Husband had been to the new Jewellery Gallery at the V&A, on a visit to London with some of his music friends, and he had said to me “you ought to take your Red Hat ladies there, it's wonderful”. And so I proposed the visit and some time ago arranged it for that day. It turned out to be just what I had needed to take my mind off other things.

The original plan was for most of us to set off for London from our local Chelmsford station, meeting up later those who came into London on different railway lines. However, when I arrived at Chelmsford station just before 10.00am I discovered that a major signalling failure meant that no trains were going at that time to or from the London Liverpool St terminus. As my travelling companions arrived I explained the problem and it was decided to try another station and hence another line into the London Fenchurch St terminus. This plan worked and we arrived at the V&A museum, albeit about 90 minutes later that originally planned.

After lunch in the restaurant we headed off to the Jewellery gallery. As all visitors to the V&A find we got a little distracted on the way by the fabulous other exhibits – we walked through a gallery with some wonderful silverware, both old and new, which we really enjoyed, plus some religious exhibits and stained glass. The Jewellery gallery itself looked relatively small but it has a huge number of exhibits and to see them all takes a while. So we spent quite a while looking around them all.

Afterwards we headed back to the restaurant for tea (the restaurant is renowned for the quality of its food and drink) and when I telephoned home the Husband was able to tell me that the Liverpool Street trains still had problems, so we retraced our journey of the morning and found ourselves back in Essex by early evening.

I enjoyed arranging the visit for our Red Hatters and I hope the others felt that it made a good day’s outing. (It was nice and distracting too.) I am now thinking what we can do next in 2009.