Dear LPG, 

Many readers of this website probably share two of my claims to fame. I am old, and you only have to look at me to know that, but I am also quite lucky that my legs have not yet paid the price. Things might change soon, but they work reasonably well with a stick and somewhere to sit occasionally. 

Although I am still blessed with two working legs, I am classing them as just one of the claims I am making today. The other one I am talking about is that I am not housebound, although I find few places that inspire me to go out these days, and I have a friend who can claim the same.  

For most of the past year, we have often met up for a cup of tea at a local café or one or the others house, and we visit a weekly social club, but while that is nice, it has become a bit mundane.    

In our attempt to improve our reasons for going out in future, we decided to make our outings a bit more interesting, and we realised that we have lived in the borough of Lewisham all our lives. It has been years since we visited its flagship the Horniman museum, so off we went, which was terrific fun. 

Having done that, we looked for a few more museums to visit, and quite a few are only a bus ride away. Many are free and also not as predictable as you might think. We found the fan museum in Greenwich, and a look through a few internet pages taught us that there are some genuinely unique museums. Some might call a few of them more specialist, while others might call some of them plain weird, and a few of them are close enough to merit a day trip. If the last time you visited some of the central London ones was as a child, during a school journey, they are well worth a revisit this year.  

I also looked at what is available if you feel this is the year to get back to going a little further afield. You would be surprised at the subjects of some themed museums worldwide.   There is a toilet museum in India, a museum dedicated to hair in Turkey, London has a National Army Museum in Chelsea, and even the Museum of the Weird in America. 

Browsing took much longer than anticipated as we spent more than one coffee morning making several virtual visits which opened our eyes.

So, just in case you are also looking for a new reason for getting out and broadening the mind, I would like to share what we found, although we have to tell you that, so far, we have just scratched the surface…

NS, Bromley

NS shares some museum secrets that she has discovered…

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