Franklin My Dear, I Just Gave A Damn

Today has been one of those weird days where nothing was as it seems.

I woke up and weighed and pushed myself into an anorexic-teenager funk, for the simple reason that, weighing every day as I promised myself and you long ago I wouldn't do, I took notice of the daily fluctuations that occur - put simply, a few days ago, I was down some impressive number of pounds, whereas this morning, following a day at home proofreading, I was not only not down those few pounds, I was up on Tuesday's result, and so felt myself drawn into the funk.This is what I believe they call a "First World Problem" of the highest order - which is to say a self-revolving non-problem when looked at with even the slightest shred of rationalism.

The day degenerated into some sort of geographical farce as soon as we left the house. We were scheduled to meet my friend Sian and her two daughters, who were on a day trip to London, for dinner, or lunch, or somesuch thing. Have you met my friend Sian yet? She's insane, bless her. She's the kind of person that runs ultra-marathons and climbs mountains and the like "because they're there." I keep telling her that "because they're there" is not so much a reason to climb mountains as a reason to go around them, but she refuses to see the logic somehow. Stubborn, I call it.

Anyhow, in particular, we were hoping to celebrate with her eldest daughter Brianna, who's having quite a week - she won a substantial first prize in an essay competition earlier this week, and was the reason they were up in London, as she was also down to the top 60 comptitors (from some 14000) in a junior beauty competition. B, as she's almost universally known (I know, I know, you were just getting used to me being married to d, now there's a B in the mix too - it's starting to sound like a Bond movie, isn't it?) and her sister Epona, or Po, are our Godchildren, and we love them both dearly.

Errr....yes, that's right, our Godchildren. Followers of the blog will be frowning at that, going "but you're an atheist, aren't you?" Yes yes, but if I tell you that a) we were asked, and b) I did ask their mother, quite a number of times, whether there'd be any of that "renouncing of the Devil and all his works" malarkey, and she breezily told me on each and every occasion "Ohhhhhh noooo, it's not that kind of church..."

It was, of course. After the ceremony, their mother just grinned at me cheekily. "Oops," she said.

So anyhow, we were keen to see the girls, and were scheduled to meet them in Trafalgar Square "any time after one" for a meal in one of our favourite, most reliable spots - The Texas Embassy. Once we got to the Square, we got a message saying "Any time after three - girls wanted to see Camden." Stuck in Trafalgar Square for a couple of hours we looked sideways into Craven Street...and grinned.

36 Craven Street is what has become known as "The Benjamin Franklin House." We first heard about it some years ago, when d worked with a volunteer at the place, and have meant to hunt it down ever since, but have never combined the will with the geographical nous, and so have never actually made it there until today.

What to say...? "Just go" springs to mind.
Benjamin Franklin has long been a source of inspiration to us both (indeed, if we ever had had a son, we had already determined he would be named Benjamin Thomas, after Franklin and Jefferson). The ultimate American polymath, Franklin did almost everything you could imagine - he was a businessman, an author, a civic developer, a botanist, a philosopher, a scientist, a humorist, a thinker, a politician, a diplomat and of course, an eminence grise among that amazing confederacy of genius that was the Founding Fathers of the United States. Look into almost any corner of human endeavour, and you'll find Franklin (most often quietly) beavering away for the betterment of himself and the rest of Mankind. We knew all that before we walked in the door of what had been his London home, and effectively the very first American Embassy in London for sixteen years, today.

I hadn't known about his work pioneering understanding of the Gulf Stream, or the unofficial anatomy school run on the site by his fellow occupant Dr Hewson, until today though. More moving than either of these two new elements though, the presentation at the Franklin House is simple and effective, bringing the man to life with audio recordings, moving pictures and live performance. And somehow better even that that is just being in the house, seeing the worn steps of the staircase he claimed to use for his daily exercise, being in the room he used as a laboratory, touching the walls of his parlour and just daring, so many years after his death, to be in the space where he used to live. (Note for my American friends - none of Franklin's American residences exist any longer - this would be the difference between building in wood and building in stone...just saying). It's easy to over-sentimentalise these places, but somehow, the Franklin House avoids this by a simplicity of which it's probable the man himself would have heartily approved. At the end, you can sign the guest-book and fill in comment cards, on which there was a deceptively tricky question.
"Who would you say is the modern-day Benjamin Franklin?"

Apparently, the closest anyone has come to answering this adequately in recent years has been "Dumbledore", and this is of course made rather dubious by the latter's faintly depressing fictional status. Franklin - and indeed the other polymaths of a breathtaking age of energy and enlightment - belongs to a breed we have forgotten the enthusiasm to emulate.

Emerging from the Franklin House, we got a text to say Sian and the girls had moved on to the British Museum. We schlepped up there, but I think somewhere in the journey, they had turned off their cellphones, so we stayed there a while, looking for them, trying to contact them...and then gave up and went for dinner (Gourmet burgers, since you ask, and since this is technically a diet-blog). Came home saddened to have missed the girls, but with brains buzzing with Franklin and his life story. And - and for this I make no apologies - immediately went to bed for a nap, rather than jumping on the bike as had been my plan. Some days, you simply have to play the cards your body deals you, and today was a "go to bed" day, rahter than a "bike yourself stupid" day. Will try and buck the trend towards wailing teenage introspection when the comparative lack of exercise makes itself felt on Tuesday. Indeed, will try to emulate Doctor Franklin's usual sanguinity.

Hey, I said I'll try, alright?!