No better place for a rainy day than the British Museum

If presented with some horrible, cultural "Sophie's Choice" of saving just one of London's magnificent museums for posterity, my decision wouldn't take long.

I'd feel horrible about the whole thing.  I'd weep bitterly about incinerating the National Gallery.  I'd think twice about the Victoria and Albert.  But the one I'd save … the only one I could even consider … is the British Museum.  Noah went for the living things, the British Museum founders built an ark for human civilisation.  The roots of all culture are here, and I can wander here happily, any time, for hours.

Ironically, it's been ages since I did just that.  I pop in a few times a year for major exhibitions, or to cut through and visit a few favourites when Bloomsbury is in between places I need to be.  But a good, old, aimless wander?  It was a perfect way to spend one of the dying days, rain-drenched days of my Christmas holiday.  As work looms, it's a reminder of what I would do with my life if I didn't also like to spend money.  (And therefore need to earn it.)  A selfless, less materialistic Ellen might have followed in her mother's footsteps to become an art historian and museum educator, calling halls like these home.  Without a lottery win, I'll be just a visitor.

What do I visit?  Most people know the Top 10.  (Elgin Marbles, Lewis chessmen, Sutton Hoo treasure…)  Let me introduce you to some of my lesser-known friends.

Let's start with the dying lioness.  This was my mother's favourite piece in the whole museum.  It spoke to her of courage and determination.  Carrying on in the face of overwhelming odds.  The lioness is part of a series of bas reliefs carved to grace the palace of Ashurbanipal, the last great King of Assyria (modern Iraq).  He's on the wall in all his glory, riding his chariot and shooting away.  Dead and dying lions litter the stone fields.  But, despite what he intended when he commissioned his decor 2,700 years ago, it's not his magnificence I dwell on, but the beauty and nobility of his poor victim.

A few galleries over, I pop in on my friend Mausolus, whose tomb at Halikarnassos (modern Bodrum, Turkey) was so amazing it gave its name to any grand tomb: mausoleum.  What's left of it is here.  There's one of of the gigantic horses that drew the quadriga … the four-horse chariot … at the monument's top.  Facing him are the equally larger-than life statues of Mausolus and his wife, and ringing the room you'll find sculptural friezes from the monument.  Not quite as elegant and sophisticated as the Elgin marbles, but similar and in many ways more exciting as they portray the battle between Hercules and the Amazons.  Many people never find these galleries because the main door in is behind the big Nereid Monument in Room 17 (another favourite), and I find there's rarely anyone back there.  On the way, I also get to give a nod to one of the caryatids from the Erechtheion.  They're the stately Greek maidens who serve as columns on the porch of one of the smaller temples on the Parthenon.  When I finally saw her sisters in situ, I was impressed by how much better preserved the one in the British Museum is.

Nearby is the Molossian Hound, born 2200 years ago in what's now Northern Greece.  This lovely mastiff is threatening in his size, yet adorable in the cock of his head and his quizzical look.  Any dog owner will recognise his greeting of genial curiosity. Is it time for a walk?  Did you bring a treat?  I have no doubt he was sculpted from life, by an artist who loved him.  Perhaps that's the reason for his popularity.  At least five copies have been unearthed from ancient Roman sites, and English nobles of the Georgian period reproduced many more to guard their neoclassical piles.  You'll want to pat him on the head, but you'll have to restrain yourself.  He is priceless.

From Greece to Rome, I go in search of the Portland Vase.  This magnificent object is made from what's known as cameo glass.  Glass blowers would blow the main vase, then dip it in another vat of a different colour of molten glass.  When the glass cooled, gem cutters would carve away part of the upper layer, arriving at the final product:  white figures emerging from a blue ground.  This was an enormously sophisticated process.  We don't know who owned the original, but it was probably someone enormously wealthy.  In its complexity, and its survival from antiquity, it's unique.  But how can that be unique, you say?  It looks so familiar!  Indeed.  That's because Josiah Wedgwood became obsessed with the thing, and the idea of reproducing it in his new Jasperware process.  After scores of trials he succeeded, and from there drove the craze for white classical figures on darker grounds that we think of today as quintessential Wedgwood. Which provided the design theme for my wedding.


Upstairs, I drift back to the Ancient Near East.  The room with the Egyptian mummies is always packed, but nobody ever seems to linger in the magic of Mesopotamia nearby.  We're in the same part of the world as the dying lioness, but my favourite here is far more ancient.  A magnificent goat, about 18 inches tall, on his hind legs searching for food in a tree.  He's made of gold and lapis, and shines so brightly you'd think a jeweller had just finished assembling him.  But he came from the royal cemetery in Ur, and he's 4,600 years old.

There's much to delight the gold-lover's eye upstairs.  Jewellery in these Egyptian and Mesopotamian rooms leads to golden Celtic torques and Anglo-Saxon burial hoards.  Keep wandering through the Middle Ages and on to cases of Georgian and Victorian ornament.  But on the way, stop to admire my favourite:  the Mold gold cape.  Dug up in Victorian times, it's almost 4,000 years old.  Showing that the Ancient Welsh could go head-to-head with any of the historic empires on the ornament stakes.  This is the ultimate bling; a shroud of gold that starts as a collar and goes down to the middle of the upper arm.  Wearing it would clearly have been deeply confining, but terribly regal.

Nearby we skip to the almost modern to find my favourite in the clock collection.  It's a miniature galleon rigged up as an automaton.  It was designed to start banquets in a German royal court.  Once set off, its wheels would propel it to the centre of the table, where it would fire smoke from its little cannons while a line of German electors circled past the reviewing emperor.  It's a clock too, of course, with a face worked in to the upper deck and sailors in the rigging hammering bells to mark the time.  Now that's how to start a dinner party in style.

Finally, I like to linger in the Enlightenment gallery.  When I was a kid this was part of the National Library, where historic documents were displayed.  Those items have all moved to a high tech new library, leaving this room for re-deployment.  It is still a library of sorts, but now it's the fantasy library of a well-educated Georgian aristocrat of the type who helped found the British Museum in the first place.  The shelves and display cases mix books with all the collectibles and ephemera our ideal lord would assemble.  Greek vases, bits and pieces of classical sculpture, a "merman" (some ancient fraud assembled from a taxidermised monkey and fish joined together), South Seas war clubs, South American ritual statues … in short, a British Museum in miniature.  It's the spirit of the Enlightenment in one room, and I love it.

I don't expect anyone will ever have to choose to preserve just one London Museum.  But if you're here with limited time and can visit only one, head to Bloomsbury.