Our uphill climb to Freud’s Castle

Here’s me with my hand on Freud’s knob at the Freud Museum today. The journey to the place was like a chapter from Kafka’s The Castle. We returned from Hampton Court Palace to find the Jubilee underground was off there, so we detoured via another to join up with it at Baker Street only to find the whole line was out of action. We then boarded a bus which conspired to take us in the wrong direction, hopped off it and about turned eventually making it to Finsbury and up the interminable hill
to Freud’s London home. What I hadn’t prepared for when I arrived was the smells of the old books and furnishings, which brought the place alive, that and his collection of Egyptian and ancient cultural artefacts. And the most striking piece in the whole house was a pencil drawing by an artist acquaintance which initially appeared quite severe but the more you looked at it, you became aware of the humanity and compassion in the man. And to see all this, the testament to a genius, residing in leafy suburbia…. It brought me back to the man in whom the ideas of psychoanalysis were born