If you’re ever looking for me at lunchtime then, at least one day every week - sometimes two - you’ll find me in the British Museum. It’s a few minutes’ walk from my desk, and packed to the gills with fascinating stuff, like mummified sacred bulls stolen from Egypt, precious marbles stolen from Greece and temple bells stolen from China. To not take advantage of it would be a crime.

And so I went there today, spending most of my time in the money gallery looking at the Bank of Hell notes that, in Eastern cultures, are burnt to make offerings to the spirits of long-gone ancestors. I remember seeing them in use in real life when I was in Taiwan a few years ago at the Lung Chan (excuse my spelling) temple in Taipei. There were small earthenware kilns by the temple walls, red hot despite the fierce heat of the day, with wide open mouths into which bereaved relatives were shovelling the immitation cash they had brought as an offering.

There is so much to see there I’m still finding new things after several years, but the one thing you can’t help but see on every visit, is the airy atrium surrounding the reading room. Today, for the first time, I took a picture, although to get it all in required more frame than I’d originally thought, as can be seen from the picture above.

1. The British Museum
   I used to like The British Museum. For the building as much as anything else. Then, last summer, I went to Greece and visited the...
   
   
2. The British Museum
   The BBC is making a programme about the British Museum called, unsurprisingly, The British Museum. There's been a board at the museum's Montague Street entrance...
   
   
3. Late night opening at the British Museum
   Great Court at the British Museum I used to be a once-a-week regular at the British Museum - so much so that I got...