WHILE Mr F enjoyed the Darwin exhibition with Fisher Junior and son-in-law (up from Wales for the bank holiday) I escaped to the Victoria and Albert museum over the road.

Honestly, evolution versus Baroque, hats and Rodin sculptures - there is only one natural selection (ha) out of these isn't there?

Well, they say opposites attract and Mr F and I have decided in many ways we are like chalk and cheese.

For a start, we never seem to be comfortable in the same temperature: if he's warm, my teeth are chattering, if I'm just right, he's busy peeling off the layers and moaning about the intense heat.

Mr F has an amazing capacity for storing facts and does very well in general knowledge tests while my greatest hour in a quiz was once listing the 12 days of Christmas.

My memories are episodic. I can picture what people wore, ate and said, which my other half would never do; I have no sense of direction (I get lost in Ikea and hotels) while his radar is practically faultless.

He eats meat, I don't; I like tomato ketchup, Mr F's a brown sauce man. He's from the south east, I'm from the midlands.

Anyway, back to our different tastes in museums, while the trio was studying the diversification of nature at the Natural History Museum, I was gazing into a startlingly real reconstruction of Kylie Minogue's dressing room.

Forget the sculpture and the baroque displays; I discovered a real gem in the V&A which was so absorbing I spent practically my whole time there.

The V&A's new Theatre and Performance Galleries which replace the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden (it closed in 2007) holds a national collection of material about live performance in the UK since Shakespeare's day, covering everything from drama, dance, musical theatre and circus to music hall, rock and pop.

Isaw Margot Fonteyn's tutu, a very skinny jump suit worn by Mick Jagger, Adam Ant's costume and Pete Townsend's broken guitar.

Add to these, scripts, posters, bits of filmed performance, models and photos (and that Kylie Minogue dressing room re-created in minute detail) and there's only one thing to do - go round again.

The scientific branch of the family was not to be outdone though and even managed to prove there is not such a big gulf between science and the arts when they presented me with a souvenir - my very own Darwin finger puppet!