The British Museum has been a place of pilgrimage for Perry since he was a child -- though he admits to a sense of disappointment on his first visit, because the modelboats in the Egyptian collection were not as shiny and new as the cars he played with at home.
Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and model fish aged unwanted on the shelves.