London

On the 27 we went to London for the day. I managed to stay up late the previous night, reading The Black Sun by James Twining (brilliant book!), so I was pretty knackered when we had to get up early and head on down for London. Had a great day though. We visited the British Museum again, and I have to say, it's one of the real must sees in England. The statues they have there are stunning, and I mean stunning. It's also incredible to think how they ended up in London, because most of them came ages ago and so probably came on wooden ships with sails. I know there's a bit of a thing about we shouldn't really have nabbed stuff from other countries, but I asked the guide about how these humongous statues ended up in the Museum, and she said that the British consul was asked by people at home who were concerned to see if the government would let them take the statues to Britain because the local people were mushing them up for mortar. So it's probably a good job they did take them. And it does mean that in going to the one museum (if you have the time), you can wander through its galleries and get a glimpse of life in just about every part of the world. Next on the list was lunch, which was okayish, but the chicken pie was too salty for my liking (and the portion was a bit small too :( ). Anyhow, after that we were going to the Tower Bridge museum, but when we got there we realised it would entail heights (which I'm really not good with) and didn't actually seem all that interesting, so we tootled along the side of the Thames on a bus, until I saw this pretty amazing cathedral (not St Paul's; it was a really really old one, as in founded pre-William the Conqueror) and we got off and had a look round and a drink. Then James insisted that we had to go on a Tube journey just for the sake of going on the Tube (the fact that we'd used it to get to the Museum apparently wasn't good enough for him). Mum and I got off a bit earlier to go back and have a look at some bookshops we'd spotted earlier--we'd already had a look in Hayles, which was quite amazing, so we then went in a couple of others too. And yes, I did buy some books--three to be precise. My own copy of the novel that kept me up the previous night, and two non-fiction. Then we had tea, at this fantastic Italian. We were looking for somewhere to go, and we'd seen a couple of places with pizzas sat around looking a bit limp, but then we walked past this place where the chef was stood pretty much in the window spinning pizzas around. So we went in there, and I had some fantastic pasta with mushrooms (and nibbled some of Mum's pizza too :D). Then we tootled home on the train. A long, long day, and pretty exhausting, but great fun too.

Monday 27th July

We went up to the RAF Museum in Cosford on this day. Mum stayed in the caravan, cos she was feeling a bit off colour, but James, Dad and I went up. It was a bit off a drive, but it's a fantastic museum. If you're ever anywhere near, you really should go take a look. It's not just all aeroplanes either. Well, there are a heck of a lot of aeroplanes, ranging in size from this tiny little man-carrying kite used by u-boats in the Second World War right up to a mammoth transport plane, the three V bombers (Victor, Vulcan and Valiant), a Pave Low helicopter which only came out of Afghanistan last year... The Cold War gallery is amazing. For a start, it's in a pretty noticeable building. For seconds, inside is an amazing selection of aircraft (that's where the V bombers live), integrated with displays explaining different aspects of the Cold War, from MAD (mutually assured destruction), CND, the Berlin Airlift (looking at it, that has got to be one of the most spectacular aerial operations ever. The sheer quantities they were taking in! And the number of aircraft--one would land ever 90 seconds at the height of the airlift!), the differences between East and West, and so on. There were a couple of tanks and cars mingled in with the aircraft too.

If the Cold War gallery isn't enough reason for you to visit, there's a brilliant hands on exhibit called Fun 'n' Flight, which shows the practicalities of all the various aspects of flying. I didn't go in this time, it was pretty busy, but my brother did and he definitely enjoyed themselves. There's also a brilliant collection of Second World War aircraft, all with nice labels telling you what they were etc, and information about the particular craft on display. They had an example of the only jet-propelled aircraft ever used operationally. It looked pretty cute, but apparently was tricky to fly and liable to explode due to the volatile nature of the fuel... They had a Spitfire of course--everywhere seems to have them for some reason ;), and a development of the Lancaster Bomber which is virtually identical apart from the fact it's bigger. Then there's an incredible display of model aircraft. Actually, there's two displays of them, in different places (I'm sure there was only one the last time we went, presumably the collection did what my own is doing and kinda grew). It's great because it lets you see the aircraft that you no longer get to see such as the old biplanes etc which being made from wood and canvas were not exactly easy to preserve, and you can see how they look like in comparison to other ones. Quite impressive.

Museum of Lancashire

Yeh, I'm way behind with letting you all know what I got up to over my holidays, so I figure I'll just start from here with the whole what I've been doing thing. As of Monday last week, I've been volunteering at the Museum of Lancashire, doing 2 and a half days a week. It's great fun, and I'm learning a lot about how museums are run. For example, I had no idea about the amount of work involved in keeping the museum tidy (I blame messy kids--and adults--for leaving the stuff in the boxes all screwed up etc). The Victorian Schoolroom's the worst if someone's left it in a state, because there's so much in there. Last week, I went in and four of the pinafores were knotted at the back, all the slates needed wiping as did the blackboard, the slate pencils were on the floor, etc. Anyway, it's not too bad. I've been helping more with the activities recently, helping people with getting paint, cleaning up, showing them what to do, etc.

Friday 24th July

Today we went to the Mechanical Music Museum. It was awesome! It also constitutes my earliest memory--I must've been about two the last time we went, but I can remember bits of it. I also remembered a doll shop opposite, and my parents were kinda stunned. So was I really. But I do remember going in there.

Anyway, if you ever get the chance, I highly recommend you head to this museum. It's fascinating! It doesn't look like much, I have to admit, it's all in two rooms, and one of the rooms is a shop. But the museum room is stuffed full of, well, mechanical music. It ranges from amazing boxes that you can open up, wind up, and they play fantastic music using pins and a metal comb. And the boxes are pretty stunning in themselves, before you even start playing the music from them. Then there were ones that were in effect record players with a load of little bits that got pushed down by the 'record' and played a tune. And then, and these were my favourites, they had three machines that would have been in a pub. They were early jukeboxes, and they were fantastic. They played music off a giant disk, but there was no electricity in them at all. They had bells and a xylophone type thing and drums and all sorts. Quite incredible. Then there were the gramophones and phonographs. Same principle behind each, but the gramophone used a disk while the phonograph used a cylinder (and worked better because it didn't have to change speed depending on where on the disk it was). But gramophones ended up becoming the accepted version, and now it doesn't matter that we use disks which are strictly speaking not as good, because we've got microchips that tell the CD/DVD player how fast to go using pies. There were also automatons, which were quite impressive. They were basically things that wound up and did stuff (danced, sung, popped out of cans etc).

We went to the town nearby after that (sorry, can't remember which it was at this particular moment, I'm not good with names), and had a bit of a wander round. Quite fun. Got lunch from Tesco (we know how to live it up, don't we!), and yeh, that was about it for Friday.

Thursday 23rd July

[I am now writing this from notes, albeit brief notes, and from memory, rather than typing up what was actually written. It was only a couple of days ago though, so hopefully I won't have forgotten anything important.]

Today, we went to Gloucester Docks. Mum and Dad fancied the Waterways Museum. James was being obstinate, and I quite fancied a soldier museum, but it didn't look so good when we got there, so we all went into the Waterways Museum. The first thing we did was go on a boat ride, which was very good fun. Forty minutes, and the captain gave a fantastic talk about the canal, the boat, and the general history of the area. The boat we were on was requisitioned during the Second World War, and was used first as a harbour patrol boat, then to help evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk. And then came the really interesting bit: during the Blitz, she was used as a floating ambulance. The theory was, the roads got too clogged up, but it's a bit harder to clog up the Thames, so that's how she served during the Blitz, complete with nurses on board. After the Blitz ended she went back to being a harbour patrol boat, and then it was back to her original owner and she was later sold to the museum. The other very interesting thing involves a popular children's nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty. (Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the King's Horses and all the King's Men, Couldn't put Humpty together again). Popularly depicted as an egg, this seems a rather nonsensical rhyme. But when you discover that Humpty Dumpty was, in fact, a siege gun constructed by Royalist troops trying to get into Gloucester, it throws a whole new light on the matter. The troops were laying siege to Gloucester, and they got fed up of waiting for them to run out of food. So they decided to a siege gun to help knock a whole in the wall, so a bunch of men (a forlorn hope, as the advance party was known), could run in and open it up for the rest of them. Because, allegedly, the siege gun they constructed looked like a particular politician, they named it Humpty Dumpty. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you like the Parliamentarians/Roundheads), when they fired the first shot, it blew up and was unfixable. Thus was born the rhyme about Humpty Dumpty.

After we'd looked round the museum, and my brother had cheered up because there was a water bit demonstrating locks that you could quite easily use to cause a bit of a tidal wave within the simulated canal, we went out into Gloucester. I had a look in an Antiques Centre, because I felt like it, and it's sometimes on Bargain Hunt (yes, I'm sad, I quite like to watch it while I'm eating dinner if I'm at home). Anyway, it was kinda fun and I was tempted by some stamps. Yes, I collect stamps. Or some rather fun looking postcards which illustrated aircraft from the First World War. But then Mum texted me and said they'd found that there was a The Works down the road, so I tootled off down there. I love that shop, but they've closed the one in Preston :(. And there I discovered to my delight four Osprey Aircraft of the Aces books for £2 each! So I had to buy them. And then we popped up to the Cathedral, which was pretty impressive, and ancient (built shortly after the Norman Conquest--William the Conquorer and his nobles had a bit of a thing for building Cathedrals and Monastries). However, I suspect it had rather suffered under the Parliamentarians, who as well as fighting the king were also vandals/iconoclasts, and decided that it was a terrible sin to display lots of pretty statues. I think there should have been statues in all these little holes, so it looked kinda forlorn. And that was about it I think, other than coffee/coke/ice cream in MacDonalds cos Mum was a bit knackered and the Cathedral cafe had been a bit noisy and overcrowded.

The British Museum

When we were in London for the day, I persuaded my mum that while my dad and brother roamed the tube (I think they did something like seven different lines...), we should go to the British Museum. After working out that it's not at South Kensington, it's actually from a small random tube stop elsewhere, we finally managed to find the place. And wow was it an impressive museum. The building itself was awesome enough, to say nothing of the stuff in it.

I had to see the Rosetta Stone of course. For those of you who don't know, the Rosetta Stone is the reason we can now understand hieroglyphs. Up till the point they found and decoded it, it was assumed that hieroglyphs were some kind of picture language, and impossible to decode as all knowledge of it had been lost. But the Rosetta Stone changed all that. It was found by Napoleon on his expedition to Egypt (when he took along a bunch of Egyptologists to study the place), and he decided that it was worth carting back to France for further study. But then the British intervened by defeating him, and in the settlement they gave the British the stone amongst other artefacts. The British were quick to recognise its importance and sent out images of it to scholars all over the world to see what they could make of it. They figured out that the three different languaged inscriptions all said the same thing--a royal decree. The languages were Greek, demotic (a kind of simple form of hieroglyphs that was actually practical), and hieroglyphs. Since they knew Greek, it was possible to figure out what the other two said. It's a pretty massive lump of rock, carved with lots of teeny tiny figures, and there was a bit of a crowd around it.

Along with the Rosetta Stone, there were a bunch of other statues from Egypt (and other places too). And they were massive! I mean, the story of how they got to the museum, bearing in mind they were probably transported on sailing ships, must be quite a thing in itself. There was a head from a statue that was taller than me, lion things, all sorts.

Then there were all sorts of Minoan and Mycenean (think that's how you spell it) stuff, which I had a bit of a look at. One of the two (sorry, I can't quite recall which), is thought to be the basis for the legend of Atlantis, and Minoan Crete is the basis for the story of the Minotaur (the legend with the man with the bull's body which lives in a labyrinth, and the ball of string). Very interesting stuff. They hung about on Crete a long time ago.

Had a bit of a look at the European history too, but I was a bit miffed we didn't have, oh, say a couple of days to look around. Pretty neat. They have the stuff from the Sutton Hoo burial there (I'd never heard of it before either--it's a load of burial mounds in this country with all sorts of funky artefacts from our ancient ancestors and bits of ship which were buried there too). Anyhow, that was pretty interesting. And a bit more moral perhaps. I mean, we have kinda nabbed a large part of the ancient culture of various different places, although I suppose folks like the Minoans and Myceneans don't really mind so much since they're wiped out (if I'm wrong here, please correct me...). But it's maybe not so nice to Egypt to have nabbed the Rosetta Stone. Although I am grateful for the fact I've been able to see it.

Anyway, it's well worth visiting this place if you ever happen to be in London. Absolutely incredible, especially if you're a bit of a history lover :D.

Leeds

So, we went to Leeds on holiday over the weekend. The hotel was really nice, four stars, right in the centre, with a swimming pool (which my brother used, but I didn't).
On the way there, on the Friday, we called in at the White Rose Shopping Centre, and I discovered that I really have grown out of Build-a-Bear with regard to choosing new clothes for my teddies that came from there (I have two: Blondey and Samkin), and I wouldn't really want to make a new one, I have enough teddies to fill a room...
We went to the hotel then, and then mum was shattered, even though she'd just been travelling in the wheelchair, so Dad, James and I went to explore Leeds city centre. We went to a Chinese for tea, and I had this seafood platter thing, which was huge, and full of different fishy things, and I hadn't a clue what most of it was. Tasted good though.
Then Saturday, Mum was really feeling grim, so Dad dropped James and I off at the Royal Armouries Museum and took her home. The museum was absolutely fantastic, I loved it. James wasn't as interested, but he liked the drama things they were doing throughout the day, as did I. They had a team of actors who brought the stuff to live, and they were really, really good. It was just a shame that the rain meant the jousting was cancelled. Dad came back and picked us up and we went back to the hotel, then to Pizza Express for dinner. Just about James' favourite restaurant ever. It's all right, better than Pizza Hut in my opinion, but it's not really, really fantastic. It's nice, don't get me wrong, I just preferred the other two meals we had.
Sunday, we went to Tropical World, which was really good. They had all sorts of creatures roaming free, and you could feed the fish. If you ever get a chance to do that, go for it. It's hilariously funny. Immaging feeding really big birds that can't move around properly, and then immagine feeding birds with smaller beaks than the piece of food as well... Twas amusing. Then, TGI Friday's for tea. Burgars and fries, yum! Maybe not healthy, but certainly tasty.
Breakfasts were good too. The hotel had a really nice buffet selection for breakfast, so we were eating two main meals a day, and pretty much skipping out lunch...
Anyway, that was my holiday to Leeds in brief.