A Morning in the Science Museum

14 January 2012. We were in London with friends David and Jeannie and it had been decided that the ladies would go shopping, whilst David and I would have a culturally stimulating morning.

The ladies vetoed Soho however, so we got on a bus and headed for the Science Museum. We waved to them from the top deck of our bus as we went past them at Oxford Circus!

Here are just a few of the many wonderful exhibits we saw, starting with the steam locomotive Puffing Billy which was built in 1814 and pulled carts of coal from Wylam Colliery to the docks on the River Tyne.

A Tucker Sno-Cat used during the 1955-58 Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by explorer Dr (later Sir) Vivian Fuchs. A label carried a quote from one of the team describing how it felt to be inside it as the nose reared up and then it slid back into a hole in the ice. Not for stay-at-home types! Judging from the barriers around it, the museum half expect it to fall over again...

David was chuffed to find a model of the class of ship he served on whilst in the Royal Navy as a young man. I had helpfully shown him a model of HMS Victory but he maintains it was a later ship he was on... I've heard some of his naval stories and, believe me, they would sit well with the days of sailing ships and cutlasses!

We were due to meet the ladies for lunch so we didn't have enough time to do the museum full justice. However, as we retraced our steps back towards the entrance, the massive mill engine was working, with puffs of steam shooting out here and there and looking suitably impressive.

It did away with the need for the treadmill, which must have been a relief to all those who previously had spent their long working day doing the equivalent of climbing a ladder.

Large versions of the photos: Puffing Billy, Sno-Cat, David and ship, mill engine

My Life, the Museum

It's a sobering thing to walk round a museum and find loads of things that you remember and that some of them are from what you consider your adult life, not just childhood!

So it was when we had a look around the Science Museum in London last weekend.

Certainly there were loads of things from well before I was born. But then...

There was the iron that my Mum used to use. I remember exactly the feel of the dial and the little rocker switch on the front, even if I can't remember what the rocker switch was supposed to do.

Of course, when I played with it (and I'm not sure at this point, memory failing me a little, whether I was supposed to be playing with it at all...) it wasn't an iron but a hover-transport-cum-spaceship for Dan Dare in which the Mekon was imprisoned and taken away to the penal colony on planet Zongo.

As the spaceship pulled off against considerable gravitational pull (the iron was heavy...) I was able to communicate with the Chief Warder on Zongo (my brother Frank) by means of my Dan Dare communications tower.

This didn't exactly pass the stringent tests of expectation. The searchlight had a torch bulb, rather than a powerful beam that could be seen as you looked sideways at it. The walkie-talkie had only short wires and you had to remain so close to the Chief Warder that you could hear him talking anyway, without relying on the distorted buzzing coming from your handset. And the Morse Buzzer... well who wanted to use a Morse Buzzer anyway?

I've shown the box lid of this toy previously on the blog but here it was, complete and just waiting for me to smash the glass, load the spinning discs, turn it against the spring to a maximum of 8 clicks and dispatch the hordes of Treens who were trying to rescue the Mekon from the innards of the iron. I mean Prisoner Transport...

Now that was all very well and it all brought childhood memories flooding back. But then...

This was the adding machine that Mum and Dad bought to do all their calculations to add up hundreds of football coupons every Friday night. Dad was a main collector for both Littlewoods and Vernons Football Pools. He collected the packets of coupons from other collectors and then had to open each, add up the value of the coupons, check it against the money that each collector had handed in, deduct their commission, calculate his own share and then bag up the money for banking before taking the large bag of coupons into the Manchester office in Ancoats. The deadline was 2:00am and it would always be towards 1:00am by the time we got there.

The adding machine enabled Dad to recruit more collectors as it saved him time in adding up long lists of payment amounts manually.

And then if being reminded of teenage years wasn't enough, things got worse!

This was our first video recorder. It came out in 1972 but it would be around 1974 when we got ours I think. The big cassette tapes had the two spools set one on top of the other, a messy arrangement that quite often fouled up. You could record TV for an hour on each cassette, which were hideously expensive. The quality though, was excellent for the time. Far better than the VHS machines that came out a couple of years later and became the standard format.

I wonder whatever happened to my tape of Benny Hill...

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Freezing in London

As the cold covers the entire country we risked the journey down to London for the weekend. I figured it was all motorway anyway so if any roads were going to be kept open and free from ice it would be the M6/M1.

And so it proved to be, despite the dashboard telling me it was -8 outside as we passed through Staffordshire.

It was just a mite cold in the Capital too! We shivered our way down to Trafalgar Square on Friday night to empty a few shelves in Waterstones and the fountains in the Square were quite spectacular. Any lower temps and they'd have been spitting lumps out I imagine!

I'd not taken my camera out during the night so I had to take these two on my phone, trying not to shiver and induce camera shake...

The Christmas tree had made an appearance in Trafalgar Square, an annual gift from the Norwegians in recognition of our efforts to deliver them from Nazi rule in World War II.

On Saturday morning we caught a bus down to Kensington and went into the Science Museum. It's both exciting and depressing to see how much stuff I remember is now classed as a museum piece... A separate entry will dredge up a few more memories of my earlier life.

There's lots of stuff in the museum that I'm not old enough to remember personally, though even so, it's thrilling to stand next to Stevenson's Rocket or to walk through the aeronautical galleries and see the majority of flying machines that were in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines and to be able to admire the First World War vintage SE5a and the Vickers Vimy that Alcock and Brown flew across the Atlantic in. It's been straightened a bit because they crashed it into a bog in Ireland... That must have been a dicey moment:

"Is that Ireland down there?"
"Whatever it is, old chap, we're going to hit it!"

We walked back through Hyde Park. Nobody was exercising horses and the usual mud was glistening white and rock hard in most places so apart from a tendency to slither here and there, we didn't get too mud-splattered.

The Serpentine was quiet - nobody rowing boats up and down and the ducks had a choice of swimming or walking depending on which bit of water they chose. Some workmen were dismantling a dog from a tree...

A continental market was in full swing with far more people than it's healthy to have all in one place at the same time. At least it was possible to buy some food without having to Google it to see what it was... This I find is a common failing in London where iceberg or flat lettuce (or almost anything edible) is passe and salad has to look like grass stalks to excite the locals.

"We're fanatical about food" advertises one food chain and they are not bloody kidding... Usually at meal times in London I feel as helpless as a 7-year-old whose school has been invaded by Jamie Oliver. I noticed indeed that he had a place in the park so we avoided that like the plague...

Those continentals know what it's all about though so there were plenty of chips on offer and none of them ruined by Spry Crisp and bloody Dry! In fact I went for a bowl full of potato scallops with bits of bacon and onion (though it would have done a blind man good to see any onion in it).

We had to push through the crowd until we came to the end of the market and found a bench, because any seats within the markets were full of people doing anything but eating. "My Goodness James, there's no hummus!"
"Never mind, Daphne old girl, just have a sit down and we'll whisk up a bowl of tofu and celeriac later!"
"Ugh, yes I couldn't eat this stuff they are selling - eew! I bet it has a taste!"

London does things to my feet. By the time we got to Marble Arch I was limping and footsore and ready to sit down (ha! no chance!) The Christmas rush on Oxford Street is yet another of those places where there are far too many people crammed into a space to be good for you.

I took refuge in the DVD department of HMV and made a few purchases that Miss Franny decided later I could have back on Christmas morning with some wrapping paper on...

We were going to head for Regent Street but there were so many people we diverted into a side street and zig-zagged until we came out onto Regent Street.

There had been an accident and the police had closed all roads leading to Oxford Circus so it was a total gridlock of cars, honking horns and people doing three point turns. Being on foot and therefore able to shake my head in amusement at all these antics almost made up for the fact that the said feet were almost dropping off!

We ate in the Mermaid's Tail on Leicester Square, a wonderful place with not a hint of couscous and, stuffed to the gunnels with steak and apple pie, we hailed a cab and headed back to the hotel.