GREAT BIG SPIDER

O where did father go, mother?

O where has father gone?

He just went away

To bring us food today

O why did he never return?

O where did father go, mother?
O where can father be?
He just popped outside
So why should he hide?
Instead of coming back home with our tea

O where did father go, mother?
We’re hungry and not very hot
There was a crumb or more
Of quiche on the floor
Could he have just gobbled the lot?

O where did father go, mother?

He said that he wouldn’t be long

He said he’d be back

Once he’d hunted a snack

Do you think maybe something went wrong?

O where did father go, mother?

It has been such a long time

Since he crawled over the floor

And under the door
Of this battered old house full of grime

O where did father go, mother?
Those people think we don’t belong
They scream and they shout
That they want us out

O why has he been gone so long?

O where did father go, mother?
Did that man trap him in a big pot?
Take him for a long ride
And throw him outside
He’ll find his way back, will he not?

O where did father go, mother?
O where did father go?
He’s been gone so long
That I think something’s wrong
Do you think that we’ll ever know?

O where did father go, mother?
Please tell me that he isn’t dead
It’s worrying me
That he’s not back with our tea
Are you sure you didn’t bite off his head?

IN THE DARK

“What’s that noise?”

Beside me, the beloved sleeps on obliviously, but I definitely heard something…

Something moving in the darkness…

Of course, it is dark and it could be anything. I switch on the torch but it’s no help. It sounded like a kind of scurrying,  but I’m not aware of any infestation… There would be some kind of a smell, surely…? But then, I’ve watched all those programmes about the hoarders and how things can be living in places that you’d never expect them to, so you do never know…

But I’d’ve heard something before now, wouldn’t I…? If it was something alive… Most likely it was my watch strap settling from when I knocked it when I reset the alarm… Or maybe it was the cardboard and plastic unfolding itself in the bin after the beloved took those tablets in the night to try and shift the migraine that’s triggered this sudden extra hour in bed.

“Can I go for the later train…?” she murmured, and who was I to argue…?

This will mean a change to my routine and having to drive through the dubious delights of the “school run” which seems to imply that by simply parking a small person in the passenger seat of a car or bus, the driver suddenly completely forgets how to drive...

Ah, this is not the time for such chaotic thoughts to be allowed to be allowed to run through a “spin cycle” in my mind...

Instead, I lie there awake, listening to those sounds I’ve not heard before…

Out there…

In the darkness…

Waiting…

The imagination runs riot. From small furry creatures scuttling, to larger, furrier creatures nibbling and gnawing. When my mind finally manages to conjure up the largest of spiders, I decide that it’s time to get up and write about it instead. It might just make me feel better if I try to put the madness to bed just as I climb (or was that leap?) out of it.

Or is that cowardice in extremis…? Now I’ve left her alone with it, whatever it is, although whatever it is might just be a piece of unfurling cellophane there is always the slightest possibility that it’s actually something with teeth, whilst I’m safely in another room with the lights on and listening to other noises which may, or may not, be the dripping of rainwater through a hole in the roof and onto something precious and irreplaceable, no doubt.

Those tapping noises could be outside of course, but they sound much closer…

Or is it just the floorboards creaking and popping from their early morning exertions of having had me climbing the stairs, or my chair stressing under the strain of holding me off the ground…? Are they just relaxing again having done their job once more, and settling down for a nice relaxing day of simply being what they are with none of the sudden extra burdens of having me around give them…?

And, after all of this mystery, then the boiler kicks up to start its strange early morning routine of pumping water around the central heating system but at least, unusual sounding as those sounds usually are, at least I know precisely what they are…

Usually… although, is that a dripping I can hear…? Is something leaking that shouldn’t be…? Has one of those unseen creatures been nibbling where it shouldn’t have been…?

And what, precisely, could possibly explain the squeaking coming from a system that has no gears…?

At least it’s the right kind of squeaking.

At least it doesn’t sound alive…

Noises, noises everywhere, and not a source to find.

SUDDENLY SCAFFOLDING

I came home midweek to find that, whilst it wasn’t entirely unexpected that it would eventually be, the front of the house had, very suddenly and without warning, been clad in scaffolding which persuaded me that perhaps some kind of a start had been made on our tiny bit of building work.

I’m not entirely sure, however, because I’ve not actually seen the place in daylight since, so it’s really hard to tell, what with all of the angles and darkness and all, whether the tree that was growing out of the roof is still there, or whether I just have a fancy sculpture standing next to the front of my home that seems designed merely to “bother” the neighbours as they pass along.

It’s a bit odd really. Having given the okay for the work to proceed, we still kind of expected to actually hear something before everything got started so that we might be able to knock on a few doors and what have you in order to let people know what was about to be going on, but no…

Instead, it just suddenly appeared as if the “scaffolding pixies” had dropped by to leave us a gift, and there it remains lurking next to the front of the house in anticipation of “something” although it doesn’t quite give the impression that anyone knows quite what the “something” is as yet.

I do, however, suspect that it’s going to be something expensive…

Still, it’s not as if anyone can really complain (although I’m sure they might), after all there’s still more than enough room for them all to get by just as long as they’re not trying to deliver a grand piano or something. (Pauses as he spots the van from the grand piano company pulling up outside…)

I was a little concerned that one of the bracing struts did seem to have been set in next door’s garden, and I did try knocking on her door to explain just as soon as we got home and saw this steel spider’s web had been erected, but she appeared to be out that evening and I haven’t seen any sign of her since.

I did, of course, mention to her that we “might be having a little work done” when she tracked me down a few weeks ago to tell me that she would be “having a little work done” to her own house a few weeks ago, so it’ll probably be all right… (Pauses to ponder upon the possibility that ALL of the houses in the row are crumbling…)

Anyway, I suppose the rational, reasonable argument goes something along the lines of it being safer to have the scaffolding set up and struggle through a little bit of inconvenience for a couple of weeks rather than have a bloody great lump of stone fall off the house and squash someone, although, on occasions in the past, “rational” and “reasonable” have not been the first words that sprang to mind with certain people in the neighbourhood.

Happily, our immediate neighbours are just about as perfect a you could hope for and, if the weather doesn’t get too grim, and the discoveries that are made whenever somebody does climb that scaffolding tower to investigate aren’t too horrendous, perhaps the imposition won’t be too long-lasting…?

Hopefully…

Fingers crossed, eh…?

Otherwise I might need some scaffolding to hold me up…

MOUSETRAP

Saturday was our designated “Mousetrap” day, although, rather bizarrely, throughout the week we kept on forgetting that it was, and every time one or the other of us mentioned it, the other one of us seemed to be surprised by the fact.

Sometimes it really is like living in a goldfish bowl, and turning out to be one of the goldfish (or at least to have inherited its memory), only without the house being full up to the brim with water of course, although the weather seems to be trying to do its level best to rectify even that tiny omission…

The tickets had been booked a very long time ago, you see, as a “Mother’s Day” present for the beloved’s mother and, before you ask, no we didn’t buy any for my mother for various reasons far too complicated to go into here.

Anyway, the date was set, the gift was given, and the tickets placed in the one spot in the house where we knew for absolute certain that we’d be able to find them half a year later no matter what other chaos may ensue around it, which was lucky because, when we got ourselves organized enough to brave the sudden cold snap and venture out to catch the train into the big scary city (I know!!! Twice in one week! – Almost unheard of these days…), they were for once exactly where they were supposed to be.

And so were were able to find a parking space, and the train was more-or-less on time, and, if not exactly full to the brim with footballing fans on their way to watch that Saturday’s kickabouts, certainly pretty close to it, and we chugged along into the city whilst nobody tried to sell us any rail tickets, or even gave us the slightest opportunity to buy any which led to the usual slight angsty feeling in this litigious age.

Instead we arrived at Piccadilly and had to join a massive queue at a hastily unfolded temporary table and pay for them there before joining the hustle and bustle of a mainline station which seems to think that it’s really a shopping mall on a busy Saturday afternoon and wait for the beloved’s mother to appear courtesy of her own railway journey.

After we met up it was time to grab the free shuttle bus to make our way to an excellent (but very busy) Patisserie for coffee and cake before strolling around the corner to the “Opera House” for the matinee performance of the Diamond Anniversary Tour of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” which is travelling around the provinces of the UK for the first time ever whilst simultaneously extending its 60-year run in the West End of London.

Well, both the beloved and her mother are great Christie fans, and it really was too fine an opportunity to be missed, seeing as we are unlikely to ever be in London long enough or at the same time in order to see the original version.

I bought the programmes and we made our way through the crowds (because, even if it wasn’t the “hottest ticket in town” it was packed) to our seats in an auditorium that seemed very familiar to me, although I don’t know quite why, and settled ourselves in and had a bit of a read. Amongst all of the other tidbits of information, I was delighted to see that an old favourite, the late Nick Courtney, was name-checked in the text telling us all about the history of the production, and was very happy to see the name of Peter Vaughan Clarke being credited as Lighting Designer as I remembered his (perhaps not exactly household) name from watching “The Tomorrow People” when I was a youngster.

What delighted me most of all was spotting that Graham Seed was amongst the listed cast. I’m so pleased that he is finding good and regular work after those sinister decisions taken in dark rooms caused his much loved character of Nigel Pargetter to plummet from the roof of his stately home in “The Archers” and, simultaneously, end my two-decade long relationship with that particular radio programme.

And as to the play itself, well, that would be telling and, to be honest, even though I had an inkling that I’d read or heard something, somewhere about something, it’s far better seeing the play without any foreknowledge of the outcome because…

Well, you know… “Spoilers…!” (and we were sworn to secrecy, after all…)

What I will tell you is that it remains a fine and entertaining couple of hours in the theatre and is excellently staged and, like the very best of Agatha Christie’ stories, all of the pieces click into place like a steel, er, trap…

Christie’s work still manages to seem very “modern” and forward-thinking somehow, and, despite occasional mutterings that it’s a bit of a hoary old chestnut, the jokes still work very well for today’s audiences, and we left the theatre feeling most satisfied by our experience, and, judging by the buckets of change that were being collected for the Actor’s Support Fund (or whatever it was they called it) it looks as if a lot of other people in that audience did too.

They’ll already be setting up in Edinburgh by now after Saturday night’s final performance in Manchester, and whizzing around the length and breadth of the UK for week-long stints all over the place until the end of next June, so you might get a chance to see the tour if you really want to.

After all “It’s a trap!” but it’s a very fine one…

ART AND THE ARTIST

The So-vile saga, as it continues onwards and upwards, seems to be turning into the “gift that just keeps on giving…” but, whilst there is obviously a massive sense of betrayal and having been betrayed by the public in general, and anyone who enjoyed “family entertainment” programmes on TV in the seventies and eighties, my own thoughts do keep on returning to this idea of whether we can ever separate the “art” from the “artist…”

Do all of those various “Sounds of the era” DVDs now become instantly unplayable because of the presence of “that man” in some of the clips between the pieces of music you bought the DVD to experience…? Do episodes of “Top of the Pops 77” (or whichever year they were up to on the BBC4 reruns) no longer have value as entertainment because the leering face of that creature pops up to make a tit of himself between the performances of the musicians…? Were all of those nostalgic chart rundown shows which I used to listen to on Sunday afternoons, any less enjoyable because of what I know now about the presenter…?

Of course, it would be more than a tad insensitive to be showing them now, which is why any images of the grinning monster have been restricted to the news programmes in recent weeks, but will there ever come a time when it is deemed to be “okay” to screen those shows again…?

And what of  “Jim’ll Fix It”…? Will any reruns of those shows ever be seen again upon our TV screens…? And would anyone really want to watch them, or even be able to ever view them in quite the same way, knowing what we appear to know now about the eponymous presenter…? And yet, for a very long time, that show was a cornerstone of “family entertainment” in this country and “entertained” a lot of us, providing some of the very best “television memories” for a generation, all of which gets lost on this tsunami of loathing, as the baby, the bath water, the bath and even the bathroom all get chucked out in our collective (and maybe just a little bit sanctimonious) erasure of history.

Does that rather lovely film about Peter Cushing having a rose named after his wife now have to be forever tainted because of an association with the television programme it was filmed for…?

Those shows, alongside the music and performances of Gary Glitter, are now likely to be obliterated forever from our screens which brings me once again to this question of “the art” and “the artist” and whether those songs ought never to be heard again, even if there were people out there who might once have admitted to having quite liked them and, let’s be honest here, actually buying them.

After all, somebody put his songs at the top of the hit parade and made the performer a household name, but can you really listen to the songs in quite the same way once you realise the lifestyle of the man singing them, another face, incidentally, that British Rail once thought “user-friendly” enough to front up their “Student Railcard” campaign…

I’m sensing a pattern here…

Nowadays, however, and despite his many years in the “celebrity wilderness” due to his connection with dark deeds and misdemenours, it does now seems “acceptable” to show Michael Barrymore’s quiz shows, at least on some of the more obscure channels, so maybe we are more collectively forgetful or forgiving than we like to imagine we are, so long as we can turn on our TV sets and be “amused” for half an hour.

A Sickert - "Le Lit du Cuivre" (c1906)

Are the paintings of Walter Sickert any less impressive because some people have decided, one hundred years or more after the fact, that he might have been Jack the Ripper...? Then again, Hitler was a painter, but nobody seems in any hurry to be showing regular exhibitions of his work these days, and there’s little in the way of repeats for any Arfur Mullard shows since his daughter’s revelations, so maybe I’m wrong about that...

But still this issue of the art and the artist nags at me, and I suspect that it’s generally about the nature of what they’ve done. The circumstances of Jimi Hendrix’s death are not exactly a good role model for his young fans, but that’s just seen as the tragic consequences of his “sex and drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle and makes his death a “tragic loss” rather being seen as being more like the sad, lonely and pointless demise of any other nameless junkie, and, whilst he did die of the effects of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, at least he had the good grace to not do so whilst sharing a bed with a six year old (not that I would want to suggest that he would ever have been...)

Music is a strange temptress anyway. I’m not a huge fan of the band “All Saints” but I think “Pure Shores” is a sublime piece of music. Would I like it any less if it had turned out that they were all coke snorting prostitutes, or, perversely, would I like it more for precisely the same reasons...?

Perhaps we expect far too much of our celebrity heroes...? Perhaps we look up to them and put them on pedestals that (some of them, at least) feel they think they’re unworthy of, and set them standards that it’s almost impossible for them to live up to. Sometimes, in the past, those “standards” might not have been all that high (if old men goosing nurses for “comedy effect” in those old “Carry On” films is anything to go by, then the 70s must have been a very odd place to live... another country, in fact...) but nevertheless, we do tend to put a weight of “expectation” upon some of them that they can find to be be a huge level of pressure to try and live up to.

There are, despite the jaunty outgoing personalities they project, lots of depressed comedians. Does the fact that Tony Hancock was a nasty alcoholic, or that Frankie Howerd used to proposition every nice young man that came his way, or that the Krankies were supposedly “swingers” make their comic performances any less funny? (Okay, I’ll admit that perhaps the Krankies is not the best example of this...)

Of course, lots of actors whom people admire for their wit and eloquence (or just the form of their bodies) are actually shy or very dull without a script full of other people’s words to say (or a good, old-fashioned airbrushing...). When interviewed they can come across as taciturn fools if their image is not carefully managed and yet, even when we know this, their films can remain just as popular, and the so-called “dark side” of the “classic” Hollywood period doesn’t seem to make people regard it with any less fondness.

(Talking of the “dark side” by the way, I’ve heard people comparing the persona of that disgraced DJ to that of Senator Palpatine in the “Star Wars” movies, with his popular “public face” hiding the dark secrets within, and it’s not the worst analogy I’ve come across...)

But we kind of accept that comedians and actors can have both a “real” life and “performance” life, and as long as what they do isn’t too extreme, we tend to forgive them any number of shortcomings because of the laughter and entertainment they give us. Perhaps it’s because we know that there’s inevitably a price to be paid for all of that natural talent…

Or something...

After all, up until a month ago, I imagine that there were hundreds of people who had met that vile man, perhaps under very difficult personal circumstances, in hospitals or at fundraising events, and had come away from the meeting feeling okay about it and that they had a “good memory” of meeting him, and might even have spent time in the same pubs as those who were muttering those dark secrets about him, telling everyone how “great” he’d been with them or their kids…

I think the sense of betrayal cuts so deep because of the man’s high profile. After all, this was a man who was deemed to be absolutely the best person to front up campaigns against “Stranger Danger”, or supporting child minders (http://bitly.com/Re4tMt), or promoting road safety (“Clunk, Click Every Trip”), or introducing us the future and “The Age of the Train…” If there was ONE person back then who you might just believe your children would be safe to be left around, I think that a well-known philanthropist children’s television stalwart, who had friends amongst the royal family and at the very top of government, would feel like a pretty “safe” choice…

How wrong we all could be…

RECONNECTED

Well, after all the weeks of nobody being able to get through to my landline number, and instead being immediately diverted to a kind of crackling limbo where they couldn’t even leave me a message telling me that they had, in fact, been trying to ring me, the telephone lines back to Lesser Blogfordshire have now been “fixed…”

Huzzah!! Let joy be unconfined, etc.

So now, any deathly inactivity on the part of my own telephonic life can only be blamed upon my own social shortcomings, and no longer can it be put down to any strange inadequacies of the age of technology.

Instead, the usual stark silence will fall again, and I will have categorical and emphatic proof of my own lack of popularity amongst anyone who’s ever met me, after my near half-century scuttling across the surface of this big ol’ world of ours.

Not that, in all honesty, I ever really expect anyone but my mother to ring me up, and at least, on the plus side, I can now be fairly sure that I won’t be getting the daily calls to work telling me that my phone isn’t working (I knew this…), and that I really ought to do something about it because it’s very important that she should be able to get hold of me in case any one of the billion and one dire emergencies that might befall her might actually occur.

Although, sometimes I’m still convinced that she’ll outlast the lot of us…

Anyway, having finally got the good people of India to accept the possibility that it might be a good thing if they actually sent a real person of an engineering persuasion, one with screwdrivers and everything, to look at my telephone system, I took the computer off my desk at work after having decided that it might be best to work at home for the day so that I might be in the house when he arrived, and to wait for one to actually turn up, which he did, and at pretty much the appointed time, too.

There was much plugging in of rinky-dinky little electronic gidgets, and much discussion about the nature of the problems I was having, although he didn’t venture all that far into our Temple of Tat, because he didn’t need to really. Something wasn’t working properly, but that something seemed to be a something that was outside his purview…

You see, it turns out that the fault on my telephone line was all my fault after all and now I shall have to pay the telephone company the princely sum of ninety-nine shiny new English pounds in order to pay for the privilege of now having had all of my telephone extensions disabled by the nice man, who ripped out the offending wire from his company’s lovely white box on the wall, and who then went on his way with the cheery manner of a man who knew that the 400,000 faults on record at any one time means that all of his future overtime is safely assured.

Joy, rapture, etc.

To be honest, it’s not as if they didn’t tell me that having to pay this fee would, in all likelihood, be the case. Apparently, if the fault is discovered to be caused by any of your own equipment, the standard charge mentioned above would have to be made. The lady at the call centre somewhere half way across the planet also suggested that I should pay my own engineer to investigate the problem before they sent their engineer out.

Not, I noted, that they had any suggestions as to where I would be able to find this telecommunications wizard.

Stupidly, I would have expected such a person to be working for, I dunno, a telecommunications company of some sort...

Anyway, that option, it appeared to me, seemed to suggest that I would need to call out (and pay) two engineers, one of whom might not be able to detect quite what the bigger problem was being caused by, whereas merely wasting the time of just the one engineer seemed as if it might be quite a sufficient and efficient solution for getting the problem solved, to my untrained mind. I know that I’m a simple-minded and naive innocent, but I do still hope for a world in which there are simple options, like, for example, if my telephone doesn’t work, I can perhaps ring the telephone company and they will send someone out to fix it.

I know... Crazy, isn’t it...? That’s exactly to sort of ridiculous thinking that got me where I am today...

Of course, now it turns out that I will need to call out another engineer anyway if I want any of the extensions to work, so that plan worked rather well, didn’t it…?

Anyway, it turns out that “somewhere” in the wiring in my house that connects to our two other sockets, there is a “short” which causes our various telephones to believe that I have lifted the receiver, even though, on most of these occasions lately, I patently had not.

Strangely enough, it also transpires that the telephone company’s responsibilities basically finish at the very first socket which comes into the house and that anything beyond that is somebody else’s problem, the “somebody else” in this instance, being, of course, me...

Mind you, it all appears to be working now, or at least, what’s left of my “network” is anyway. Not that you’d know from the endless stream of silences coming from the rest of the world which, it seems, has finally given up on me. Still the evening brought a lovely old text message from the telephone company telling me that they were “Sorry about my phone fault but it should be ok now” (I swear that these so-called professionals used the expression “ok” in their text message…), and that I “May need to restart my hub if I have broadband...”

You would really think that they ought to know for certain whether or not I actually have broadband, given the amount that I pay them for it each month...

Presumably, whilst that text message was being composed, the other hand was simultaneously typing out the bill to slide through my letterbox in a slightly embarrassed manner in a few days. At least I hope it has the good grace to act in a slightly embarrassed way…

Although, and whilst I really don’t want to get my hopes up here, there was no mention of whether or not they were going to charge me in that matey-sounding old text message.

Still, on the plus side, after all of that fun, my mother can now leave me her shopping lists again, which is nice, so all-in-all, it’s a “win-win” really.

I just sometimes wonder whether it will ever be my turn to win, that’s all…

ANCIENT WORLDS

I don’t often look forward to heading on to the big city as a rule (as regular visitors to these pages will already know), but after catching the last twenty minutes of a TV programme called “Unsafe Sex in the City” the night before, the city seemed an even scarier place to be visiting than even I had previously thought possible. (It wasn’t the unlikely prospect of the “Unsafe Sex” part that had bothered me so much, by the way, but more the merest possibility that the dreadful characters interviewed during the programme might just possibly be in the same postcode area as me, even if only for a couple of hours…)

But, ultimately, we had the tickets anyway, and, despite the fatigue of being more than halfway through another working week, we thought that we’d go along, not least because we’d been assured that there were indeed only “100 tickets available” for the event in question and having got hold of a pair, it would have seemed rude not to then turn up.

The tickets were for an event called “Ancient Worlds” which was the “grand re-opening” of several of the exhibition galleries at the Manchester Museum after their recent refurbishment. As one of the galleries includes a large section of artifacts from Egyptian archeological exploration, part of me was rather hoping that, in the best tradition of all those old “Mummy” horror movies, that the opening ceremony would be interrupted in the kind of scenario where the smart set gather and the “I declare the museum open…” speech gets interrupted by a sudden scream, as Boris Karloff erupts from a sarcophagus or somesuch, but alas, this was not to be…

There were, of course, far more than one hundred people there when we arrived, but, despite my usual terror of crowds and crowded places, I convinced myself that they were unlikely to be a “rough crowd” seeing as we were all celebrating the reopening of a museum, and I grabbed myself a complimentary lemonade and began to circulate, or rather, move around a busy room full of people and try not to get in the way of too many of them.

There was a string quartet, and a couple of speeches to declare the exhibition “officially open” and suchlike, whilst many of the people looked at the tiny screens of the telephones in their hands instead of what was going on right in front of them, but, on the whole, this was just an excellent opportunity to spend a couple of hours of an evening having a good look at the exhibits at a time of the day when the place is usually shut up for the night and with, if not exactly an intimately tiny group, certainly a relatively small crowd of like-minded people around me, all trying their very best not to get in each other’s way, and generally succeeding.

At first I was convinced that, to my own great shame, I had never actually visited the museum before, but as I walked around one or two of the collections, some of the architecture started to seem a little bit familiar, and I was transported back to a time that I rarely think about these days when I spent a number of Saturdays In Loco Parentis, trying to find interesting ways to amuse the children who lived in a house which I rented a room in. I’m pretty sure now that one of the things we did was a trip to that very museum, although I really could have sworn that this was my first visit there…

But this was not an evening to ponder on such things, this was an evening to explore, with great excitement, the many wonders to be found in the display cases of the three new exhibition galleries and more, and, whilst I might be more than a little uncomfortable with the art of taxidermy in general, I will admit that the vast numbers of birds on display in the Natural History exhibits were an absolute godsend to this very amateur bird-watcher who sometimes struggles with the basics of species identification even when I’ve got an guide book in my hand.

I really must return to that section again… (If only I had taken my proper camera with me instead of just my telephone... Some of the pictures might have been incredible...)

The Egyptian Room is, of course, always impressive. I do so worry that there will come a time when the artifacts are “politely requested” to be returned to their country of origin, so perhaps it would be best to make the most of the opportunity to see these things whilst you still can. Of course, the speech-makers did mention that the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo was one of the institutions which needed thanking for their support, so I’m hoping that this means that they’re actually fine with it. After all, it would be a shame if the only way for everyone to experience the history of any culture was to have to actually go to whichever country it is. That way, I believe, lies a far more insular mindset which is never really good for any of us.

My own favourite moment came, of course, when I was able to follow a sign marked “T-Rex” which was pointing to some quiet and forgotten looking staircase. I ventured downstairs and, despite the hustle and bustle of activity going on in other parts of the building, for a few precious minutes I had the entire fossil department, with the room dominated by the huge Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and the massive fossilised root-ball of an ancient tree, all to myself.

Just me, a dinosaur, an ancient tree, and cases full of Ammonites…

I was in absolute bliss, and with the minerals exhibit just a few paces away, I’ve found another place in which I could happily hide myself away for a very long time… and, if I stand still long enough, I might just fossilise enough to join the collection…

Anyway, if you are ever in the area, do yourself a favour and get yourself through those doors, and go and have a look at those great new galleries. If you’ve got any interest at all in the world around you, I really don’t think you’ll regret doing so, and I’m pretty sure that it’s all free to get in to as well, so what more could you possibly want...?

BIRD ON A SHEEP

Sheep, but no bird...

The other day I saw a bird on a sheep and thought to myself “Well, that’s something you don’t see every day…” although, to be fair, I don’t even see sheep every day either, although, living where I do, perhaps I see them more often than some. I paused for a moment to point it out, but, just a moment later, the bird hopped off the sheep and, to the eyes of the person I was pointing it out to, it merely became a bird next to a sheep, which is nowhere near as interesting, so they just had to take my word for it.

I didn’t even have the time to bring my camera to bear on this particularly strange moment, either, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it too, as I ponder once again upon “the pictures that got away…”

But not yet.

After all, there’s still that bird to consider… and, of course, that sheep.

It was lying there, in a soggy field, on a sunshiny day that seemed almost designed to mark the last of summer. It was, if it’s not too indelicate to mention it, a black sheep which rather made it stand out from its fellows in the field, or, at least it would have stood out if it hadn’t been, as I already mentioned, lying down.

The bird was a jackdaw, which meant that it, too, was black, which I only mention because it was, and not to cast any aspersions about whether it felt an affinity with the less than usual hue of the particular example of sheep-kind upon which it chose to alight.

Jackdaws do seem to be becoming ubiquitous these days. I can go almost anywhere in this country and be almost certain to see and hear a chorus of them lurking around in some tree or other, or on top of a building and even if I don’t see any other birds on my travels (which is, unfortunately, sometimes the very purpose of those journeys), the jackdaws will always be there, watching us watching them, like a permanent audience to our human follies and travails.

Number of species spotted: One.

So, to summarise, a jackdaw is not a rare thing to see, and to see a sheep is a slightly rarer thing, but to see a jackdaw on a sheep felt just a tiny bit unusual.

I watched it for a few seconds, because, up until I realised what it was, it was just some shapes moving unusually. I watched until those shapes formed into the sheep and the bird, and watched a little more as the bird pecked away at the back of the sheep foraging away for some meaty morsel or other which it had found, whilst the sheep seemed to just lie there, oblivious enough that I suspected for a moment that it might just be a dead sheep.

But then its ears flickered and all was well in its sheepish world, at least for the foreseeable or until the lorry came to take them all away.

Having decided that I wouldn’t just be pointing at a dead sheep, I took my moment to point it out, just as the jackdaw hopped to the ground, and so the shared moment was lost, although we did ponder for a moment upon the various examples in the natural world of the symbiotic relationship between certain creatures. Those egrets that perch on the back of buffalo, or the plovers which pick at the teeth of crocodiles, or the clown fish nestling amidst the deadly poisonous barbs of the anenome, or the cleaner shrimp lurking around in the mouths of eels, and I decided that it was probably not one of those relationships, otherwise it wouldn’t be all that unusual to see a bird on a sheep.

Perhaps it just wanted to keep its feet warm...?

DOCUMENTARY DAY

“Sunday is documentary day,” or rather, there’s no better day for settling down and watching a good documentary. The day just feels right for it and, you never know, we might just learn something from the experience as we try and clear the 1001 things that looked like they might be interesting but never got around to watching, and clear some space off the DVR.

To be honest, this phenomenon started on Saturday night, but as Sunday has become the day upon which we do the “documentary watching” thing, it tends to sound better to declare it to be documentary day than to holler “It’s a documentary 24 hour time segment that is starting on Saturday bit which will mostly occur on Sunday and will probably stretch to slightly more than 24 hours anyway…”

Mind you, if I have learned one thing from watching all those documentaries, the value of using the correct terminology ought to be more important to me. Accuracy in all things should be a prerequisite.

Saturday evening had started with us finally getting around to “Trevor Nunn on The Tempest” which was a quite fascinating look at Shakespeare’s last completed play which was part of the BBCs “Shakespeare” strand earlier on this year. We recorded a heck of a lot of it, but this was the first time that we’d sat down to watch any of it. And what fascinating stuff it was, such stuff, in fact, as dreams are made of, and now I really would like to see the play again, although the thing that I most learned was that you really, really, ought never to let actor’s speak about what they do, their motivation and justification and so forth. Time and again I found myself thinking, as they gushed on and on about nothing in particular, “Oh just stand over there and say your lines, luvvie…”

After this we leapt into Horizon’s “Are we good or evil?” which wasn’t all that much of a leap after all that “actorly wisdom” but it was fascinating to see an analysis of the genetics of psychopathy and to learn that some people are predisposed to wickedness, and most of those, if they aren’t drawn to the “universe changing” notion of ending other people’s lives, do seem to thrive in a big business environment.

I always suspected as much.

A jolly Saturday evening finished with a film about the murder of a policeman in Dallas in 1976 called “The Thin Blue Line” which was fascinating as it started with the viewer having little idea of who was who as they spoke direct to camera and, time and again, allowed their own words to condemn their actions. This was a massive condemnation of the justice system in the America of the 1970s, and had quite a lot to say about the death penalty, too. In the end, you were left with a very bitter feeling about the whole situation which, of course, also managed to remain ambiguous enough for you to remain as uncertain as to what really happened that night as any number of law enforcement officials must have done at the time. When the caption came up announcing that one of the contributors had indeed been executed in 2004, it was hard not to end the day heading to bed in a particularly sombre mood.

Sunday brought “The Two-Thousand Year Old Computer” onto our screen, although at first I wasn’t all that fussed about it and did the washing up instead, which was a mistake because it was all about one of those things that does actually fascinate me, the lost technologies of the ancient world. After all, just because we don’t think that they could possibly have had such devices doesn’t mean that they didn’t, because there were still brilliant minds at work back then, even if they didn’t have some of the advantages of modern science. If you chucked an iPhone into a tar pit tomorrow, what would future archaeologists make of it? Anyway, if you’ve never heard anything about the “Antikythera Mechanism” it’s well worth looking it up, because it might just change your opinion on a few things as we stand here on the precipice looking into a new dark age…

After that we had a triple bill of “Space” related programmes. “Do We Need the Moon?” - Well, unsurprisingly it turns out that we do, and we ought to be investing tin that bloke’s “solar panels” plan right now, by the way…; “Destination Titan” - The sacrifices made during a team of scientists 17 year quest to land their shoebox full of testing equipment onto a moon of Saturn one billion miles away; “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” – the history of the Soviet space programme which turned out to be a bit of an investigation into some religious claptrap being spouted by some cosmonaut cult or other, but was quite interesting nevertheless.

After tea, we returned to Shakespeare and watched Ethan Hawke, an American actor with whom I was unfamiliar, basically pitching to be allowed to have a go at playing Macbeth, in “Ethan Hawke on Macbeth” (See my note above about letting actors talk…). Of course, Macbeth is one of my favourite plays and there’s nothing I like better than to discuss it at length and out loud with an actor just before they go onstage, and then stroll back to the dressing rooms whistling all the way…

Really, the most interesting things that I found out about Ethan Hawke during the programme is that he’s friends with Richard Easton (who used to be in “The Brothers”), and the odd fact that they allowed him to manhandle a first folio without wearing gloves, but despite him, the Macbeth stuff was actually very interesting and a lot of the psychology linked straight back to that “Horizon” film from the day before.

Finally we sat through a double bill of “Simon Schama’s Shakespeare” which was much more my cup of tea; Proper history, proper theatre, proper kings and queens being up to no good, and all being reflected in the art of the times, and Simon even took a moment to send himself up by acting opposite Harriet Walter, which almost made me forgive him for letting the actors gush on a bit about finding their characters and the obvious smugness of the “smart set” as they went about their theatre-going.

Almost.