Week 9

Things are starting to step up a notch. Debbie and I worked on the card game based around the living cultures and money galleries, which we're going to be trying out on a group of guinea kids in a couple of weeks.

And on Monday Dominic and I are going to be working on the draft of my Hermes verse ready to try something out on a local school the week after.

I also looked round the museum to contemplate what the future element of my set of poems might be. Mostly I was looking at the snowy sky through the glass roof and wondering if we needed some kind of Great Glass Elevator.

There's a shocking exhibit in the vivarium with lots of chopped down trees and no animals at all. That's one future. There's also on the other end of the same floor an aquaponics system - a closed system where bacteria digest fish poo into food for mint. It's all very peaceful and harmonious. That's a vision of the future too.

And in the money gallery there's an amazing machine that allows you to feel your way round virtual objects. Partly it's for visually impaired people - but it's also a different way of having other people experience objects, and a way of exploring objects theoretically from the other side of the world. It's a very strange experience, poking your way round a rather vicious looking pig skull and being able to feel how deep the holes are and which go right through and which don't. (There were all sorts of lovely vases but naturally I'd rather poke round a pig skull!) So a world in which we experience things differently and in which we are differently connected. That's a future too.

But the future is unscripted. It is territory to which the map is not yet drawn. It is a story which young people will write for themselves. I'd like to help them understand that. Without scaring the bejeezus out of them, or apologising too abjectly for the fact that we're handing a difficult present to them.

But on a lighter note there's a parcel waiting in the post office for me. I'm hoping it's rubber snakes - all the way from Hong Kong. Can snakes have a carbon footprint if they don't have feet?