Week 17

It's been a week for discovering people.

I forgot to take a picture at the museum -
so this one's from the Natural History Museum website. 

On Wednesday I was persuaded to put my antisocial tendencies ('but I'd rather watch netflix with my cat') and go out to see Denis Jones  do a gig at the Old Granada Studios. Denis was of course great, but so was the company.

My friend Sian and I got chatting to Jenny who was rehearsing with the fabulous She choir , Jenny it turned out worked at the museum and is keen on blogging and minerals. I'm hoping to be able to connect up this blog with the Museum Blog that Jenny runs and to talk to Jenny a lot about rocks and minerals.

So today I had a good meeting with Debbie (Cat it turns out is stranded in Lumb Bank. Good for her!) and we ran through the improvements we need to make to the trading activity in the money gallery.

Then I went outside to enjoy the rain in the Rutherford Garden and got chatting to a really nice woman who was with a party of school children from Finland spending the week in Manchester. They were from Tampere, the 'Manchester of Finland'. She said the cold felt like home even if the rain didn't and I told her people were getting sunburned last week. She said that their children started school two years later - and I asked her was it true that they then learned their reading more quickly and more happily and she said yes.

Then I went to find Jenny, who introduced me to a dinosaur egg. It's not that big compared to a dinosaur. They grow a lot! Turns out that reptiles don't really stop growing in the way that mammals do - which is why you get some big old crocodiles.

So, is growing a kind of migration? I'm having to think about that - but I'm writing a poem about dinosaur eggs anyway.

Weeks 14-16

I've been in Barcelona, being unexpectedly unimpressed by Gaudi. However sitting in Parc Guell on the final morning watching the parrots pick the blossom off the cherry trees I managed to crack a problem that had been bugging me all week. How could I fit the story of Worsley Man into a narrative about journeys?

I'd originally wanted to include Lindow man in the series - partly due to a plea by Dominic for the inclusion of more human beings. I remember LIndow man being unearthed when I was a teenager. At the time we'd believed he was a traveller that had been mugged. Someone even wrote a letter to the paper complaining about his being sent to the Natural History museum in London rather than staying in Manchester. It was signed Pete Marsh. "I don't want to go to London. Last time I tried to go there I got robbed and garrotted." I paraphrase.

But over time it seems to have become more or less certain that Pete Marsh like many other 'bog bodies' was some sort of ritual killing, probably a sacrifice, right under the noses of the Romans who had banned such sacrifices. There's even evidence from finger nails and beard and bones and teeth that suggest that these human sacrifices were well-born and healthy and possibly either volunteered or were raised for sacrifice.

This is all so other, so incomprehensible that I realised the incredible jouney that Worsley Man and Lindow man have made. They have come to us from another time, from a civilisation with very little recorded history. Worsley Man is a time traveller. As are we all. We wait and time moves around us, like watching a moving train as we sit in a stationary train. Only Worsley Man has waited nearly two thousand years as time moves around him.

Now he, or his replica, sits in a case in the archaelogy section while people walk past on the way to see the mummies. I like him better than the mummies. I look at his face and wonder if that's the face of a man waiting patiently and trustingly to be killed.

Week 12 and 13

It's not that not much has been happening, it's that most of the stuff that's been happening has been somewhere in the recesses of my mind - and it's not pretty in there.

Dominic and I trialled the first section of the Hermes show at Stanley Grove Junior school. It was great fun - and I remembered all the words. The children had lots of interesting questions which was great - one of the things poetry should do is make people think. 

One of the things I did many years ago when I had a role as science co-ordinator for Creative Partnerships is take a load of scientist, artist and educators out to dinner to talk (at the Wapping Project, now I think closed - which housed the hydraulics lift the curtains of London's theatreland) I seem to remember we argued a lot about metaphor but one of the things we agreed on was the importance of questions. We came up with a little aphorism - the reward for asking questions, is not answers, it is more questions. Or something like that. As a science educator I believe that if you can keep children's ability to ask questions alive, they will learn beyond your expectations. #

The questions also gave me a direction to go with the writing. It's also given me a lot to think about around the Hermes character and the theatrics of the piece - which is a completely new area for me. 

So I've been doing some writing around the history of the solar system (the problem with these things is as you keep answering questions arising from questions, you find yourself going further and further back. I don't want to start at the Big Bang - I'll leave that to Stephen Hawking!) and today I've been to the museum for a tete a tete with my favourite meteorite, a big shiny, angular piece of iron that fell on Campo de Ciel in Argentina about 5000 years ago. I've developed a bit of an obsession with this meteorite, mostly because it's one of the things you can touch. It's older and from further away than anything I will ever touch and that fills me with wonder. All I have to do now is catch some of that wonder in a poem.....