Weekending
I've had a very lovely weekend, centred around a visit from my old chum hollyione (aka Amy), her very-nearly-six-year-old daughter Holly and her partner Pete. It's always nice to have guests, as it provides a great excuse to go off and do fun local things which you don't normally bother with on your own, and it's especially nice when those guests are such congenial people to have around. Amy, Pete and I seemed to spend most of our time joking, laughing and sharing our enjoyment of the various things we went to see and do, while Holly was extremely well-behaved - and of course also full of laughter, high-spirits and funny observations in the way that six-year-old children usually are.
Our main excursion was to the National Media Museum in Bradford - the same place that I go to for the Fantastic Films Weekend, but this time in its everyday capacity as a museum. I've looked around the exhibits a bit while there previously for the festivals, but they're more extensive than I'd realised, and really well-designed for children. We played vintage video and arcade games, looked at televisions, video recorders and cameras from the earliest days of TV to the present day, played around in a mock-television studio, pretended to read the news, messed around with strange mirrors and lighting effects, and watched an episode of Mr. Benn together - a nostalgia trip for the three adults, but a new discovery for Holly. Amy was amazed that it was all available to visit for free, and she was right - we're very lucky to have it.
Being out with a child certainly makes you see things in a different way, though. One part of the museum had a small projection room where a looped sequence of 'iconic television moments' was being screened. As we walked in, they were on the moon landing, so we thought that looked interesting and sat down for more. But when you're in there with a not-quite-six-year-old child, you don't half realise quickly how many of the epoch-making events of the television age have basically consisted of people dying horribly, often at the hands of other people. We sat there through the Challenger disaster, the collapse of the Twin Towers, Live-Aid and accompanying starving children, the Hillsborough disaster, and so on and so forth. Occasionally there were events which were straightforwardly happy and positive, like the afore-mentioned moon landing or the coronation of the Queen. But even some of the positive moments were only really positive because they were over-turning awful things - like the fall of the Berlin wall, for example.
And somehow or other - probably because I'd led us into that particular room in the first place - I found myself falling into the role of having to explain all the great events going on on the screen to a wide-eyed Holly sitting on the seat beside me (with able assistance from Amy in the trickier moments). So there was a lot of, "Um, yes, this was a very sad event - these people hoped to go up into space, but unfortunately their ship exploded; and lots of people were working in these towers, but some other people flew aeroplanes into them and made them catch fire; and these children don't have enough food to eat, so these people are trying to raise some money to help them..." And then great relief when a more cheerful event came on, like Charles and Diana's wedding - "Ooh, yes, look Holly! This lady is getting married to a prince - look at her beautiful dress!" - alas followed a few clips later by footage of a hearse driving through central London, and us having to launch into a whole new level of explanations - "Ah, yes, right - do you remember that lady we saw getting married a few minutes ago? Well..." It was challenging, to say the least, but somehow a lot more fun trying to make it all understandable for a little child than just sitting there nodding passively at the same old clips we'd all seen a hundred times before.
Afterwards we wandered through a surprisingly sunny Bradford, where the locals were out and about enjoying a street market and a vintage car rally, and where Amy bought Prosecco while Pete was given a free two-minute Indian head massage. Then we returned home for dinner and a local cinema trip to see Shrek Forever After, which I shall write up separately, and which Holly seemed to enjoy. And today we indulged ourselves in the charity shops of Headingley, had a nice lunch together and walked home past some Scottish country dancers strutting their stuff at a school fête, before my guests had to pile themselves in the car and hit the road for the journey back home to Bristol.
I should add that in the evenings while little Holly slumbered upstairs, we adults settled down with Prosecco and G&Ts to enjoy some more grown-up activities. Well... slightly more grown-up, anyway. We played a few rounds of Eat Poop You Cat, for which I owe a huge debt to whatifoundthere for alerting me to the game's existence. Unlike her, I can't scan our efforts, because my scanner is currently bust, but I can tell you that we collectively managed to transform the simple phrase "Highway to Hell" into the sentence, "You can listen to great music along the road to hell, but the reception on your car radio may be affected by lightning storms", and also "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" (Amy's contribution, not mine!) into "Dog punt atom mother".
We also watched a couple of episodes of Blake's 7 - though unfortunately not starting with the first one, which would have been the most logical for me, as it was missing from Amy's box-set. That meant that it took me a while to tune in to the characters, but by the end of the second episode I'd definitely warmed to Cally, Jenna, Avon and Vila (for rather different reasons in each case). I also appreciated the way that the stories didn't always end neatly or happily in the same way that they do on Doctor Who (not that I dislike that in Who - but it's nice to see a different approach). I've still got a lot of Doctor Who to watch (and write up for that matter), but I'm definitely up for some more Blake's 7 at some point.
So, yes - a great weekend. I'm a bit physically tired now, but mentally refreshed and ready to face the week. Wonder if that will last into tomorrow morning? ;-)
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Our main excursion was to the National Media Museum in Bradford - the same place that I go to for the Fantastic Films Weekend, but this time in its everyday capacity as a museum. I've looked around the exhibits a bit while there previously for the festivals, but they're more extensive than I'd realised, and really well-designed for children. We played vintage video and arcade games, looked at televisions, video recorders and cameras from the earliest days of TV to the present day, played around in a mock-television studio, pretended to read the news, messed around with strange mirrors and lighting effects, and watched an episode of Mr. Benn together - a nostalgia trip for the three adults, but a new discovery for Holly. Amy was amazed that it was all available to visit for free, and she was right - we're very lucky to have it.
Being out with a child certainly makes you see things in a different way, though. One part of the museum had a small projection room where a looped sequence of 'iconic television moments' was being screened. As we walked in, they were on the moon landing, so we thought that looked interesting and sat down for more. But when you're in there with a not-quite-six-year-old child, you don't half realise quickly how many of the epoch-making events of the television age have basically consisted of people dying horribly, often at the hands of other people. We sat there through the Challenger disaster, the collapse of the Twin Towers, Live-Aid and accompanying starving children, the Hillsborough disaster, and so on and so forth. Occasionally there were events which were straightforwardly happy and positive, like the afore-mentioned moon landing or the coronation of the Queen. But even some of the positive moments were only really positive because they were over-turning awful things - like the fall of the Berlin wall, for example.
And somehow or other - probably because I'd led us into that particular room in the first place - I found myself falling into the role of having to explain all the great events going on on the screen to a wide-eyed Holly sitting on the seat beside me (with able assistance from Amy in the trickier moments). So there was a lot of, "Um, yes, this was a very sad event - these people hoped to go up into space, but unfortunately their ship exploded; and lots of people were working in these towers, but some other people flew aeroplanes into them and made them catch fire; and these children don't have enough food to eat, so these people are trying to raise some money to help them..." And then great relief when a more cheerful event came on, like Charles and Diana's wedding - "Ooh, yes, look Holly! This lady is getting married to a prince - look at her beautiful dress!" - alas followed a few clips later by footage of a hearse driving through central London, and us having to launch into a whole new level of explanations - "Ah, yes, right - do you remember that lady we saw getting married a few minutes ago? Well..." It was challenging, to say the least, but somehow a lot more fun trying to make it all understandable for a little child than just sitting there nodding passively at the same old clips we'd all seen a hundred times before.
Afterwards we wandered through a surprisingly sunny Bradford, where the locals were out and about enjoying a street market and a vintage car rally, and where Amy bought Prosecco while Pete was given a free two-minute Indian head massage. Then we returned home for dinner and a local cinema trip to see Shrek Forever After, which I shall write up separately, and which Holly seemed to enjoy. And today we indulged ourselves in the charity shops of Headingley, had a nice lunch together and walked home past some Scottish country dancers strutting their stuff at a school fête, before my guests had to pile themselves in the car and hit the road for the journey back home to Bristol.
I should add that in the evenings while little Holly slumbered upstairs, we adults settled down with Prosecco and G&Ts to enjoy some more grown-up activities. Well... slightly more grown-up, anyway. We played a few rounds of Eat Poop You Cat, for which I owe a huge debt to whatifoundthere for alerting me to the game's existence. Unlike her, I can't scan our efforts, because my scanner is currently bust, but I can tell you that we collectively managed to transform the simple phrase "Highway to Hell" into the sentence, "You can listen to great music along the road to hell, but the reception on your car radio may be affected by lightning storms", and also "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" (Amy's contribution, not mine!) into "Dog punt atom mother".
We also watched a couple of episodes of Blake's 7 - though unfortunately not starting with the first one, which would have been the most logical for me, as it was missing from Amy's box-set. That meant that it took me a while to tune in to the characters, but by the end of the second episode I'd definitely warmed to Cally, Jenna, Avon and Vila (for rather different reasons in each case). I also appreciated the way that the stories didn't always end neatly or happily in the same way that they do on Doctor Who (not that I dislike that in Who - but it's nice to see a different approach). I've still got a lot of Doctor Who to watch (and write up for that matter), but I'm definitely up for some more Blake's 7 at some point.
So, yes - a great weekend. I'm a bit physically tired now, but mentally refreshed and ready to face the week. Wonder if that will last into tomorrow morning? ;-)
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.