Tuesday 12th August – What We Did On Our School Trip

Today we had a family day out.  My mum and dad came over to take us out on a trip.  It was very like going on a school trip.  In fact, their people carrier bore an uncanny resemblance to a school bus, which probably explains why I was starving hungry by the time we arrived and it was only eleven o’clock.  I should have eaten my sandwiches in the car park in the time honoured tradition.

We went to Snibstone museum which bears the exciting tag of ‘Discovery Centre’.  This is of course what is known in the trade as ‘Marketing Bollocks’.  The only thing you discover at Snibstone is that most of the displays are broken and they sell the same overpriced sandwiches as every other museum in the county.  It’s a shame really.  It purports to be a kind of mini version of the science museum, and is built in a disused colliery.  It bears no resemblance to the science museum at all.  It is like a hideous hybrid museum built by scientists after a pissed night out where they think that welding a donkey and a vole together is going to be the best idea in the history of drunken ideas ever.

You walk in to an experiment zone, where nearly all the exhibits are now broken or in the process of being broken by bored teenagers.  You walk further into a play area where most of the books are ripped and the toys are broken.  You move swiftly on to a display of old vehicles which nobody is allowed to touch.  There is a beam engine which only works when there is a solar eclipse and is otherwise stationery.  There are a lot of ‘coal’ based exhibits with fake coal mines and hard hats.  There are large lumps of real coal lying around.  These are fascinating, because while everything else is roped off and has huge signs bearing the legend: ‘If you breathe gently on this we will march you to the firing squad immediately to meet your maker’, the coal is just lying around within easy reach of small children who can clamber all over it and get hideously grubby.

Outside is a play park built around the colliery.  You can go on trips down the mine, in the cage should you so desire.  I can think of nothing worse than dropping thousands of feet in the pitch dark with three small children in a confined space, which is impenetrable and filthy. I’d rather spend the afternoon shut in the cupboard under our stairs.  I hate going underground.  I once went on a trip to the Blue John Caverns in Derbyshire on a school trip when I was ten.  I hated every minute of it and only managed to hang on to my sanity by thinking about cake and how embarrassed I would be if I gave in to my primal urge to rush about aimlessly, waving my hands in the air and shrieking: ‘Get me out of here!’

The final part of the museum is a display of fashion through the ages.  There are lots of corsets in a case, a dress by Azzedine Alaia and a lot of Victorian mourning gear.  It’s all very bizarre.  None of it really works at a conceptual level and hardly anything works at a practical level.  At one ‘interactive’ display, the kids were supposed to build runways of pipes between two walls and push golf balls down the pipes from one wall to the other.  It was very fiddly and kept breaking every third section of pipe, which drove them mad with frustration.  There was a man working like an industrious but bald beaver at one side, constructing his own pipework.  I kept my eye on him, as there were no children with him, nor within radius and I always find it rather odd to see lone adults at events or spaces which are clearly allocated as things for children.  My mum had already clocked him and we were circling like hawks, when Oscar found out just the way to get rid of him.  He bumbled up to him, laid his hand on the man’s carefully built construction and brought it crashing to the ground in a really friendly way.  I thought the bloke was going to kill him.  He was absolutely furious.  He got up, bunched his fists and glared at Oscar.  I really think he would have said or done something except for the fact that he became aware about three seconds later that mum and I had him in our laser beam sights and would have had no compunction in slicing his head off neatly at the first sign of trouble.  He stamped off in a snit and was thankfully never seen again.

Despite our adult disappointment, the kids had a lovely time running around failing to look at the exhibits, even though my dad patiently tried to get them excited about some plane hanging about two inches from the ceiling and only visible if you climbed a ladder and tipped your head so far back it fell off your neck.

We would have left sooner, because we were all starving after about twenty minutes but we had forgotten my dad’s terrible fascination with museum labelling.  He insists on reading every single label in the entire building, even the ones in braille and the ones for the toilet.  It slows us down considerably and means that he does one lap of the museum for our forty three.  He was amazed that I hadn’t read about the beam engine’s capacity to ‘beam’ things.  I explained that having to whip by all the exhibits at four hundred miles per hour whilst trying to drag a small boy out of a coal mining exhibit and growing two extra pairs of arms and eight eyes to field the other two children means that I no longer have the luxury of reading the labels, even if I wanted to.

We decided to avoid the overpriced sandwiches and head to Calke Abbey for the afternoon.  Calke Abbey is a National Trust property and is one of those enormous, crazy stately homes that was owned by the same family for about a billion years.  They never threw anything away and then just gave the whole lot to the National Trust when they had filled it and decided to move to a sheltered housing unit in Cromer.  We ate National Trust over priced sandwiches instead, although these are of a higher quality than the ones available in regular museums and you can eat them with bottles of elderflower presse and twigs.  I sat and marvelled that there really is a type of ‘National Trust’ people.  There was a great deal of crumpled linen, some very sensible shoes and a lot of Boden mixed with tweed.  I was wearing my Red or Dead t-shirt with a sticky handprint from my son on the front and got my Diesel trainers wet in a puddle.  We stood out like a sore thumb.

We went on a tour of the house in the afternoon.  It was a ‘live’ exhibit afternoon which means they had lots of volunteers dressed in period costume and you could chat to them.  The girls had treasure hunt and questionnaire sheets and had a wonderful time galloping about and chatting to the understairs maid about how oppressed she had been.  It was actually fabulous except for the fact that it is not in any way buggy friendly and you have to keep your babies under strict control at all times as the house is still being renovated, and is full of ’stuff’, all of which is very, extremely precious and seems to exist only at two year old height.

Oscar didn’t respect the nice red ropes.  He didn’t like the people dressing up.  He shouted at the lady of the house who was dressed in a crinoline and was wearing a doily on her head. She said: ‘Hello young man,’ in a very genteel voice.  He shouted: ‘Aaaarghhh.  Monst!’ and tried to fight her like for like by sticking his arms out like claws and shouting ‘RRRRAAAAHHHHHH!’ in her face.  They don’t get that much in the National Trust. It’s not that kind of period costume.

I ended up having to manhandle a two stone, wriggling boy past all the other Trustites, some of whom clearly didn’t approve of the under sixties visiting historical monuments.  It is a very large house, with miles of corridors.  We galloped through them.  My main impressions were that there were an extraordinary amount of stuffed, dead things.  Every room had cases and cases of dead, glassy eyed rabbits frisking about fake Victorian grassy knolls or stuffed pelicans golloping down stuffed fish.  Oscar wanted to free them all and play with them.  I felt sure that the custodians of the house would not approve.

The only place where he could safely be allowed to roam was the extensive cellars and underground passages.  I was delighted by the time we fetched up there.  My arms were dropping off and I was knackered.  I put him down, thinking he would love to run up and down in the dank, dark, tunnels.  Instead he had hysterics, insisted he had seen a man and he ‘No like it.’ and demanded a cuddle immediately.  I cuddled him through half a mile of wet tunnels, only to emerge in the car park, miles from the house.  This would have been very convenient except that mum and dad were miles behind with the girls, somewhere in the bowels of the house, and the buggy was by the front desk, a good ten minute walk through the grounds.  I staggered back to the buggy and collapsed in a heap while Oscar ran round and round the sun dial on the front lawn to a chorus of disapproving stares from the visitors.  The actual staff thought he was lovely and encouraged his galloping.  I don’t think they get out much.

We all fell asleep in the car on the way home, except grandad, who was still being amazed at the fact that I didn’t get a chance to read all the labels on the Elizabethan state bed as I zipped passed…