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Non-Fiction
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| Museyrooms | |
| By patterjack | ||||||||||||
| 03 February 2007 | ||||||||||||
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Museyrooms As a long time lover of puns , I have dipped into James Joyce's Finnegans Wake time and time again since I used it as part of the topic of my English Honours thesis way back in my heady youth in 1949 . From it has come my ( uncapitalised ) patterjack nom de plume , and the title for this piece . I have always liked the term museyroom in lieu of museum and have rather preciously used it often in talking and writing . During our overseas trip we wandered into many a museum , and mused our way through lots of galleries of antiquities . and modernities as well . Oddly , we spent little time in the British Museum itself , and the only reason I can give for that is that we spent much more time in the art galleries of London than in there . The art galleries provided my daughter and me with one foolish little game . We were overwhelmed by the number of small paintings of Dutch canals and skaters that the galleries contained , and were always amused to find the figures within them with one leg cocked up as the subject swung along over the frozen canal or pond . So , in the quiet of the sacrosanct rooms , passing visitors would often hear Hey up ! here's another leg up ! delivered in a bold Oz accent as we competed in finding the most of such paintings for the day . We did of course see quite a few museums . The very first was in York , with its wonderful recreations of the city's past . The Viking centre was a particular favourite of mine . I envied the long history shown , though some of our own local , especially the rural , museums in Australia now have similar trends. Somebody told us that above all we should visit the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford , if we were to go to that city . It was one of the most pleasant , and at the same time amazing , visits we made. I still sometimes check out the description of the displays on its net site , and refresh my memory of its incredibly varied collections . I was totally gobsmacked by the number of disparate objects the old gent had had collected , and for some reason I am still entranced by the thought of a collection of pigeon whistles ! Another University museum provided an insight into how one student , later a professor , earned pocket money . He wove little rectangular shields of a reed material , which were placed in beds during the day , attracting bed bugs , which were then tapped out before bedtime and disposed of , perhaps humanely . Small moments , but a big museum moment was the chance to look upon the Venus De Milo , as well as La Gioconda , but unlike Stephen Dedalus I had no desire to write my name upon the backside of the former . And while in Berlin to see a remarkable couple of drama performances I made sure that I saw in reality the bust of my historical pin up girl , Nefertiti , with whom I fell in love when I saw her picture illustration in one of my Ancient History texts at university. The Greek museums were breathtakingly splendid in their contents , and I must admit that I was also very much taken with the gold exhibited in Dublin , and the old gems , roughly polished but still very beautiful , in the Munich Museum. One interesting piece of serendipity was when I had to visit Walsall in order to meet up with putative distant family relation . That by the way is another story with some strange quirks . While we waited for confirmation of a hotel reservation we discovered that there is a very large Epstein collection there . Not the only chance occurrence either , because I also found by accident that there was a large CAE nearby that fitted neatly into my drama study plans . Too many museums of too many kinds to tell of them all . So . Two partly Oz-persona-oriented tales to finish with . In Milan we were looking through the very crowded La Scala Museum , crowded with objects rather than people at the time. There were , besides us , two quiet women -- no doubt from a tour -- studying the contents . We picked up on their Oz accents , but , under a long standing agreement between us not to make contact with other Australians unknown to us , we simply wandered quietly ourselves. Then , in the doorway appeared a figure -- classically arrayed in stubby shorts , tee shirt and thongs , calling out raucously , Hey you pair , get a bloody move on , the bloody bus is bloody going in two bloody minutes ! All this long before Crocodile Dundee ! The other occasion was in Bath , where we were exploring the city's past . My wife insists on reading every placard explaining the exhibits . I read them much faster and was well ahead of her , so , waiting for her to catch up , I leaned back against an exhibit case in the centre of an aisle. An English gentleman , looking into the wall case opposite me with his hands clasped behind his back , stepped backwards , and his hands contacted a very personal part of my anatomy . He turned and apologised profusely in a most embarrassed manner . I was mightily amused really , and could not resist commenting in my best exaggerated Oz accent -- She's right , mate. I ain't been touched up like that in years ! He fled ! More to my amusement , when we left the building , he and his wife and three children were also leaving . He took one look at the vulgar colonial , and pushed wife and children fast along the pavement within a sheltering arm in order to avoid the uncultured beast . A contribution I have made to relations with the Mother Country .
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i wanna read more of yours..poetry..haha..especially poetry
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