I’ve done some fairly interesting things this month, and had planned to write posts for each of them — but, for whatever reason, none of them provided that particular spark to me. Maybe they just didn’t seem that interesting to explain to you, the reader, or maybe i didn’t know what to say about them except the obvious.
Nonetheless, it would be a shame for these events to pass into the annals of my journal without telling you about them. So! Here’s a brief summary of my unblogged July thus far.
I toddled off to Shildon to visit Locomotion, the local branch of the national railway museum. It’s the birthday of the railways, and thus boasts a disproportionate selection of anorak arcana — alas, you can’t go in the trains, but you get a pretty good look at the inside of Queen Alexandra’s royal train car, the erstwhile Birmingham maglev, and, most proudly, Stephenson’s Rocket.
Beamish1 has been newly crowned Museum of the Year, so there was no better time to check it out. I hadn’t properly explored their new fifties town yet — the chippie and the old houses are wonderful, but the record store, crammed up the stairs, across an anachronistically modern mezzanine, and down a grey corridor, leaves much to be desired. Nitpicks about balcony design aside, it’s as great as ever, and, somehow, well worth the £33(!!!!!) asking price.
Finally, just yesterday, i went off to an Elbow concert hosted in a ruined mediæval priory by the sea. Belting out “One Day Like This” in the fading dusk light with five thousand other people standing on the same hallowed ground where monks tried to figure out where baby eels came from is a top-ten human experience.
