Hats at the museum

I have a passion for obscure museum and there was no possible way I was going to pass up the The Stockport Hat museum. Especially when it's FREE! Well it's free if you don't want a tour of the machines, rather than wandering about yourself. I love hats, people don't wear them enough. So I actually enjoyed the historical hats on display. In paticular the 18th century lilac dandy top hats were truly vile, in every way. I wasn't so sure about all the hats for the kids to try on - my mother's voice was whispering 'nits nits' from the grave, so I passed up on the opportunity.

Who knows where felt comes from? I do! Who knows what invention started the slow decrease in the British tradition of hat wearing? I do! Wonderful museum - look what I learned. And I loved all the machinery - seeing how the felt become a gnome cap and then finally a top hat. The staff were really friendly, the interactive displays were fun and if you are interested in hat factory related family history, there is a lovely study room. Also the cafe is cheap and has the added bonus of being a charitable organisation. When I grow up I'm going to be a milliner, but for the moment I'm just going to wear more hats.

Historic toilets

Apologies for the absence, yet again my Christmas period was complicated with relatives going into hospital. Never fear though the mighty gingerbread project is not forgotten! It'll just have to be a pre-wedding-anniversary gingerbread extravaganza.

But onto important matters. Loos. The John Ryland library loos to be precise, which are AWESOME. Victorian in extremis. It's like walking into the past for a wee. Clearly other people feel the same sense of awe at the loos and there are signs up reminding them not to take photographs. However here is one from the Manchesterzedder's blog.

Of course the John Ryland Library is worth a vist anyday of the week. It is stunning and when I rule the world I shall live in it, happily polishing all the wood pannelling, reading books on cunning lecturns and naming all the gargoyles. Everything is beautiful in the church-like library building, built by the possibly gold-digging 3rd Mrs Ryland (She was a lot younger than her millionaire husband). Gold digging or not she was pretty smart insisting that her books be stored under electric lighting instead of gas whilst also being very picky about the doors and railings. In honour of the beauty of this place the modern extension is even tasteful. All libraries should look like this. All books should be stored like this. All loos should make you want to take a photograph.

Currywurst museum - taking the sausage?

(Picture from Spiegel online)

Berlin has a new currywurst museum. Why does all the best stuff open once you've left? I loved the month I lived in Berlin but I have to admit to only having one decent currywurst whilst there and never during my 3 years in the Rhurgebiet. For those of you unaware of this German delicacy, currywurst (or curried sausage) is essentially a chopped sausage with tomato ketchup and curry powder (German standard curry powder, so not hot atall.) I always preferred a good standard bratwurst im broetchen (sausage in a breadroll), especially when the bratwurst is 3 times the length of the bun, making the whole thing comedic.

I know about currywurst from reading The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm. It's a nice novella and Lena Brueker's tale of wartime romance and survival is a touching way to introduce the birth of Berlin's culinary masterpiece. Plus any book based on the invention of fast food snack has a certain uniqueness anyway.

The question remains however, why don't we have a Fish and Chips museum? I appreciate fish-and-chip's rise to fame is not quite so linked to post-war development and east/west clashes in a symbolic city, but there has to be some information worthy of an exhibition. The kids could play on the chip-frying simulator or giant map depicting mushy pea trends across the UK, whilst the adults consider the display on changing portion size and listen through vinegar bottle shaped headphones to interviews on the environmental impact of banning newspapers as wrapping. I'll write to the national lottery for funding shall I?

Videogame Nation - Videogaming is now exhibition worthy history and/or art?

Videogame Nation is an exhibition running at the fantastic Urbis in Manchester about the British video games industry (no Supermario here). It is accompanied by several talks and events relating to the videogaming industry. The exhibition is slickly put together with many games available to play, sketches, merchandise and game cover art. Parts include actual bus shelters for you to play you Nintendo DS in or an arcade style room for the arcade games as well as telephones that play recorded interviews. The walls are covered in snippets of gaming history, anecdotes and some worryingly pretentious quotes. ''Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other,' Charles Lamb' seems to be glorifying spending 4 hours straight on Tetris a bit too much if you ask me.

I have to admit that this is a great way to spend several hours on a rainy summer's day. The £3 entrance fee essentially lets you play limitless computer games, whilst indulging in some serious nostalgia. My friends' thrill at seeing 'Elite' again was strangely endearing and it offset the upset of seeing young children utterly amazed at the modern archaeological status of their beloved 'Jet Set Willy' . (Seriously, one kids was staring at Micromachines like it was a Viking helmet). We walked through the rooms to the endless cries of 'I remeber that!' and managed to get re-addicted to Lemmings. I'm afraid a lot of the nostalgia was lost on me. I never got into our Amstrad CPC 464 and my parents neither understood it nor encouraged me. I got pretty good at anything that involved viciously hitting the space bar (Bubba Bubba and Harrier Attack) and then left the world of computer games until as a procrastinating university student we were re-introduced. However at the exhibition, I triumphed in Sensible Soccer after brilliantly coming across the notion of hitting only two buttons very quickly for 2 minutes, which is exactly how I succeeded at any videogame in the 80s.

The exhibition, laid out from conception to today, underlined the meteoric speed and development of the gaming industry. I'm not sure however, that it did much else. The art of various magazines and disc covers, were sporadically dotted about but never alluded to as being part of a greater artistic trend. A shame really because the art of video games and it's influences could have been very interesting. Towards the end the recent issues of violent games, women gamers and the health concerns relating to gaming were almost cursorily shown. Which left me feeling that the exhibition seemed unsure as to it's purpose. Videogame Nation was a history lesson, art gallery and playroom all in one but it felt like a thesis that had failed to pose, argue or attempt to answer a question. It was a lot of fun, a lot of detail and information, but I'm not sure in bringing all these games together it achieved anything except saying that videogames have developed....a lot.