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March 7th, 2009
08:54 pm - Songs, Shanties and Sailing
Today we went to Liverpool's Maritime Museum. It was good fun, if a little badly-organised (I often found I was learning about events backwards because of the bad-signposting and lack of any sort of guide as to in which order to view the exhibits) and occasionally badly lit. And mum laughed because the guestbook had a pencil attatched with wire to the wall ("You can tell where you are!" were her gleeful, if ill-timed words).
A lot of my time was also spent wallowing happily in intertextual references.
We saw the Seized! exhibition about Customs and Excise some of which was funny (for example anything involving reference to the Moonshiners lead me to hum a little of "Gather up the pots and the old tin can, the mash, the corn, the barley and the bran. Run like the divvil from the excise man, keep the smoke from rising,Barney"- The Hills of Connemara. And some was harrowingly awful, like a cabinet full of recent confiscated goods (bear bile, pickled baby cobras, a wolf's head, a cheetah skin, baby elephant tusks, turtle soup etc) and the part on drug and gun smuggling and the piles and piles of weapons (guns, knives, knuckledusters).
The Art and the Sea and the Emigration sections were equally fascinating, as was the somewhat scrappy but no less enjoyable Magical History Tour about the history of Liverpool itself.
I was particularly interested in learning about the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania the latter of which I only knew from the rather jolly verse in 'My Brother Sylveste' ("Oh he saw the Lusitania in distress. What did he do? He put the Lusitania on his chest. Big Chest. Swallowed all the water in the sea and he walked to Italy.")
The Naval Warfare section held less fascination from me, although I would like to see it again, when there aren't a small army of young boys who were particularly enthusiastic about looking at the torpedoes and quite knowledgable about different U-Boat models. Their enthusiasm was endearing and macabre, although the noise and the bustle was rather distracting. As always I gravitated towards the 'individualism' parts - the stories of notable individuals, property recovered belonging to so-and-so who were honeymooners on the Titanic, or the letter home of a young Naval soldier who would later recieve medals for bravery, or recieved a medal after losing both his legs and having them removed in bad conditions without anaesthetic. Or a propaganda notice calling on Irish people to riot in the streets after the "callous hanging of our countrymen".
One part of the warfare bit I did find intriguing was the short part about the Mine Sweepers...mostly because Uncle Jimmy did that during the war, although Mum doesn't know what company he was in.
I'm right tired out now of course, but I enjoyed myself even though the cafe wasn't up to much and annoyingly the gift shop was quite un-useful. I'd wanted to splurge on a picture of something I'd seen but there wasn't really a lot to choose from. Ah well.
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