Museum memories
The IndieWeb blog carnival this month is being hosted by James on the topic of Museum memories which is so precisely up my street.
I've been very lucky to go to many great museums and I've written about some of my favourites on my history and heritage page. My default thing to do when visiting a town is museums.
We went to museums a lot as kids. My dad was very into history and science and my mum was a teacher so we often went on recces of places she was taking her pupils. Regulars included our local city museum, a nearby science museum (since closed), the local Roman ruins museum, lots of other Roman ruins, a science museum near my grandparents, stately homes.
My first thought for the prompt though was a trip to London and the British Museum when I was probably ten or eleven years old. I have documentary evidence of what I was most interested in at that time because I took photos.
Grecian urns. Years before reading what is probably my favourite poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Here we have Mithras slaying a bull. Apparently I was already intending to study ancient and mediaeval history at university.
It does not appear my interests have changed all that much.
What I remember most, from this trip, is the sheer scale. The British Museum is vast and full of plunder from around the globe. I remember the sense that the world is a huge and wondrous place with this amazing history.
And from the same trip, a bonus not-museum: horse poop at Horseguards. Ten-year-olds have correct priorities.
