A television / museum sandwich
May. 16th, 2011 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe week of watching too much television continues into its third week; luckily, "too much" means "more than I am used to" and "too much" means "where did that evening go?" and even "too much" means "I don't regret any of it"...
Saturday night was Eurovision, and we invited friends round to help us watch it; which was just as well, because on the whole it was a pretty dull contest. We found ourselves supporting Moldova, because we could remember which one they were (not for the song, but for the staging: the pointed hats, the unicycling fairy, the circus music). We felt sorry for Spain, who had played by the rules and entered a chirpy little piece of Europop, only to discover that nobody voted for it, and would have liked to like the French entry (because it was so perfectly perverse: how could you be less Eurovision than a bloke with an operatic voice singing in Corsican?*) but didn't. Craig Murray's description pretty much nails it (and the comments will lead you down the byways of pointy hattedness and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (with especial reference to the ceramic cow on wheels).
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desperance stayed until Sunday morning, and help us to eat his apple and cinnamon bread with his Vintage Oxford Marmalade, and to beat the Saturday crossword into submission. Then he went home, and we looked round and realised that the bright if breezy weather of the last couple of days had given way to grey skies and faint but perceptible showers. So we decided that our walk had better be somewhere where we'd find shelter if we needed it, set off for a National Trust property in Northumberland and decided at the last minute (as we drove past the signs on the motorway) to go to Beamish Museum instead (we've been promising ourselves for some time that we would invest in annual tickets and spend some time at Beamish).
It was a good decision; we enjoyed our visit very much. There semed to be less walking that I'd remembered, and not just becausedurham_rambler kept saying "Let's take the tram / train...". The site is very cleverly laid out, so that it feels quite rural as you walk, say, from the waggonway to the town, but the distances are not great. On the other hand, we were on our feet for most of the day, and saw maybe half of what there was to see. It's over ten years since we last visited the museum, and the collection has grown. We knew this from walking the public footpaths which cross the site, from which we had seen the waggonway and Pockerley Old Hall; and the town has acquired new shops, and a bank and a Masonic Hall. There were also more staff than I remembered wandering around in period costume, ready to talk to you: the young men who drove the train, the woman who had just baked some cinnamon biscuits and would we like to try them, the men glimpsed across the fields with the muck waggon. I took a huge number of pictures, and can't decide which one best encapsulates the day: so here's something slightly random, because I love the texture (and the sentiment:
All this, and we were still home in time to settle down with a glass of wine and watch The Doctor's Wife, which like everyone else I enjoyed a whole lot. There was a moment when I thought "Oh, here we go again" Message from a Time Lord! But all the Time Lords are dead! Oh, no they're not! Oh, yes they are! etc. But we got past that, and it was all fun (biting: like kissing only there's a winner) and the rather irritatingly teaserish title (is he going to explain any of the hints about River Song? No, of course he isn't, not at this stage in the series) turned out to be a way of pulling the rug out from under that whole game, because of course now Mr Gaiman points it out, we all know who the Doctor's Significant Other is... There've been quite a few Doctor Who stories that I've enjoyed watching, but as the final credits roll I start picking holes. This one still works for me a day after we watched it.
And as if that weren't enough television, we carried on and watched Vera: this episode was The Crow Trap, probably my favourite of the books, which is usually a recipe for not liking an adaptation. And it's a long and complex book, and even at feature film length, a dramatisation is going to have to leave a lot out (including a couple of plot points whose absence left dangling threads). Despite that, I thought this was the best yet of a very watchable series.
*I miss the days when everyone sang in their own language...
Saturday night was Eurovision, and we invited friends round to help us watch it; which was just as well, because on the whole it was a pretty dull contest. We found ourselves supporting Moldova, because we could remember which one they were (not for the song, but for the staging: the pointed hats, the unicycling fairy, the circus music). We felt sorry for Spain, who had played by the rules and entered a chirpy little piece of Europop, only to discover that nobody voted for it, and would have liked to like the French entry (because it was so perfectly perverse: how could you be less Eurovision than a bloke with an operatic voice singing in Corsican?*) but didn't. Craig Murray's description pretty much nails it (and the comments will lead you down the byways of pointy hattedness and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (with especial reference to the ceramic cow on wheels).
desperance stayed until Sunday morning, and help us to eat his apple and cinnamon bread with his Vintage Oxford Marmalade, and to beat the Saturday crossword into submission. Then he went home, and we looked round and realised that the bright if breezy weather of the last couple of days had given way to grey skies and faint but perceptible showers. So we decided that our walk had better be somewhere where we'd find shelter if we needed it, set off for a National Trust property in Northumberland and decided at the last minute (as we drove past the signs on the motorway) to go to Beamish Museum instead (we've been promising ourselves for some time that we would invest in annual tickets and spend some time at Beamish).It was a good decision; we enjoyed our visit very much. There semed to be less walking that I'd remembered, and not just because
durham_rambler kept saying "Let's take the tram / train...". The site is very cleverly laid out, so that it feels quite rural as you walk, say, from the waggonway to the town, but the distances are not great. On the other hand, we were on our feet for most of the day, and saw maybe half of what there was to see. It's over ten years since we last visited the museum, and the collection has grown. We knew this from walking the public footpaths which cross the site, from which we had seen the waggonway and Pockerley Old Hall; and the town has acquired new shops, and a bank and a Masonic Hall. There were also more staff than I remembered wandering around in period costume, ready to talk to you: the young men who drove the train, the woman who had just baked some cinnamon biscuits and would we like to try them, the men glimpsed across the fields with the muck waggon. I took a huge number of pictures, and can't decide which one best encapsulates the day: so here's something slightly random, because I love the texture (and the sentiment:All this, and we were still home in time to settle down with a glass of wine and watch The Doctor's Wife, which like everyone else I enjoyed a whole lot. There was a moment when I thought "Oh, here we go again" Message from a Time Lord! But all the Time Lords are dead! Oh, no they're not! Oh, yes they are! etc. But we got past that, and it was all fun (biting: like kissing only there's a winner) and the rather irritatingly teaserish title (is he going to explain any of the hints about River Song? No, of course he isn't, not at this stage in the series) turned out to be a way of pulling the rug out from under that whole game, because of course now Mr Gaiman points it out, we all know who the Doctor's Significant Other is... There've been quite a few Doctor Who stories that I've enjoyed watching, but as the final credits roll I start picking holes. This one still works for me a day after we watched it.
And as if that weren't enough television, we carried on and watched Vera: this episode was The Crow Trap, probably my favourite of the books, which is usually a recipe for not liking an adaptation. And it's a long and complex book, and even at feature film length, a dramatisation is going to have to leave a lot out (including a couple of plot points whose absence left dangling threads). Despite that, I thought this was the best yet of a very watchable series.
*I miss the days when everyone sang in their own language...
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Date: 2011-05-19 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 10:24 am (UTC)