POMPEII LIVE

On Tuesday, June the 18th, I was fortunate enough to attend the first of the British Museum's "Live" events which were being beamed to various cinemas around the country in much the same way as certain theatrical events I have attended recently have also been.

A few weeks earlier, when we had first seen the advertisements for this event, I had, of course, got completely the wrong end of the stick about what sort of event it was going to be. I had visions of a camera crew walking around the Pompeii site and showing us around as if we were on a tourist visit which, of course, might be a very interesting thing to do one day, but sadly, for now it was not to be, even though that's how I described it to a few people before we got our tickets.

I became far wiser when it got mentioned on the BBC Website on the Thursday before the event and, having assumed that it would have sold out long ago, we found that "70%" of the tickets had been sold which rather implied that 30% would still be available and one swift kick-up of the laptop later and the deal was done and Tuesday evening would be spent in consideration of life and death in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum on that fateful day in AD49.

The British Museum are terribly good at this sort of thing, and the exhibition in London itself is a sure-fire hit, so this event, bringing the exhibition to a far wider audience than was previously thought possible, does seem like it might turn out to be another winner, and it is a good thing that these old institutions are embracing new forms of communication to get out into the big wide world and pique our interest. The museum staff even put out Tweets throughout the day adding links to help tell the story and build up the anticipation for the evening, which all helped to make it seem like an "event" in itself.

So, when the allotted hour came around, we shuffled into our seats punctually for a prompt seven o'clock start, noting with some trepidation that the front two rows were reserved for Manchester Grammar School and there was the prospect of a load of schoolkids turning up to spoil our fun, not that we needed to have worried, as not all that many of them actually showed up, perhaps preferring the "schools version" of the show which was planned for the following morning.

Still, as soon as Peter Snow bounded across the courtyard we knew that we were in pretty safe hands and, whilst it would never be quite the same as actually being in the building itself and looking at the artefacts "in the charcoal" as it were, I don't imagine that I would get personal tours from expert historians like Bettany Hughes and Mary Beard if I did that either.

The exhibition itself seems to be based around a set up in the form of a house, so that each room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the sewers, the courtyards, the gardens and so on are allowed to tell the story of what day-to-day life was like in a society that was so instantly smothered upon that fateful day that ironically it can tell us more about what living there was really like, from the loaves of bread to the linen cabinets once tragically transformed instantly into charcoal, than a couple of towns which would probably have been otherwise almost completely forgotten by the march of time might have done.

Several uncomfortable topics were touched upon, from the mostly brutal lives of the slaves, and about how some of the freed slaves were able to rise to the top of society, to the rather frank representations of sex in Pompeii, which seemed to be everywhere, but which were most startlingly displayed by a statue of the god Pan in flagrante delicto with a live goat...

In the beautiful garden room some rather beautiful garden frescoes were discussed with Rachel de Thame as our guide to the birds and the flowers painted upon the walls. I was initially wary of having this kind of "celebrity opinion" piece, but it worked really well and you do have to accept that having recognised experts in their fields chatting about such things does make the whole thing rather more accessible to the general public.

After all, it was a baker who was able to show us all what the ridge around the instantaneously carbonised loaf of bread most probably meant; A piece of string with a built-in carrying handle, which few of the rest of us might have thought of.

Obviously the most moving aspect was perhaps, of the people. The things that they grabbed as they fled, only to die on the beach. The family baked alive whilst hiding under the stairs, so that the imprints of their bodies could be preserved in the ash and reconstructed by pouring in plaster to fill the voids left behind by their bodies. The fact that someone wealthy enough to have a gold bracelet that weighs half a kilogram could do nothing to save themselves or their children.

An hour and a half passed incredibly swiftly and whilst, at times, I felt initially slightly disappointed by lack of sense of where I was within the museum, and got the nagging feeling that if I was actually there I might be stopping and looking just a little bit longer at each of the pieces, when I thought about it afterwards, I realised that it was actually very well done and, even if I didn't get to virtually walk the streets of Pompeii, this was probably about as close as I was likely to get without leaving the Manchester area.

That sense of the timeline to imminent destruction, and the "room by room" structure works very well at getting the story across and relating it to us in our modern lives, which is, I suppose, what history needs to do if it is to engage us. Later on, the debates and arguments for and against further excavation of the sites also proved very interesting and show that some things are not as simple as they might at first appear, although you can sense the craving to know what else there is to find out there.

On occasions, the whole event felt a little bit like a TV show that hadn't yet found a broadcaster, but I suppose that they could only do it this way otherwise they'd have had to close the place to the public for weeks. But then again, this was the first time that they had attempted to do anything like this, so there may very well maybe be a few tweaks to the format next time...

But, as an experiment in opening things up to new audiences, it was something of a minor triumph and I'm very glad we went...

IWM AGAIN

It’s true that whenever I know that I’m going to be in the vicinity of the Lowry Centre, I always take one of the cameras along, because I always find the architecture of that area particularly stimulating.

The ridiculous thing is that I always end up taking pretty much the same pictures, each and every time, another set of pictures of the same old views which serve little purpose other than to fill up even more space on the hard drive.

For some reason it’s always bloody freezing whenever we go there too, but I suppose we ought to ask ourselves whether we’re going there because it’s a cold day anyway, and we couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

Actually, we went to that part of Salford because we wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum. We’d heard about the new display of Sean Smith photographs which we quite fancied seeing, but, while we were there, we also got drawn in by the fascinating exhibition called “Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict” which, in amongst all the other images and ideas on display, mostly made me think of my dad serving as a medic in Burma, and all of the horrors he had to endure about which I never really knew anything.

Mind you, it also made me think of “M*A*S*H” which just goes to show how fickle and shallow I am.

And that bloke with half a face in “Boardwalk Empire…”

Still, despite my obvious ease at being drawn into pop-culture references whenever I’m faced with anything that’s too “real world” for me to cope with, it’s a bloody good, and rather moving, exhibition and is on until the end of August, and is well worth a look if you get the chance to go.

The Sean Smith pictures (in the gallery heading into the cafeteria) are pretty fantastic, too, by the way, which is just as well, seeing as that’s what we really went there to see.

Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, there was a group of French schoolchildren milling about the place on the day we went, which struck me as kind of weird.

Not the fact that you’d want to take a load of schoolkids to a museum, because that’s not odd at all, but I did wonder what they made of it all, because it is all seem from a terribly “British” point of view on the whole, especially when you make it to the gift shop, which must have seemed a little bit surreal to young and French eyes.

Of course the gift shop itself remains a necessary evil for any of these places to keep themselves afloat, but I can’t help feeling slightly bothered by the idea of turning the horrors of war and conflict into nick-nacks and souvenirs. Somehow it feels just “wrong” of us to be turning all that suffering into plastic toys and embossed notebooks because, despite the fact that it helps us not to forget, it does seem to trivialise it all a little, which is what we really ought never to do.

ANCIENT WORLDS

I don’t often look forward to heading on to the big city as a rule (as regular visitors to these pages will already know), but after catching the last twenty minutes of a TV programme called “Unsafe Sex in the City” the night before, the city seemed an even scarier place to be visiting than even I had previously thought possible. (It wasn’t the unlikely prospect of the “Unsafe Sex” part that had bothered me so much, by the way, but more the merest possibility that the dreadful characters interviewed during the programme might just possibly be in the same postcode area as me, even if only for a couple of hours…)

But, ultimately, we had the tickets anyway, and, despite the fatigue of being more than halfway through another working week, we thought that we’d go along, not least because we’d been assured that there were indeed only “100 tickets available” for the event in question and having got hold of a pair, it would have seemed rude not to then turn up.

The tickets were for an event called “Ancient Worlds” which was the “grand re-opening” of several of the exhibition galleries at the Manchester Museum after their recent refurbishment. As one of the galleries includes a large section of artifacts from Egyptian archeological exploration, part of me was rather hoping that, in the best tradition of all those old “Mummy” horror movies, that the opening ceremony would be interrupted in the kind of scenario where the smart set gather and the “I declare the museum open…” speech gets interrupted by a sudden scream, as Boris Karloff erupts from a sarcophagus or somesuch, but alas, this was not to be…

There were, of course, far more than one hundred people there when we arrived, but, despite my usual terror of crowds and crowded places, I convinced myself that they were unlikely to be a “rough crowd” seeing as we were all celebrating the reopening of a museum, and I grabbed myself a complimentary lemonade and began to circulate, or rather, move around a busy room full of people and try not to get in the way of too many of them.

There was a string quartet, and a couple of speeches to declare the exhibition “officially open” and suchlike, whilst many of the people looked at the tiny screens of the telephones in their hands instead of what was going on right in front of them, but, on the whole, this was just an excellent opportunity to spend a couple of hours of an evening having a good look at the exhibits at a time of the day when the place is usually shut up for the night and with, if not exactly an intimately tiny group, certainly a relatively small crowd of like-minded people around me, all trying their very best not to get in each other’s way, and generally succeeding.

At first I was convinced that, to my own great shame, I had never actually visited the museum before, but as I walked around one or two of the collections, some of the architecture started to seem a little bit familiar, and I was transported back to a time that I rarely think about these days when I spent a number of Saturdays In Loco Parentis, trying to find interesting ways to amuse the children who lived in a house which I rented a room in. I’m pretty sure now that one of the things we did was a trip to that very museum, although I really could have sworn that this was my first visit there…

But this was not an evening to ponder on such things, this was an evening to explore, with great excitement, the many wonders to be found in the display cases of the three new exhibition galleries and more, and, whilst I might be more than a little uncomfortable with the art of taxidermy in general, I will admit that the vast numbers of birds on display in the Natural History exhibits were an absolute godsend to this very amateur bird-watcher who sometimes struggles with the basics of species identification even when I’ve got an guide book in my hand.

I really must return to that section again… (If only I had taken my proper camera with me instead of just my telephone... Some of the pictures might have been incredible...)

The Egyptian Room is, of course, always impressive. I do so worry that there will come a time when the artifacts are “politely requested” to be returned to their country of origin, so perhaps it would be best to make the most of the opportunity to see these things whilst you still can. Of course, the speech-makers did mention that the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo was one of the institutions which needed thanking for their support, so I’m hoping that this means that they’re actually fine with it. After all, it would be a shame if the only way for everyone to experience the history of any culture was to have to actually go to whichever country it is. That way, I believe, lies a far more insular mindset which is never really good for any of us.

My own favourite moment came, of course, when I was able to follow a sign marked “T-Rex” which was pointing to some quiet and forgotten looking staircase. I ventured downstairs and, despite the hustle and bustle of activity going on in other parts of the building, for a few precious minutes I had the entire fossil department, with the room dominated by the huge Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and the massive fossilised root-ball of an ancient tree, all to myself.

Just me, a dinosaur, an ancient tree, and cases full of Ammonites…

I was in absolute bliss, and with the minerals exhibit just a few paces away, I’ve found another place in which I could happily hide myself away for a very long time… and, if I stand still long enough, I might just fossilise enough to join the collection…

Anyway, if you are ever in the area, do yourself a favour and get yourself through those doors, and go and have a look at those great new galleries. If you’ve got any interest at all in the world around you, I really don’t think you’ll regret doing so, and I’m pretty sure that it’s all free to get in to as well, so what more could you possibly want...?