CORRIDORS OF ETERNITY

You go through a set of automatic doors and are faced with corridors stretching endlessly off in all directions. You pick one and follow it, trudging hopelessly towards the next junction and the next, each time to be greeted as you turn a corner by another endless corridor that looks much the same in its drab, easy to clean, glossy, utilitarian and wholly institutional décor, and which seems to stretch on to yet another horizon, or a junction of yet more similar corridors, all of which split off into an endless maze that you suspect may very well join up deep underground with all of the other similar institutions, despite their insistence that each of them is different in some way, into some kind of vast hidden network of despair and misery.

Occasionally you pass confused looking people travelling back the way you came, also seeking exits that you suspect no longer really exist, and the wardens of the damned dashing along with a job to do or a serious incident to respond to, or other, more (or perhaps less) authoritarian figures pushing along the damned, or the detritus of having just fed the damned, or the hopeless damned themselves, shuffling along the endless corridors of eternity in their dressing gowns, looking for the little shop, the exit, or somewhere to light up the next cigarette, despite the fact that the habit might be what got them inside this depressing labyrinth in the first place.

We all shuffle along miserably through the parts of this strange living circuit board, each of us playing our part in this not-so-merry danse macabre, some of us knowing we’ll be free in less than an hour, others knowing that this might very well turn out to be the proverbial “it” for them, the last place they ever see, and still more for whom this is merely an extended “blip” on their way back to health, happiness, “normality” and, above all, freedom.

Another corridor, and another, and another… They really are starting to all look the same now. So much so that you begin to wonder whether you might meet yourself coming back the other way as time and eternity fold back on themselves, like being trapped inside some kind of etching by M.C. Escher, and  the various wards, A1…, B3…, E2…, all disappear like so many Brigadoons, only to reappear again in a different time and space, as you turn at yet another junction.

So, here we find ourselves on the very brink of April and, off and on (but, in fairness mostly on) all I seem to have done since the middle of January is trudge along corridors that look like this on my way to and from various hospital wards, making reluctant but necessary visits to retrieve washing, deliver treats, and chat about the nothing in particular that is getting done in my life beyond the maze.

The months just seemed to have been chewed up and spat out as a fortnight in one drab labyrinth leads to three weeks in another and another fortnight back in the first, and those all too familiar roads, the sight of which I am becoming heartily sick, followed by the endless trudge to car park pay stations, through automatic doors, and back into the maze, and grabbing one or other of those hard plastic chairs from wherever the particular ward I’m now visiting chooses to hide them, to talk about nothing before bidding my farewells and heading back off into the night again, now convinced more than ever that this routine will never end.

Although – and this is perhaps where fate plays its cruellest card – there is a rumour that I may yet be free of it, that the day has come for yet another release into the great outdoors and that this endless trek through the maze will be over as freedom beckons and the great return home is imminent…

I know better, of course. There’s always the boomerang effect, and perhaps even just a week of respite is more than I can hope for, and all I can do then is sit at home or at work just knowing that the hated telephone will ring and summon me back into the labyrinth again to continue this merry dance.

Perhaps forever…?

Or at least until its my own turn to be trapped inside its malevolent web.

REFLECTIONS

What can I say...?

Other than I liked the reflections in the mirrored glass, and the abstract shapes made by the other elements in the environment rather pleased me, too...

NORIDEL GONE

You may or may not remember a series of posting from the early days of this blog about a battered little shop bearing the name “Noridel Zeus”. In those early days, when I was rather desperate to think of anything at all that I could write about, (as opposed to now when I’m trying to come up with myriad reasons to stop…), I wrote a fair few short pieces – with a little help from my friend Rick - about that intriguingly named and crumbling little retail outlet, mostly because the unusual name had been catching my eye for several years as I drove past it every day as I drove to work.

That was all two-and-a-half years ago now, and I’d all but forgotten about them, but they suddenly popped into my consciousness again when someone posted a comment about one of those very postings (after all that time, which only goes to prove something or other about blogging…) and engaged me in a little nostalgic exchange of comments about the old place, which has, rather sadly, been decaying still further since those heady, optimistic days when I believed that my words actually might mean something to somebody one day.

If you want to have a look at what I was thinking back then, by the way, just type “Noridel Zeus” into your search engine of choice, and at least one of my humble offerings will pop up. You’ll probably find very similar thoughts to these, only I suspect that they might have been better written back in those days before the cynicism set in too deeply.

I’d passed by that little shop for years, and, one day, I decided to stop and take a few pictures because I believed that the day would finally come when an old and battered row of buildings like that might be bought by a developer and bulldozed into history, and I’d better have some sort of photographic record, because I honestly thought that nobody would ever believe me when I told them about the unusual name that was once painted so proudly above the door which seemed to come from another era, or perhaps even the pages of Charles Dickens.

I also wanted to have it as a memory trigger if I was ever stuck for a character’s name in a play, because I also used to believe that I was something of a playwright back in those days, too.

Well, I have to report that a rather sad day has come… The signs have disappeared, even if the shop itself has not quite fallen down yet. They have been stripped away from that battered façade, and are gone. I did wonder whether it was the gales last weekend which had finally done for them, although I’m pretty sure that I’d subliminally noticed they’d disappeared a few days earlier, and my searches on the internet revealed a few photographs which seemed to imply that it had actually happened some little while ago, and that I was simply not paying attention.

Still, as we are now skating towards the one thousandth blog mark, which does have a slight feeling of being enough of a landmark to perhaps finish at, even though it’s still a good few weeks off, I suppose it’s rather appropriate to revisit one of my more successful postings from those early days and give anyone who might have wanted it some kind of closure.

I wonder what became of those signs…? Did they just blow away on one gusty night, or were they perhaps stolen by a fan of strange and unusual ephemera…? Perhaps they were just torn off by vandals, or the shop owner is planning a refurbishment but liked the eccentric nature of those old shop signs…?

Maybe old Noridel himself returned and spirited away his own name, leaving nothing but an enigma wrapped up in a mystery and sealed inside a conundrum, and just the vaguest of memories of a name which might have been, but about which I’m not longer even certain about myself.

Farewell then, Noridel Zeus old son, and thanks for all the inspirational nostalgia you’ve triggered in me over the years.

I just hope that they didn’t end up in a skip, that’s all.

RETIRING TYPES

I’ve got to that age…

I might not be quite ready to hang up my mouse-clicking finger, grab my coat, and consider cultivating prize-winning Petunias in the back garden just yet, but I’m noticing a slight gravitational shift when it comes to the familiar professionals who I’ve been dealing with for quite a few tears now, as if the universe has taken it upon itself to remind me that change is necessary, and that change is good thing, before slapping me in the face and packing me off kicking and screaming into eternity.

But last week, I had one of those “moments”, those rubicon-crossing, “stop and think” stepping stones which means that your life has changed forever. One of those “happening for the first time” events which means that your life has moved into a new phase and perhaps will never feel quite the same again.

You see, quite a few of the professionals whose lives interact with mine are just ever-so-slightly older than I am, but that also means that they’re old enough to be thinking about scary things like retirement.

I went to see my dentist this week for the usual six-monthly check-up and we were engaging in a bout of lively but mutually understood banter about whether the strange bloody taste in my mouth each morning is a side-effect of all those blood pressure medications.

Ha, bloody, ha… Rolls eyes knowingly whilst there’s a great big metal tube stuck down my throat, you know the sort of thing…

Anyway, after the usual polishing and scraping ordeal, she announced that I’ll need to make another appointment for six months but “...it won’t be with me, because I’m retiring…”

Bombshell…

I mean. I knew her hair was a little bit grey, but then so is mine… I kind of thought we were of much the same age, give or take a half-decade or so, but of course, it’s that half-decade that makes all the difference, especially if you’re lucky enough to be in a profession where “early retirement” is an option…

Anyway, I wished her all the best and the best of luck, and went away to book my appointment, mildly sad that there’s another person who I’ll probably never, ever see again, but also, and perhaps selfishly, wracked with the kind of slight worry and doubt that enforced change can make gnaw away at the back of my mind.

So next time, I’m going to have to start training up a new one from scratch and that’s never easy, although at least this time I’m getting a bit of warning. The last time I had to change my dentist it was because of him having an accident, and I got “given” to a locum who seemed far more interested in lining his pockets with cosmetic procedures rather than in what was happening around my gums.

Luckily, he’d vanished – presumably into the realms of private practice – after only a couple of attempts at persuading me and I was switched to my current, now former, dental professional and everything’s been fine since then.

Well, until now, that is…

I do wonder what kind of eager young whippersnapper I will find behind that grim door the next time I venture there and it is a ittle bit of a worry, especially if he or she is the sort who’s embraced all kinds of new gadgets and gizmos and keeps me in the chair for hours for no very good reason as they explore deep into my jawbone and venture into dark cavities that we’ve already come to an understanding about.

Shudder…!

I never did like change all that much, but now I’m starting to realise that, over the course of the next decade or so, this sort of thing is likely to start happening rather more frequently than I’d like it to.

Why can’t the world just play a game of “statues” and freeze in a position that I quite like until I’m finished with it…?

That would be more helpful, I think…

CALIGARI

I went into town after work on Monday evening as we had long-held tickets in our grubby little paws (well, mine are usually pretty grubby anyway…) for yet another of those events that we sign up for which sometimes get overtaken by circumstances, as we were, as we always seem to be these days, not convinced that we would actually get there what with the NHS and their constant dithering over my mother and whether or not to send her home on every day that we seem to hold tickets for some event or other.

This time we were off to the Royal Northern College of Music to see the silent film classic “Das Kabinett Des Doktor Caligari” or, if you prefer “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” being shown with a live musical performance by the bowler-hatted musician Martyn Jacques, the front man of the Grammy  nominated punk-cabaret band, “The Tiger Lilies”.

It’s a long time since I attended an accompanied viewing of Caligari, ten years at least, and the seminal German expressionist masterpiece made way back in 1920 remains as bewilderingly enigmatic and visually interesting as ever, even if the scenery sometimes might resemble a school production being mounted inside a cupboard.

You could, of course argue that this demonstrates the claustrophobic nature of the story and you’d probably be right, but throughout I was constantly reminded of Tim Burton’s animations and have no doubt that his style has been very heavily influenced by Robert Weine’s dark meisterwerk.

In fact, coming away from the show I was rather left with a sense of surprise that Mr Burton has not yet attempted an animated remake of this film because I do believe in his hands it might turn out to be a very strange and imaginative movie indeed, even though I’m not usually all that fond of remakes generally.

The plot itself involves a man in a garden telling the tragic tale of what he and his “bride” endured a few years earlier when a mysterious and sinister figure, Doctor Caligari, came into their town to show an attraction, a “somnambulist” at their fair.

Once set up, the sideshow act then seems to predict a series of murders which then start to occur and the investigation points towards the somnambulist himself, only for the story to then move into murkier waters as layers of truth are stripped away to reveal a far more surprising story behind the murders.

I was going to add “than you could possibly imagine” to the end of that statement, but I’m sure that you probably could. After all, that kind of plot behind a plot scenario has been done countless times since, but this particular film does have the advantage – or maybe, to modern eyes, disadvantage – of having been one of the first.

Anyway, it’s a relatively short piece, and the print being shown was a 1996 remaster with English intercards, and many musicians have attempted to accompany it down the years, of which Mr Jacques is the latest.

It was an enjoyable soundtrack which did, for the most part, at least occasionally do the old-fashioned silent-era accompanist’s job of underscoring the visuals with the usual musical “stings” whenever something “dramatic” occurred, but I can’t help feeling that the music could have quite happily existed in isolation from the visuals as a performance piece in its own right rather than having the visuals there at all.

It was a disturbing and very effective performance in its own right with the performer in full face make-up performing the piano and piano-accordian, and in itself it was an astonishing piece of work, but once again – like with “Pandora’s Box” last year, I came away from one of these shows not completely convinced that modern musicians truly “get” the idea of how to fully support the visuals of silent film.

That said, I might be misunderstanding the point. Several modern performers use abstract animations as a backdrop for their more modern shows and no-one necessarily expects them to fully synchronise with each other, so perhaps the idea is for the one to augment the other and in that respect at least, it was something of a triumph.

Another night out in town, and on a school night too. Even a Monday, no less, which is almost guaranteed to leave me feeling exhausted throughout the rest of the week again, especially after the indigestion I suffered from eating far too much in the restaurant before the show and then spending the night being absorbed by the cricket team actually managing to hang on for once…

Unless that was all a dream or just something I imagined in my despair…?

After all, as John Cleese once famously put it in “Clockwise” It’s not the despair... I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

TWITSTOP

@Twitter You’ve really been taking up far, far too much of my time lately, so I ought to just stop.

@Twitter It’s the #TwitterGames and the #Wordplay.

@Twitter Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been enjoying playing them, but… (cont’d)

@Twitter (cont’d) they suck up so much of my time and I don’t even realise it.

@Twitter I can sit there for TWO HOURS or more on a Sunday morning…

@Twitter …just trying to come up with a bit of witty wordplay to add to everyone else’s…

@Twitter A convoluted play on a film title…

@Twitter An “amusing” spin on a popular music title…

@Twitter To join in with the “fun” topic of the day… or the hour… or the minute…

@Twitter And don’t get me wrong…

@Twitter I was getting a kind of real gratification from being able to “amuse” a few people…

@Twitter It was nice to get their friendly feedback in the form of RTs and Favs…

@Twitter And all so direct and immediate, too…

@Twitter To instantly know whether you’ve tickled a strangers “funny-bone” or not…

@Twitter Very satisfying… (Very addictive…!)

@Twitter The #Altwic and #Artwiculate folk are all very friendly (and forgiving!)

@Twitter And adding my thoughts to #punsr has been a joy these past few weeks…

@Twitter As well as contributing to @Foyles weekly #bookgame…

@Twitter And it WAS really good to “jump start” my brain each morning…

@Twitter But it was taking up far too much time and I wasn’t getting ANYTHING else written!

@Twitter So it really, REALLY has got to stop…

@Twitter I need to go #ColdTurkey (or whatever the Twitter equivalent might be…)

@Twitter Or at least take a “TwitStop” for a while…

@Twitter Otherwise it can turn into an addiction (atTwitction?)

@Twitter And I’ll get so OBSESSED with today’s #WOTD or with writing the wittiest offering ever…

@Twitter That my life will fall apart…

So farewell, then @Twitter, at least for a little while…

@Twitter (I’m sure nobody will even notice I’ve gone)

@Twitter Because, that’s the sad nature of it, really…

@Twitter Trying to entertain strangers for no real reason…

@Twitter Other than a moment of recognition that there are like minds out there somewhere.

@Twitter And a vague sense that you aren’t as strange as you sometimes think you are.

@Twitter #Offline.

SPRINGWINTER

At the other end of the scale from my comments upon “Winterspring” a week or two ago, I awoke, like many others did I suppose, to howling gales and snowstorms on the third day of spring...

And I can’t help but feel just a little bit responsible, like it’s somehow all my fault. After all, I did order a new bench for sitting upon in the garden in anticipation of making the most of some April sunshine which seems to have been our only experience of anything approaching a summertime over the past couple of years...

Anyway, with that in mind, I know that it’s three months late, but Happy Christmarch everyone... (I just knew there was a good reason for not throwing out our “Little Tree”)

POST-IT-NOTE-ART #1*

Number #1 in an occasional series whenever I can’t be bothered writing about anything else...

Sometimes I find that I’ve just happened to doodle a very quick scribble on one of the Post-It-Note* pages that I keep next to me for when the phone rings, or for if I just have an idea for a blog posting that can’t actually wait for the computer to boot up just in case I forget the notion before I can actually get into the Word-Processing software.

On some occasions it takes minutes, but because I’m getting very old, the thought can flitter away into infinity and be lost forever in the meanwhile, so an “old school” handy pen and paper sometimes - but not always - manages to save the day as I try and hold on to my startling idea, phrase or bon mot to share with good people like yourselves at some future, mutually convenient moment.

Anyway, sometimes I get so bored of waiting for the electronic gears to engage that I pick up my little marker pen and find myself scribbling something, and something like this is the result.

Granted, I can never see the “Post-It-Note-Art*” idea transforming into some kind of “movement” (The PINArt Movement...?) like Cubism or Impressionism or any other kind of “ism” you might have come across in your travels through the history of art, and, even though I’d like other people to share their own “Post-It-Note*” doodling experiences with me, I suspect that this is another “great notion” which is likely to die on the vine.

However, be that all as it may, here’s a very quick scribble from a few evenings ago which took all of thirty seconds to whistle up.

Enjoy...?

*Other brands of self-adhesive notepads are available.

N.T. LIVE: “PEOPLE”

Setting aside the contentious issue of whether, for various irritating reasons, I might have to cancel at the last minute,  or, at the very least, forego actually eating, whilst also trying to neatly side-step the suggestion that we’ve had quite enough of our attempts at having something resembling a social life “ruined” over the past couple of years, once again we found ourselves attending another “N.T. Live” event, this time the play being shown on the big screen for those of us living outside the city of London being “People” a new play by Alan Bennett.

Things had not looked all that promising as I ended my working day with one of those busy little half-hours that keep on making it difficult to actually get away at the time I had planned to – emails, back-ups taking longer than usual, unexpectedly chatty telephone calls, etc – all spent with half an eye on the land-line wondering whether there’d be a last-minute hitch coming via a call from the hospital, but, eventually, I was able to lock up the office and dash around to the car and scream desperately (and possibly alarmingly) through largely co-operative traffic to get to where I was going, and I only had to pay two quid for the last parking spot in Didsbury when I got there, before hunting down the restaurant (the rather alarmingly named “Mud Crab”) where my fellow not-quite-actual-theatre goers had already parked themselves and were already making their plans for what they were going to eat.

One very tasty hamburger later (and I did rather feel that I had to wolf it down so I didn’t get to fully appreciate it - and I paid for it indigestion-wise later, I can assure you…), and happy to have finally found a “proper” “Diner-style” burger within at least extended driving distance of my house, we headed to East Didsbury CineWorld to battle our way into the chaos of a stupendously busy car park, which does, at least, happily indicate that the “N.T. Live” experiment is something of a roaring success, at least on the outskirts of Manchester.

There were, of course, other issues...

Chance meetings with other “Theatre Folk” from my dark and dismal past proved (1) How terribly nice they can be, and (2) How awful I am at dealing with the “unexpected” meeting, but it was actually pretty good to see them.

The play itself was smashing, and all rather wonderful, although I will admit to feeling too tired and depressed by the other things going on in my life at the moment to fully appreciate its subtle charms on just that viewing. I'm not going to go on about it at any great length here, not least because I don’t really like “spoilers” so I’d rather not commit any myself, but, suffice it to say, that the performances and the script really were rather top-notch and it was really rather encouraging to discover that that old master-wordsmith Mr Bennett is still able to wrangle such impressively sharp and astute dialogue even now, and create such wonderful roles for such great female actors (and their male counterpoints of course) whilst taking the audience down such unexpected pathways.

There were so many quotable lines, too, because he does have an good ear for a well-honed turn of phrase, and such a lot is said during the course of the play about the British and all of our strange and eccentric passions as much as saying so very much about the state of the nation and what it thinks of itself, both of its charms and of its seedier underbelly, as we splutter along in this brave and not so new century.

Perhaps the greatest observation that is made is one that I had to be reminded of as I looked back on my big night out in the very cold light of the morning after, but with which I cannot help but agree:

“PST: People Spoil Things!”

And they do. I certainly know that, being a “people” myself, I certainly do...

The thing that has most stuck with me, however, as I think back upon the production is a magnificent scene change at one point which is a true wonder of stage craft and really has to be seen to be believed. The old “Stage Crew” head I still have on these now heavily weighed down shoulders could have wept at the sheer bravado of it.

Afterwards, we had to dash home to have any chance of getting home before a brutally late hour on a school night, and we drove home in a gale with builder’s sand and other debris lashing against my car’s paintwork in a most alarming way.

The next morning, I got up feeling pretty exhausted, there was snow on the ground again, the gales were howling and the cricket score was not encouraging, but at least I’d had yet another rather wonderful night at the not-quite-actual theatre.

“N.T. Live” - Give it a whirl some time, I really don't think that you’ll regret it if you like a bit of theatre.

Whoever first had this idea of allowing the rest of the world to see the best of what’s going on upon the London stages definitely had a touch of inspiration about them on that day.

Now, if only we can get them to start making them available on some kind of shiny disc...

BATTLESTAR

“Battlestar Galactica” (the “new” one, not the 1970s version) was a fantastic journey which, for us, sadly ended last Friday after a three-month marathon triggered by a reckless (and, at the time, unpopular) purchase during the January sales of the complete series box set because “I’d heard good things about it and wondered what all the fuss was about” and, most of all, because it was going for a price which was relatively cheap…

Anyway, after the quick postscript of pulling the follow-up TV movie “The Plan” out of my little big of hidden treats, there it was, gone… and we found ourselves feeling quite bereft. Almost, in fact, as bereft as when we finished our marathon run of “The West Wing” a few years ago, because, when you really get into a show like that, especially in such a concentrated form, you really start to invest in the characters after a while and worry about how things are going to turn out for them

(It’s easy, really… They’re all actors, so they just grow their hair, style it in a different way and turn up on another show and spout the usual bollocks about how great that show is on the DVD commentaries…)

No more new episodes to watch, no more previously hidden Cylons to be uncovered, and a satisfying conclusion to an epic journey that somehow managed to tell real human stories despite being set in an environment full of spaceships and cyborgs.

Really, after you’ve committed yourself, all that you really want is a satisfying conclusion to the story and to not be left hanging out high and dry and thinking “WTF…?” after it’s all over. Whilst I lost interest in “Lost” after the first year, I believe that there was some disappointment amongst its fans at how it ended, and I’m not going to begin to tell you how appalled some of the “Enterprise” fans were with its finale.

The most satisfying conclusion that I’ve seen in recent years was that of “Ashes to Ashes” which, somehow, just seemed so right in the end, although my personal favourite ending still remains the feature-length conclusion of “M*A*S*H” which still manages to move me thirty years on.

“Battlestar Galactica” ran for four full seasons between 2004 and 2008 after  the success of a mini-series in 2003 which I did actually see at the time, so my own particular journey on the Battlestar could, I suppose, be said to have been a tad longer.

However, the fact that I didn’t have access to the channels on which it got its broadcast over here, and the fact that I never quite got around to watching the tapes of the first year which I was lent (and which, due to losing contact with their owner due to unforeseen circumstances, I still appear to have… oops!) I somehow lost track of it, despite all the various good words I had heard about the quality of the show.

You could, of course, argue that my journey actually began back in the 1970s with the original show which managed to be both phenomenally popular in the wake of the release of “Star Wars” but managed to get itself cancelled after just a season and a slightly disappointing revamp.

That show was cheesy in a way that only 1970s television can be, but remained well-remembered and well-loved enough for someone to come along a quarter of a century later and see how it could be redone properly and so the new show was born.

So after sitting through seventy-odd episodes which told stories about what it is to be human, and what it is to be at war, and so many other tales so skilfully woven and told, all of which were written and produced in that “Post-9/11” decade in the American cultural landscape, I just wanted to tell you that it really is worth a look, if you fancy that sort of thing, even if I’m telling you this five years after the fact and I’m probably the last person on earth who didn’t know it already.

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.