Sleep Interrupted

On Thursday, Louise and I took the kids to The Natural History Museum in London. It was a long and tiring day out but I think they enjoyed it. I think that when it comes to museums, children are generally either too young to fully appreciate them or too old to be interested, but you’ve got to try — Parent’s Mantra No. 5.

It was certainly a lot easier than previous forays into London as this time there was no buggy to haul up and down steps, especially in the Underground. Now that Jessica is three, we’re certainly becoming more mobile.

The one thing that really struck me during the visit was the size of the exhibits. The museum falls into two halves, logically if not physically. Lots of modern “educational” displays — explanations, diagrams, videos, buttons to push — on one side and ageing exhibits in glass cases — animal, vegetable, mineral — on the other. Interestingly, the children were far more interested in the latter, perhaps because they are so much more immediate.

What I couldn’t get over, though, was the size of the animal exhibits. Everything looked so small. The lion just didn’t look lion sized. Neither did the polar bear look polar bear sized. The Blue Whale… what was I expecting? I don’t know. Okay, the elephant looked pretty elephantine, I’ll grant you.

So, why was this? I can think of three reasons.

First, back in the day, the museum’s hunters went round shooting adolescent specimens because the fully sized buggers were far too scary. Second, they’ve shrunk as I’ve got older, just like Wagon Wheels. Third, Hollywood special effects have rotted my brain with extra large “monsters” on screen, in the same way that they use elk in place of reindeer because the latter aren’t impressive enough. Much as I’d like to blame Hollywood for everything, I suspect it’s a combination of all three.

After a bit of a hiatus over the Christmas period, Ben — accompanied by me and Louise — has restarted his Roald Dahl odyssey with The BFG.

We stopped for well over a week after a couple of chapters because, as far as we could tell, Ben was afraid of the man-eating giants. Here’s my tip on selling the book to the young, male and trepidous: Skip to the end and show them the pictures of the helicopters.

We finished the book tonight. This read was particularly challenging for me because I decided to give all the characters accents. Usually Ben stops me doing this and asks that I read in my “proper voice” but this time he didn’t seem to notice.

In my production, the heroine Sophie was played by Louise. The BFG was played by Justin Lee Collins. Ray Winston voiced all the other giants. The heads of the army and navy were played by Stephen Fry, in best Blackadder Goes Forth style, and the Queen was played by The Queen.

The chapter The Plan was probably the trickiest bit, heavy with dialogue between five different characters. I must admit that on ocassion a few of the characters’ accents got swapped but Ben didn’t seem to notice. It’s nice to have a forgiving audience.

I was catching up with my blog reading in Google Reader over lunch — today was the first time I’ve had some down time at work for as long as I can remember — when I realised I hadn’t updated my subscription to James’ blog since he moved it. Realising I had a lot of reading to do I did a quick scan only to discover that Vicky gave birth to baby Charlotte over a week ago! Am I really that far removed on the grapevine? So it would seem.

Anyway, this is rather missing the point — Congratulations James, Vicky, Christopher and Charlotte!