A fun day out at Newcastle...like.

Today (15th/July/2009) I went with my girlfriend (Vivien) and her mother to Newcastle. Some of the day was spent at the Hancock History Museum, you may know of it, you may not, regardless fun was had; looking at the many artifacts from the Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks, all very interesting and whatnot.

However with everything there's always a niggle in there somewhere..this such niggle came about when Vivien's mother decided to sit down, which she has every right to do, Vivien and I joined her; as we were getting up one of the staff came over looking horrified and said,
''Please don't sit on the displays'', which is fair enough she is doing her job, although I'd like to say that we weren't really sat on any display, or at least in such a way that we would be causing damage. The set up was of Hadrian's Wall, and was fairly long and placed in the the middle of this particular room, basically we were sitting on a surface that wasn't in any way going to cause harm; that's all that needs to be made clear. So Vivien's mother makes the point that there are no chairs in this room; hence why we chose to sit where we did, not because we were trying to be cool. The staff member then proceeds to go on in one of the strangest manners I've ever seen, I'll try and quote to my best here,
''Ohh well, right, right em, well when you go out, right? When you go out you can get a purple form and write that down and then if enough people say they want chairs in this room, we can do that, we can put some folding chairs in this room..ok then? Good''. The fact she told us they could do that, install the chairs, led me to think, well surely wouldn't it be appreciated if you just put them in, without the fuss of people needing to put it down in written form. Not that the museum doesn't have 'any' seating, but you might as well just put the seats there to make everyone happy. Maybe she was just trying to make her job a bit more exciting, I'm sure she's a good worker really.

Fun was had for the most part. The thing is, do you ever feel that you must buy something to remember your day out?...Or maybe you have graced ''X'' city's grounds therefore you must invest in its future by spending something. Ok, point is, I left today having not spent any money, and it felt somewhat empty, good thing was what I didn't spend I kept, so that's all good. The thing is it would have been nice to maybe not go away empty-handed, be it a book, DVD, whatever, it would have been a nice little treat for myself. Not that I'm a shop-o-holic, or an impulse buyer, but hey-ho I did have my chances, there is always next time as they say...

As for yesterday, I spent part of the day watching two Marx brothers films (Duck Soup and Animal Crackers) they are fantastic without doubt...but that goes without saying. So I'm able to keep my french up, I put French subtitles on (yes it was a DVD), the thing I find amusing is that when you translate jokes (the words which make them up) they clearly don't work in other languages, an obvious point perhaps but still funny, adds to the whole entertainment of it. An example of one is, there's a joke where ''Taxes'' is repeated as ''Texas'', I'll not delve into the joke...anyway...the French for taxes is ''(les) impots'', so the word-play doesn't work in French. The ''vice-versa'' also is true, a I was told once there was a joke lost in (English subtitle) translation, you may (or may not) know that 'pierre' is both the word for 'stone' and a name (links into the English 'Peter') in French, and that on a film someone plays on that fact, but the joke doesn't work in English, yes you guessed it, we don't go calling stones 'Peter'.


That about wraps it up for now, if I get sorted, I'll be doing Blogs possibly called, 'Bob Dylan - why is he following me? No not on twitter.'' and ''Loosing that acting buzz''. Those are for later though, I hope you enjoyed this slice into what I get up to.

Thanks for reading.

Callum