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An enjoyable morning looking round the Charlestown Shipwreck and Heritage Museum, a sprawling warren of corridors dedicated to the history of Charlestown and vessels that have ended up in Davey Jones’s Locker, many parts of which are so long serving that they themselves belong in a museum of museums. The audio visual room had a TV showing a documentary about the harbour town that I would have estimated from the camera technique and music had been made in the 1970s (although the end titles revealed it was in fact from 1989 and thus only 27 years old), telling us what Charlestown was like “now”. So in essence we were getting a taste of what the people of the past had experienced when they came to a museum. I felt like someone should be filming us watching it so that they could show people of 2043 what the people of 2016 felt like watching the people of 1989.
Other enjoyable retro touches were mildly terrifying mannequins set in scenarios with extremely minimal animatronics and an acted out voice over. I adore stuff like this, almost entirely unironically and you don’t see much of it around any more. And as far as I know there is no museum museum (I just checked, there seem to be some online resources that collate what’s in different museums, but I want a museum that you go to that gives you the history of museums and has displays of display from other museum in it), so you can only see stuff like this when you find a museum that has been resolute in its desire not to be updated. And so its displays have become museum pieces in themselves. Or they would do if there was only a museum brave enough to host this stuff.
A rather tenuous connection to the beginnings of gas lighting (from memory, the inventor married a woman from the town) meant there was also a display of gas fixtures and fittings down the ages. Which was one of my favourite things in the place. I saw a 1930s fridge and gas ovens that were over a hundred years old (and I liked the fact that old models of gas cookers had a plate drying rack above the hob - thesis stuff you only learn in crazy museums).
And the actual shipwreck part of the museum was fun too. Ordinary objects like plates and toilets become bizarrely fascinating once they’ve been deposited at the bottom of the sea and then recovered. The items with barnacles and stuff growing on them were particularly poignant. Half-Claimed by the sea and then reclaimed by the land, unable to shake off the scars that told their story. If I was a transgressive modern artist (and in a way I am) then I would concentrate on allowing nature to overtake normal objects and then display the results. Humanity’s battle to control the environment is ultimately a losing one and those barnacles on a plate are testament to the fact that one day all we have done will be consumed and lost.
But we win this time barnacles. For now you are trapped above the water in our human museum, prisoners in a long war that none of us can win.
The sun came out in the afternoon and we played with Phoebe in our small back garden, rolling around in the grass and laughing, looking down at the harbour below. It was pretty cool. Phoebe must be approaching her first memory soon and I wondered if anything on this holiday would lodge itself in her brain. Amongst the laughter she touched a prickly weed growing on the lawn. It made her cry so I touched it too and it had quite a kick. That’s the sort of thing that might form an early memory. My wife says we’re predisposed to remember painful and unpleasant stuff first (which is maybe why so many people are resentful to their parents as they only remember the bad stuff). I will remember the laughter and the tickling, but maybe Phoebe will just remember the shock of the lawn that had been so soft and welcoming, biting back at her when she’d done nothing wrong.
