Nobody told me that it was national Employ an Idiot day. I went to pay a cheque into the bank in Colchester. That was very quaint and old fashioned of me, but I was given it for a recent woodland talk. A strict interpretation of charity rules doesn't let UK charities pay money to other charities, so I am sometimes given a cheque made payable to me, and I send the same amount on to the woodland charity. I did that promptly, so have been out of of the money for a couple of weeks.
There was no queue at the counter, so I thought I'd pay in the cheque there instead of using one of the automated machines, since the cheque had been folded up in my purse and the paying-in machines don't always like paperwork with creases in it. The young girl behind the glass smiled at me, and I passed over my cheque book open at the deposits section at the back, the counterfoil and slip already filled out, and the cheque. She reached for a calculator, which puzzled me slightly since paying one cheque into one account didn't seem to involve any calculations, added two numbers together, wrote something on the next paying-in slip in the book, and stamped it with an official HSBC stamp. I goggled at her and surmised that the older woman standing behind her chair was not just hanging around, but was in fact supposed to be supervising her. The supervisor said that that was not what you were meant to do, wrote Void over the spoiled slip, and stamped my counterfoil, then asked if I'd like her to remove the used slip. I said Yes please, it was no use to me now, and then later wished that I hadn't, as I'd have liked to confirm whether the girl at the counter had indeed used her calculator to add up twenty-five plus twenty-five, being the amount of the cheque and paying-in slip respectively.
If this is the future of Britain's banks then we're in deeper trouble than we already thought we were. And our educational system is even worse than we already knew it was.
Then I went on to the main purpose of the day, which was to visit Colchester Castle. I have been there before, but not for over twenty years, so when a friend suggested meeting up sometime I asked if she'd like to come for a cup of coffee in town and have a look at the castle, as a change from drinking tea in each other's houses. The castle is the second largest Norman keep in the UK, after the White Tower in London, and is currently showing an exhibition of visiting Chinese artefacts that sounded interesting.
Colchester Castle Museum, as it describes itself, is fascinating and infuriating in equal measures. Fascinating because it is stuffed with artefacts. Locally collected stone age tools and bronze age axe heads. A beautiful large cauldron dating from 1100 BC (they're still on BC and AD, no politically correct Before Current Era yet) that set me thinking of the magic cauldron in the Mabinogian which restored slaughtered warriors to life. Roman glass and memorials and coffins and mosaics and a fabulous sphinx crouched over the head of a man. A small display on the mediaeval woollen weaving industry in Colchester. Loads and loads of good stuff, crammed into old fashioned display cases linked by strange walkways vaguely based on neolithic huts.
The Chinese objects are great. On loan from a museum in Nanjing, sometime capital of China, there are terracotta grave goods, porcelain bowls, carved jade animals and a jade suit made out of hundreds of small rectangles of stone strung together with silver wire, that was originally the burial dress of an emperor. Some of the terracotta animals are wonderfully animated and life-like, others odd or downright comic. It is a really good visiting collection and well worth a look, on until 6th January 2013.
The castle is infuriating because you can't really see the inside of the building at all. It is filled up with galleries to hold the museum stuff, while staircases cut across the original doors and windows, so you get no sense of the original layout. There is no interpretation about the castle itself. No explanation of whether it was a royal castle or built by an uppity local baron, or where the stone came from, or when the curtain walls and all of the rest of the castle apart from the keep were destroyed. It seems a great waste. It is an atmospheric building, but it would be so much better to have a proper purpose built display for the pre-historical and Roman artefacts, and present the castle as a fascinating historical building in its own right, maybe with some information about mediaeval Colchester. Just think, if all of that money spent on the Firstsite gallery had been invested in a modern museum to present Colchester's ancient past.
Colchester is generally terribly bad at making the most of its history. Driving into the town you pass signs welcoming you to Britain's oldest recorded town. And that's it. If you park in the multi-storey car park next to the dual carriage way that the planners decided to route next to a large stretch of surviving Roman wall, you can walk through an actual Roman gateway, though most people don't bother and just skirt past it. In the town centre you can see another section of the town walls, with the car parking theme carried one better since the car park runs along the base of the wall. I think that somewhere in the Dutch quarter you can peer through a window and see an excavated Roman something-or-other. And that's it. They did find a chariot racing track a while back, but with the economic crisis plans to develop that as an historic attraction have gone very quiet. Compare this meagre effort with the amount of fuss that York makes about the Vikings. Granted, York has one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Britain, but the only visible evidence of Vikings you'll find now is in the Jorvik centre.
The management of Colchester Castle Museum must be aware that it doesn't quite make the grade as a twenty-first century museum, since it is due to close for fifteen months at the start of next year for modernisation. I hope that will make it better and not worse, since upgrades to the National Maritime Museum have dumbed it down considerably, according to the Systems Administrator, with the collection of builders' models of ships disappearing from display, and eco displays about melting icebergs taking their place. Looking on the bright side, I don't see how anybody can drag climate change into the Bronze Age and the Romans. I fear, though, that what the Castle Museum really needs is another building into which most of the current collection could be relocated.
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