Today I finally went for the day out in Cambridge that was postponed from December, when it was forecast to rain all day (which it did) and I refused to use the park and ride and spend the day walking around Cambridge in heavy rain and an ambient temperature of about three degrees. Today was much nicer, though the weather forecasters tried to scare us off with predictions of more rain (which didn't materialise).
To my complete astonishment it is possible to park outside the botanical gardens. I rarely go to Cambridge, which is just a bit too much of a hike from where we are, and imagine it as a city where it is completely impossible to park. The idea that the only thing to do is to leave your car at the park and ride is deeply engrained in my psyche, which is presumably the effect the City fathers intended. My friend, who lives closer to Cambridge than I do and goes there regularly to shop in Waitrose, said that on the contrary, there was parking if you knew where to look for it. From mid day onwards you pay a pound an hour up to a maximum of five pounds, and for that you can leave your car in the Trumptington Road for the rest of the day. On one side of the road are the botanical gardens, and on the other side an implausibly rural scene of a meadow with cows grazing in it.
We went first of all to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, where the staff must be fully signed up to the concept of citizen science, because you can take any stones or fossils you have picked up and want to know about, and they will tell you what you have found, instead of greeting your poor amateur finds with haughty disdain. A very helpful young man wearing a beanie hat and several tattoos, who looked about fifteen and must have had at least a PhD, examined my friend's garden trophies with the utmost seriousness, conferred with colleagues, and showed us less worn examples of the same things. He turned out to be in charge of collections.
I like fossils but in a generic way. I am never going to remember any of their names, or try to identify them in books. I love the sounds of the names, and the idea that they were once alive and are very, very old, and somehow miraculously preserved, or at least their impressions in the mud, and I find some rather beautiful, but it is not a proper scientific curiosity, more a Cor Blimey, look at that wonderment. What makes the Sedgwick really worthwhile is not just the fossils, but the museum itself. It is furnished with wooden display cases, tiers of drawers and tall cabinets with glass fronts, which belong to a previous age of museum design. There are tiny, yellow labels the size of stamps, with the names and identifying codes of the exhibits hand written in tiny, crabbed writing, and there are display cards that were typed on a manual typewriter. It is a prime candidate for the Museum of Museums, along with the Whitby town museum, and the Carlisle regimental museum if that hasn't been modernised since we went there nearly thirty years ago.
I expressed my anxiety to the curator that they would not entirely update the displays, if they ever got any money to do so, because the cabinets belonged to the historiography of museums and were so marvellous as they were. He had already spotted this dilemma. With any luck the current public spending squeeze will save the Sedgwick from being modernised and dumbed down, just as Suffolk falling on hard times at the end of the Middle Ages meant that the fabric of Lavenham was preserved almost entirely intact, instead of the buildings continuing to be redeveloped over the next five hundred years.
After lunch we went to Kettle's Yard. This was the home of Jim Ede, curator of the Tate in the 1920s and 30s. He collected modern art, which then attracted so little popular support he could barely persuade the Tate trustees to acquire any for the Tate, and in 1966 left his house to Cambridge for future generations to experience art of that era in a domestic setting. It is down a little side alley, and you must pull on a bell rope for admittance, which is done three or four visitors at a time as the guides take your address and lock your bags away. Then you are free to wander through the house, and sit on any chair, though you are asked not to touch anything else. There are paintings, drawings, etches, sculptures, interesting pebbles, feathers, ethnic furniture and textiles, and bookshelves shoehorned in here and there. Every wall is painted white, the bathroom is spartan and we never saw the kitchen but I imagine that was basic as well.
There are some very beautiful objects. Nothing is captioned, but if you ask a member of staff they will tell you about anything. They don't wear uniforms, or badges, and you have to work out who is a volunteer rather than a fellow visitor who is merely taking things rather slowly. They don't do that over-eager National Trust room guide routine of leaping on you like the Ancient Mariner and telling you about something whether you want to know about it or not. That may be one of the reasons why Kettle's Yard has a very peaceful atmosphere. An extension which houses part of the art collection is currently closed for building works, but that merely provides a reason to go back next year when it is open.
There is a good little museum shop across the alley, and an art gallery showing contemporary work. I didn't take to the turntable playing Vivaldi's four seasons very slowly, over the space of a year, or the concept of the grain of sand taken from the Sahara which had apparently been reduced to 0.000000something times its original size, and returned to the Sahara. That sort of thing gives me what PG Wodehouse called the pip. However, the artist did redeem herself with her exhibit in the nearby church, a tiny fragment of a once larger Medieval church and heavily restored in the eighteenth century, now deconsecrated and in the care of the Redundant Churches Trust. Suspended in the middle of the room, otherwise empty except for a small modern stone altar and Norman font, was a necklace made of small round beads, every bead carved from a fossil. Yet another volunteer, a quiet and unobtrusive young man, gave us a guide to the necklace, which told us what every bead was, how old the fossil was, and where it came from. It was a beautiful necklace. I'd happily wear it.
Then we had tea, and rushed into Lakeland five minutes before it closed, where my friend bought some muffin cases (better than the Waitrose ones) and I bought a reel of kitchen string. I've been wanting one of those for ages.
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