h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.nam.ac.uk/

Mama is, secretly, not a big fan of museums. She doesn’t find things in and of themselves very interesting, and in museums there is a lot of looking at things. Frequently, those things sit stolidly in cases, with little numbers next to them for you to find on a bare list of items, and this sort of thing makes Mama want to poke her eyes out with the corner of the complementary map. Museums, in Mama’s opinion, live or die on how many things you actually get to play with there are and the quality of the captioning, although she also likes a good scavenger trail.

The National Army Museum is, therefore, one of Mama’s very favourite museums, and here’s why. There are an awful lot of things in the museum, but many of them have a little placard next to them telling the story of the person who owned them, or who owned something like them. Sometimes in their own words, even. Mama finds this absolutely fascinating. She also thinks it is rather clever – buried in the descriptions there is quite a lot of information about whatever nasty little war the display is telling you about and it’s much more memorable than the usual boards full of dry exposition.

Mama says. I wouldn’t know. I can’t read. And to be honest, neither can Mama these days, given that what we are doing when I am there is mostly rambling randomly around the rooms looking for buttons to press, and what she was doing when my Superdooper Big Brother was my age was much the same. Except when we get to the skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, which frightens me. Mama always has to carry me past it, shrieking. My Superdooper Big Brother, of course, thinks that’s the best thing in the place, or did until they opened up the WarHorse exhibition, which has many pictures, films and large sculptures of horses in it. My Superdooper big brother has been to that one once, but still comments enthusiastically about it whenever we go past on the bus.

So these days the fact that this is still one of Mama’s favourite museums ever really has nothing to do with the museum part. It’s not even to do with the coffee shop, although Mama highly recommends that too. It was always decent value, and now they have revamped it and are starting to provide more hot food as well. But they only have three toddler seats, which Mama thinks is very strange given that NAM is Chelsea toddler central these days.

Why? It’s because of their Kid’s Zone. This used to be a large room off the shop area which had various toys and activities and a pretty impressive soft play climbing frame running round three of the walls. It was free to get into and while you had to collect a ticket from the front desk, it didn’t get sold out that often and you could go and get one for the next session if you hadn’t had enough of playing with the rocking horses, sliding down the slides or building towers out of the large soft cubes. It was fab, although possibly the scale of the climbing frame was a little daunting for all but the most confident of preschoolers. In the last year, though, they have relocated it and revamped it, and now you have to pay the princely sum of £2.50 per session, which is not a problem, and can book in advance, which kind of is as Mama rather gathers that you have to get in there at least a week in advance of having a hope of finding a slot. At least you can do it online. Anyway, is all new and much cosier than the last one, and while it still has an extensive soft play climbing frame, it is now much more achievable for the under fives. I certainly thought it was GREAT when Mama scored a ticket for us, and was perfectly able to ignore Mama’s wistful looks at the door to the exhibition spaces for the entire hour we were there.

Highly highly recommended.

The problem of doing this on the fly at 11pm is that these are getting a little more rough drafty than I had planned. Heigh ho.

I know the feeling! I'm doing much the same, and it's creeping towards midnight sometimes. I still have some drafts but we're not even half way through the month yet.

Anyway, I'm fascinated by your reflections on places I know, and the ones I don't. 20 years ago (yikes!) when I was doing the same rounds with toddlers there were no such things as play areas and I had to provide all the entertainment. Sitting down for a coffee was unheard of!

My parents took me to museums a lot too, and now that you mention it, the lack of refreshment areas in the 70s probably explains why I still know where most of the picnic areas are.

Did you know that some airports have play rooms for small kids airside now? Not Heathrow, that would be too civilised, but elsewhere.

Actually Sunshine and I had a conversation this very week about how we visited Heathrow to look at it on more than one occasion and rode the little train between terminals back and forth just for fun.

Cheerup>

reddit.

Read this yesterday, but forgot to leave my card