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Monday 20 October 2008

4.2 billion years of history

Inspired by the great blog Travels With My Baby http://travelswithmybaby.wordpress.com/ we went to check out the Play & Learn centre at the Manchester Museum today. It was fantastic! In a bright, clean space T cruised and crawled, coloured in and chewed a variety of small rubber replicas of the giant taxidermied animals in the galleries downstairs. All for free!

One of the best bits of the day was found outside the dedicated children's area though. On the first floor, just outside Egyptology, a volunteer with bald head and giant beard (which amused T no end) presented us with the 'oldest item in the museum', a piece of fossilised copper from the H-something era. OK, I admit I have a history degree but it's not that sort of history! Anyway, this slice of what looked like striped marble was cool, smooth and more than 4 billion years old, an incomprehensible age. T sort of poked at it and then had a tantrum when I stopped him flinging it to the floor.

In other museum-vandalism news, I was pleased to see the black and white pot in the Egyptology department, which my childhood friend had climbed into during a visit when we were around 6 years old, was still on display. I don't know whether those chips around the rim have always been there though.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, really glad my blog was useful - Manchester Museum rocks (and it's full of rocks, too, by the sound of your trip there)! Hope you have lots more happy travels with your little one. x

Sleepless Mum said...

Thank you for your comment! I love the Museum, it was such a big part of my Manchester childhood, our default go-to location for rainy days and holidays when there was more month than money! I had no idea about the P&L centre until you wrote about it though, what a great hidden treasure x