England Plus Paris: Part 8

At breakfast, the headwaitress talked to me for a while. Somehow, she figured out that I wasn't one of her usual sarariman guests. She wanted to make sure that I understood how to find B&Bs. I said that I did, and told her of my previous adventures. Ah, the Snooker Tourney. Of course.

I asked her where she liked to travel. She liked to go to Ireland. She liked to hike around there, she liked to visit her relatives. I imagined walking across the USA to visit my relatives. I felt tired.

Inappropriate Behavior

I'd learned my lesson from Oxford/Sheffield/Leicester. I showed up in Nottingham early. I had backup plans, other cities I could try for lodgings. I was ready to swap plans around, go to London, go to Cambridge, whatever place would have me.

It wasn't totally easy. There was some kind of 10:30am beer rush going on. There were a bunch of guys there buying drinks for one another. But most of the drinkers shuffled out at some point and the bartender dug out a room key for me.

While I was waiting, I overheard one guy saying that Leicester was the future and Nottingham was the past, and that he preferred Nottingham because the beer was cheaper in the past. I was just glad that there were plentiful accomodations in the past.

Anchor

It was gray, threatening rain, and there were threats of gale-force winds but I wanted to go out.

I walked out through the bar area. The "Leicester is the future" guy was still there and he encouraged me to "set down anchor right here". I didn't set down anchor right there. I was looking for the front door. (I'd squeezed in through a side door to get in, and that was looking locked now (though it wasn't, really, not from the inside).) I said that I had to be somewhere. (I didn't have to be somewhere, but I really wanted to go out.)

Somehow, this guy figured out that I was an American. He said that he was from a place in Southern Virginia called,... did I want to know what it was called? I wanted to know where they could have hidden the front door. He told me that he was from a place in Southern Virginia called the Universe.

I thought, He's far too young to waste his time bullshitting in a bar. He's not even good at the bullshitting.

He told me that Nottingham was full of sexy women, and that I'd best beware. "Be-fucking-ware." I assured him that I would remain en guarde. At this point, the bartender materialized and rescued me by asking if I had any questions. I asked her where the front door was, and she pointed it out. And I was free to make my way out into the threatening storm.

Certainty

Wollaton Hall: stately enough for most purposes

They had a lot of locally-made telephone equipment on display. Apparently, there's some (Ericsson?) telephone product-development site in Beeston, a suburb.

[Photo: Wesgrove, an early video recorder]

An early video recorder developed by Norman Rutherford and Michael Turner. They sold it in kit form.

Raleigh has a big plant in Nottingham, and this museum had many pretty Raleigh bicycles.

Lest you forget that there was a Victorian pumping station involved, check out these pipes.

After a bus ride and a walk through the grounds of Wollaton Hall, I walked into one of the low estate buildings. Although it looked like a gift shop, and the only exhibits immediately visible were about some "ecology walk," I was sure I was in the Industrial Museum. Why was I sure? Because I was in a Victorian Pumping Station, and of course you must turn Victorian Pumping Stations into museums of Technology. Nottingham's was rather good.

Nottingham is known for its lace-making, and they had some huge lace-making equipment. If I'd known something about Jacquard looms, this would have been a good place to learn more. The lace-making machines had card-readers; when manufacturers wanted to make a new lace design, they changed the cards, but didn't have to completely re-work the machines.

There was a card-puncher for creating new cards. In my notes I wrote, "But I think it's missing some pieces." I don't remember what that means, but I suppose that I wasn't able to figure out much about the machine.

When I first smelled smoke, I was worried that the pump works might be on fire. Just the day before, they'd had it running for visitors. Perhaps someone had forgotten to shut something down? But no, it was smoke from the blacksmith shop, where a smith was pounding iron bars into some useful shape. This place obviously had everything.

One lace machine, more than 7m long including its Jacquard controller was described as "quite a small version". What part of the process required so much space? Did it leave a whole strip of lace laid out flat? I couldn't tell.

I also visited Wollaton Hall's main building in which there were a few pretty rocks amongst many dead critters.

This weaving machine looked like a St Louis shoelace weaver that had grown up. It reads Jacquard-style cards.

What was The Point of That?

Shimla Pinks had exuberant decor and modern music, which might have been enough to convince me that I was eating something interesting if I hadn't been paying attention.

Exotic Foreign Beverages

Here is a gratuitious poorly-stitched panoramic view of Sheffield city center. Do you see that wooden archish construction on the right? When I arrived in Sheffield the first time, that construction had obliterated the street I planned on using to navigate my way around. So I got lost. Progress is all very well, but it's rough on travel guidebooks.

As I sat in my train seat, I watched the refreshment cart wheel past. I noticed that you could get Olde English beer in England, much to my surprise.

I was going to Sheffield. It was in the North. It was known as a university town for partiers. I thought of it as the Chico of England.

Outside My Bailiwick

[Photo: parking space under Bessemer thingy]

My favorite part of the Kelham Island Museum was this parking space.

The Kelham Island Museum talked about Sheffield's industrial history. Surprisingly, it was not housed in a Victorian pumping station, but I was able to find it anyhow.

This museum's exhibits didn't intersect with my obsessions. It's nice to read that in 1997, the tallest building in the world (the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur) was faced with over 2000 tonnes of Sheffield Stainless Steel. There were many stainless steel tools on display, including an impressive display of tuning forks.

There was some guy who hand-made stainless steel surgical tools on the premises. Apparently there's call for some hand-made surgical tools. For some tools, there's not much demand, and if you're a left-handed surgeon seeking one of these relatively-obscure tools, there might not be a factory line anywhere stamping them out. But I did not see the guy making the tools, so I don't know if he was interesting.

The Most Interesting Thing: Me

I was in a traveling museum exhibit about movies. There were movie props. There were screens showing movies. When I entered the exhibit, a nice lady talked to me: Eventually I figured out that her uniform was not a museum uniform, but a movie-usherette's uniform. There was another lady there, dressed like a flapper. At a table, an animator drew a flipbook.

I was the only visitor there, and I was there by mistake. I'd hoped for the Ruskin collection. The Ruskin Collection was more popular than this exhibit. Maybe that's because it contained some exbhibits about pretty rocks and about building design based upon nature. But if I may make a gross, mean-sprited generalization about British tourists, I mostly think it was popular because it was free.

I felt sorrier for the usherette and the flapper. At least the animator had something to do. She could draw. But the usherette and the flapper had no-one to talk to but each other, and what could they have left to talk about?

They probably talked about my exhibit-viewing habits. Why was I craning my neck around like that? (Because I was looking for the entrance to the Ruskin Collection. They wouldn't have thought I was looking for that, because I was in the wrong place to do that. There was no entrance to the Ruskin from this exhibit.)

They probably noticed that I was taking notes. But it might have seemed that I was writing about rather random parts of the exhibit. In fact, these notes had nothing to do with the exhibit. Instead, I was writing down things that I wanted to remember about Sheffield in general.

You might think I have a big ego, thinking that they were watching me, talking about me. I'm not saying that they were watching me because I'm a particularly interesting person. It's just that there was nothing else going on.

I asked the usherette a question. She was glad to be asked a question, glad to have something to talk about. I asked: Which way to the Ruskin Collection? She pointed me away, out of her life. She was again stuck in that exhibit with just the flapper and the animator, a trinity out of Sartre.

Ruskin, Rush Out

Happy To Be Here

I was glad that I wasn't in London. The London police were predicting May Day riots. I didn't know whether London police would think that I looked like a rioter. I knew I didn't want to find out the hard way.

Like a Record, Baby

This laundrette had spin-o-matics! I had read about these in a history of British laundrettes. (You can see one of them on the left-hand side of this photo.) Now that I had a chance to see these exotic foreign devices, I realized that I'd seen one before. Hans' washing machine in Japan had had a spinner.

Out on the Town

I walked my clean laundry back to the hotel. Along the way, I went past the Raleigh plant, whose parking lot featured a large bike-parking shed. Further down that road was a Co-op brand funeral parlor. Further on, I got rained on. In the time it took me to realize that this was a pretty serious downpour and to wrangle my rain jacket out of the laundry bag, the rain stopped.

I Didn't Understand

You might think that Green's Mill was a place for reducing lettuce into paste, but that wasn't where the name came from. It was a windmill which had been owned by the Green family. One Green had gone on to figure out Green's Theorem and Green's function. By the windmill, there was a kiddie science museum which didn't say much about the theorem or the function, presumably because nobody could understand these things.

Get Your Grist On

Fortunately, one of the museum guys came running out after me and told me that I was allowed into the windmill itself, not just into the kiddie museum.

I had never been inside a windmill before, and it turned out to be pretty interesting. There was a mechanism which allowed the top of the tower to turn into the wind. There were the huge gears which took the power of the sails to turn a great axle. There was the square axle of the mill wheel, square so that its corners would periodically knock another seed out of the hopper and onto the millstone.

I suspect that it was a windmill much like any other, but I'd never seen the inside of a working windmill before. I was glad for this opportunity. This was a functioning windmill, mind you. I could have bought some ground-on-the-premises wheat flour if I wanted a big, heavy souvenir to carry with me on my subsequent travels.

At Least It Was Close to the Hotel

I went to the Caves of Nottingham because I had read about the underground tanning, and I didn't believe it. I'd heard that Nottinghamsters had carved deep basements into the local sandstone. I had also heard that some tanners had treated hides in a cave. I associate tanning with stinky chemicals, and couldn't figure out how they'd ventilate the works.

It turns out that the tanning cave wasn't a dug-down cave. The tanning cave was a cave-in-the-side-of-a-cliff cave, a cave with a wide mouth, a cave with excellent ventilation.

To learn this, I had to listen to a self-guided audio tour with a very low signal:cheese ratio.

Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 8

What's a Scraggly Guy Like You Doing in an Overpriced Place Like This?