Today is our thirty-third wedding anniversary. When I initially suggested to the Systems Administrator a few days ago that we could go out on Friday the SA, who was suffering from a cold and getting increasingly stressed about the car, stared at me rather wild eyed and asked Where do you want to go? I said I didn't know, somewhere local like last year when we went to the Munnings Museum, but that we didn't have to go out. By the next day the cold and the car panic were abating, and the SA suggested that we could go to the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, adding as a clincher and proof that this was not just a casual idea that he had checked it was open.
That's the difference between being at home and on holiday. If we were just visiting west Suffolk for the week we would certainly make the effort to go to a museum of East Anglian life. Living on the fringes of East Anglia we have not bothered to visit once in over thirty years. So we set off. The SA checked the traffic on Google maps before we went out and reported that everything was flowing freely. When we got to the fringes of Ipswich the dot matrix signs on the A12 said that the A14 was closed between J50 and J49. Where, enquired the SA, wa J50? I looked at the road atlas and discovered that J50 to J49 was the stretch of the A14 that is effectively the Stowmarket bypass. Ah. We came off two junctions early and took the back route through the lanes, along with quite a lot of other people who could read road signs, and then sat in traffic in Stowmarket with all the other people who had been turfed off the A14 whether they had been reading the roadside warnings or not, but we got there.
The museum turned out to be bigger than I expected, though tiny compared to Beamish or Blists Hill. They have got some old buildings rescued and reconstructed from various bits of Suffolk, which mostly house exhibitions. There is a lot about agriculture from the late Victorian era through to the mid twentieth century, a lot about the many engineering firms that developed out of Suffolk's need to service the agricultural sector, and a little bit of domestic history with a few room sets and a Victorian school room. There is a tiny bit about the fishing industry, which is fair enough since Stowmarket is well inland and there are museums on the coast that major in fishing (which we have not been to either). I would have liked something about the silk weaving industry, though I suppose the Warner archive in Braintree covers that. There are traditional East Anglian breeds of farm animals in modern wire enclosed paddocks, with signs around the museum appealing for funds to build them a Victorian farm. There is a watermill, and a windmill originally used to power a drainage pump rather than thresh corn. A Victorian octagonal shelter looking as though it had escaped from the seaside, except that it is too enclosed, came from the cattle market in Bury St Edmunds where it was used to settle livestock trading accounts. There are charcoal burning and hurdle making equipment, neither in use today. There is a restored walled garden in full productive clatter with vegetables, fruit and flowers for cutting. If we had stayed on until tonight we could have seen the outdoor cinema showing Mary Poppins.
It is a slightly confusing site to navigate your way around. The signs are not awfully clear as to what things are and which buildings you are supposed to go into, and more than once we found we'd started an exhibition somewhere in the middle and only got to the welcoming orientation panel that would have told us what it was all about at the end. The key to the map they give you with your entrance sticker does not list the numbered attractions in any order that would make any sense to somebody who didn't know the site, so it took ages to decipher, and I was simply baffled by the little banner flapping in the wind on a patch of grass that said First Aid Point. We never saw anybody there and there was no first aid equipment so I don't suppose what you were supposed to do if you needed first aid. Lie down on the grass until somebody noticed.
Still, the food in the cafe was quite nice, and I got to scratch a Large Black Pig called Tim behind the ears, and after much painful thought understood how the mechanism of a church clock built in 1607 worked to transmit gravitational force from the weight to the pendulum so that it kept swinging. The key according to the SA was the escapement at the top, and it all became much clearer once I worked out I needed to think about the mechanism from the top downwards, instead of fixating on the largest cogwheel and then working upwards.
The museum is taking its time expanding, since it was first opened in 1967. There is plenty of space for some more buildings, as and when suitable buildings and more critically the finance become available. Still, we spent three and half hours walking around looking at stuff, and left feeling our brains were full, just as it began to spit with rain.
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