THE SCIENCE MUSEUM, WE WILL ROCK YOU (EVERYBODY)

Yesterday afternoon, The Morgans and The Grandma visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum as a prelude to a week of museums. 

Today, the family has visited the Science Museum, one of the most interesting of London, perhaps the most amazing after the British Museum.

Before the visit, the family has been practising some English grammar with The Simple Future and the Object Pronouns, and learning some vocabulary about The Weather. They also have been talking about Occitan poets and Gypsy community and their ways of transmitting information about the future through poetry and fortune telling.

Finally, The Grandma has explained the interesting history of La Torre del Rellotge, the old lighthouse of Barcelona, located in La Barceloneta, the fishermen neighbourhood, that has its own little story: it has the honour of being one of the geodesic points where the scientist Pierre François André Méchain took the measurements he used as the basis of the metric system.

More information: Future Simple

More information: Object Pronouns 

More information: The Weather

The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019.

Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission, although visitors are requested to make a donation if they are able. Temporary exhibitions may incur an admission fee.

It is one of the five museums in the Science Museum Group.

The museum was founded in 1857 under Bennet Woodcroft from the collection of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

It included a collection of machinery which became the Museum of Patents in 1858, and the Patent Office Museum in 1863. This collection contained many of the most famous exhibits of what is now the Science Museum.

In 1883, the contents of the Patent Office Museum were transferred to the South Kensington Museum. In 1885, the Science Collections were renamed the Science Museum and in 1893 a separate director was appointed. The Art Collections were renamed the Art Museum, which eventually became the Victoria and Albert Museum.

When Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the new building for the Art Museum, she stipulated that the museum be renamed after herself and her late husband. This was initially applied to the whole museum, but when that new building finally opened ten years later, the title was confined to the Art Collections and the Science Collections had to be divorced from it. 

On 26 June 1909 the Science Museum, as an independent entity, came into existence.

The Science Museum's present quarters, designed by Sir Richard Allison, were opened to the public in stages over the period 1919-28. This building was known as the East Block, construction of which began in 1913 and was temporarily halted by World War I. As the name suggests it was intended to be the first building of a much larger project, which was never realized. However, the museum buildings were expanded over the following years; a pioneering Children's Gallery with interactive exhibits opened in 1931, the Centre Block was completed in 1961-3, the infill of the East Block and the construction of the Lower & Upper Wellcome Galleries in 1980, and the construction of the Wellcome Wing in 2000 result in the museum now extending to Queen's Gate. 

The Science Museum consists of two buildings -the main building and the Wellcome Wing. Visitors enter the main building from Exhibition Road, while the Wellcome Wing is accessed by walking through the Energy Hall, Exploring Space and then the Making the Modern World galleries at ground floor level.

More information: Science Museum

A visit to a museum is a search for beauty,
truth, and meaning in our lives.
Go to museums as often as you can.

Maira Kalman

LEAVING L'EMPORDÀ, 'ÉS QUAN DORMO QUE HI VEIG CLAR'

Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma are on their way to Barcelona after spending a few days in El Port de la Selva where they are going to pay a final tribute to an old friend and visit another, Tina Picotes.

Yesterday, they took their bicycles and went up from El Port de la Selva to the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes, one of the most imposing and mysterious buildings from where on a clear day you can even see the Serra de l'Albera, Canigó and the Pyrenees.

On the way back, they went down through Vilajuïga and returned to El Port de la Selva along the Llançà road, a road that allows you to enjoy an extraordinarily beautiful landscape and, although you have to keep your attention on the road 100%, it allows you to stop at different places and contemplate how the sea and the mountain coexist.

 

NOTES SOBRE EL PORT DE LA SELVA per J.V. Foix

Em trobaren ajaçat a la sorra quan ja tots els banyistes havien desertat la platja. Enganxats a la nuca i a l'esquena tenia papers de totes les colors amb inscripcions de duanes i de grans hotels i balnearis exòtics. Me'ls volien arrencar, però seguien trossos de carn viva. Els ulls dels cavalls els pesquen a la cova de la Colomera quan toquen les dotze de la nit. Només en aquell instant precís es poden obrir com qui obre una ostra. Llur pupil·la flota damunt un licor tan ardent, que mai cap llavi humà no ha pogut acostar-s'hi. No els mireu mai de fit a fit, perquè us prendrà per sempre una tristesa sense fi, i la passió per les cales inabordables lligarà la vostra vida al més misteriós dels destins.

NOTES ON PORT DE LA SELVA by J.V. Foix

They found me lying in the sand when all the swimmers had already abandoned the beach. Stuck on my back and the nape of my neck were pieces of paper in all colours with inscriptions from customs houses and from grand hotels and exotic spas. They wanted to tear them from me, but chunks of live flesh came off as well. They go fishing for horses' eyes in Colomera's cave when it strikes midnight. Only at that precise instant can they be opened as one opens an oyster. Their pupils float on a liquid which burns so strongly, that no human lips have ever been able to come near. Don't ever stare at them, because an endless sadness will take hold of you for good, and the passion for inaccessible inlets will bind your life to the most mysterious of destinies.

 

They arrived on Friday with J.V. Foix and his poetry and they leave in the same way, remembering his writings about this beautiful town and what is, perhaps, his best-known poem, the one that tells us about dreams as a way to escape from reality, especially when it is harder and crueler than you can bear.

In this poem, J.V. Foix reminds us of the Occitan poets who also sang of love at night surrounded by the dreamlike atmosphere, and even reminds us of Corto Maltese, the character of Hugo Pratt, who also uses dreams as a way of refuge (or escape) in Les Cèltiques. Calderón de la Barca also told us that life was a dream and Bernat Metge took advantage of the resource of dreams to be able to criticize society and the political power of the time and avoid the established censorship, and dreams allow us to live as we want and desire, that's why our beloved Bruce Springsteen also invites us to daydream...

 

És quan plou que ballo sol
Vestit d'algues, or i escata,
Hi ha un pany de mar al revolt
I un tros de cel escarlata,
Un ocell fa un giravolt
I treu branques una mata,
El casalot del pirata
És un ample gira-sol.
Es quan plou que ballo sol
Vestit d'algues, or i escata.

És quan ric que em veig gepic
Al bassal de sota l'era,
Em vesteixo d'home antic
I empaito la masovera,
I entre pineda i garric
Planto la meva bandera;
Amb una agulla saquera
Mato el monstre que no dic.
És quan ric que em veig gepic
Al bassal de sota l'era.

És quan dormo que hi veig clar
Foll d'una dolça metzina,
Amb perles a cada mà
Visc al cor d'una petxina,
Só la font del comellar
I el jaç de la salvatgina,
-O la lluna que s'afina
En morir carena enllà.
Es quan dormo que hi veig clar
Foll d'una dolça metzina.

 

It's when it rains I dance alone
Dressed in seaweed, scales and gold,
There's a patch of sea at a bend in the road
And a piece of scarlet sky,
A bird loops the loop
And a shrub branches out,
And the pirate's manor-house
Is a broad sunflower.
It's when it rains I dance alone
Dressed in seaweed, scales and gold.

It's when I laugh I see my hunched back
In the pond below the threshing floor,
I dress up as a man from antiquity
And harass the farm-girl,
And between pine grove
And kermes oak I plant my standard;
With a sail needle
I slay the monster whose name I do not utter.
It's when I laugh I see my hunched back
In the pond below the threshing floor.

It's when I sleep I see all clearly,
Deranged by a sweet venom,
With pearls in either hand
I live in the heart of a scallop shell,
I am the spring in the gulley
And the bed
Of the wild creature,
—Or the moon who becomes more delicate
As she dies beyond the ridge—.
It's when I sleep I see all clearly,
Deranged by a sweet venom.

 

El Port de la Selva, April 1939

On he deixat les claus...

 

More information: Anglo-Catalan Society

 

I quan tot just si la tenora sona,
Pastors i estels perduts serrat enllà,
La Verge i Tu tots sols, a l'Hora Sola,
I els corns reials qui sap qui els sentirà,
Vindré mudat, al costat de la dona,
Amb els vestits de quan ens vam casar.

And then just as the woodwind tenora sounds, 
shepherds and stars lost beyond the hills, 
the Virgin and You all alone at the Single Hour, a
and who knows who will hear the royal horns, 
I shall come, having changed my clothes, beside my wife,
dressed as we were when we married.

J.V. Foix

El Port de la Selva, Christmas 1948

Onze Nadals i un Cap d'Any