pumpkinstrokemarrow

Yesterday to Ipswich museum, a large and impressive relic of a by-gone era. Lots of things in glass fronted mahogany boxes.

Main hall, just inside the front door, a large affair with a first floor gallery running around the walls and mainly full of stuffed animals. So we had a mammoth, presumably not stuffed, a giraffe, a lion with cubs (notice explaining the cubs were neo-natal zoo deaths, not wild), a bear, a gorilla and sundry less important animals. Beavers, ant eaters and so on. Various skulls, teeth and other relics. An area with various sea life, including the first horse shoe crab that I have ever seen close up, this one about a foot long. Behind this gallery what was described as one of the largest collections of stuffed birds extant. There were certainly a lot of them and they all looked a bit dusty.

Animal life all good fun but a bit old-speak. One got the impression that the curators were a touch embarassed by the whole business.

Then there was an Anglo Saxon gallery, complementing the previous day's visit to Sutton Hoo. Much more modern affair than the animals with a proper collection of posters explaining what was going on. Good balance between poster and artefact. A gallery of man-kind with all sorts of things from around the world. All in all it has been a week for masks. What with the masked helmet being sold at Christies, the masked helmet dug up at Sutton Hoo and now all these masks from Africa and other places. Clearly wearing masks for masques was an important business in the olden days. A slavery gallery to provide a bit of balance. A second world war room. An Egyptian gallery with quite a lot of stuff on loan from the British Museum. Where I learned that not only did the Egyptians put their innards into canopic jars, they also had particular jars for particular innards. So one jar was the god of intestines and was used for intestines, another was the god of stomachs and used for stomachs. Not very big, maybe 9 inches high. Distinguished by the lids of the jars being in the form of the appropriate god's head. And then, rather than go to the waste and expense of burying one's servants with one, one buried model servants in a special model servant box. It seems that when someone said the proper spell, these models would spring into life as real live servants who could serve one's underworld breakfast. Not sure who told the spell. Perhaps one had to rely on the priests who were still in the land of the living keeping up the proper prayers for the proper length of time.

First floor gallery a little disappointing in that the proportion of poster to artefact got a bit high. One might just as well have read a picture book about Ipswich.

A good morning out, and free. But one wonders how such an old-fashioned place will survive in the new world of outsourced Suffolk. We read in our papers that they plan to more or less close down the Suffolk operation and replace the fraction they can still afford by contractors. Do they hand over the museum to Chessington World of Adventures to run for them, prior to closing it down and flogging the site off? Would the National Trust be interested?