Adult Exploration

I know what you were hoping for in this Blog Post: Adult Exploration, in other words.....but I am going to take this opportunity to show some snaps I took recently as I was exploring as an adult. As children we took our torches and went up the Dingle where at the top there was a Bridge. We could hear a small waterfall further into the darkness so off we went with no concern for potential danger and before Weil's disease was even a blip on the radar. As adults we can lose our urge to explore. I am taking the opportunity to explore an unfamiliar part of Britain but one which has always held a fascination for me: The North West. As a self proclaimed arty farty sort I am surprisingly taken by the relics of the Industrial Revolution perhaps because somewhere deep down I feel that discovering our collective history might assist in changing our collective future.

Next year is the 100 year commemoration of the First World War. In my adult exploration last week I chanced upon the Gallipoli Gardens in Bury, Greater Manchester. It was situated near the Fusiliers Museum. I didn't want to go in there because I didn't want to engage in the history of the military. I stopped here to take a photograph because I had two great uncles who fought on the beaches of Gallipoli, one on the British side and one on the Australian or Anzac side. Uncle Dafydd and Uncle Tommy were both brothers of my Grandmother on my Father's side from an area near Cerrigydrudion in North East Wales.  Tommy had left Wales to seek his fortune in the new country and within months of arriving, the war to end all wars started and he was shipped out to the Dardanelles. They both fought on the same beaches, against the same perceived enemy and neither knew the other one was there.  I would maybe one day like to write a play about their experiences. Both survived the carnage and brutality and Tommy became a Soldier Settler in Queensland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_settlement_(Australia)
 

I have learnt that in my Father's part of North Wales in the 1920's every Armistice Day children were marched to the cenotaphs from their schools where there would be large numbers of women dressed in black. It decimated the male population of many areas especially Lancashire.

 I finished the afternoon in Bury thinking about Poetry and Plays and for many people this is the only way they can express their feelings about important subjects like War. Our impotence in the face of such global grief can perhaps only be expressed in words.



http://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/their-families-have-been-informed.html

Before going into my lectures I gazed across at the Imperial War Museum North. I have been around a couple of times and have noted how the exhibition is more like a Multi-Media Performance. There is something detached and removed about the exhibits. I suppose that the further away we get from War and the effects of War then the harder it is for people to interpret what it was like. Next time I go round I'm going to ask where the exhibition to honour conscientious objectors is. What did surprise me was that there was mangled metal in there, huge mangled iron girders that had been shipped across from Ground Zero & The Twin Towers next to a burned out armoured car that had been shipped over from Iraq. This gave the exhibition an element of the ghoulish and indeed there were persons having their photographs taken next to the mangled metal although photography was prohibited. A trophy photo perhaps. I thought 9/11 was an act of terrorism, therefore what were its remains doing in a War Museum.  There were young territorial soldiers in the Museum shop and I couldn't look at them. I couldn't hold their gaze. They wanted confirmation that they were heroes. I couldn't give them that. I felt ashamed that I was a member of a species that has invested and profited through war and conflict.

http://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/on-futility-of-war-and-sickness-of.html