Since my local cinema is rubbish [and I'm still bitter], when my mum starting asking what we could do this weekend, I offered up the suggestion of a visit to the Science Museum. Corinne and I went earlier in the year but we only went to the Space section and I really wanted to go back and explore the whole thing. And go to the section for kids that Corinne wouldn't let us go to but Billy Bass said was brilliant. Consequently I found myself on a train stopping at about eleven stops til it was anywhere remotely near Central London with my brother and my mum. I am still undecided on whether I prefer going to museums by myself or with other people but one thing I am most definitely decided on is not going anywhere near them in school holidays, something I figured out pretty quickly when I found myself in a queue for a map of the museum. As a general rule, people annoy me when they walk slow. I mean really annoy me, to the point where I wonder how I've got through life not actually delivering a swift kick to anyone walking slowly for no apparent reason in front of me, so after the walk from the station to the museum being full of people I wanted to kick, I was hoping the museum was less so.

We decided to start on the top floors and make our way down, hoping it was the opposite of what everyone else, and all their pushchairs, had decided to do. Thus we ended up in a rather interesting section on the Science and Art of Medicine, made slightly annoying by a woman with a posh voice and a kid who clearly wasn't interested in the exhibits and was being forced by the woman to stand in front of the exhibits whilst she explained the bleeding obvious - "there's the cot, that's where the baby will go" - and rather entertaining since she wasn't reading about them before she started explaining, hence, "this is another doctor's surgery, look at the boy, that's what they wore in those days...oh no actually it's a dentist". By that point I'd stopped reading about the medicine in the war and was instead waiting for her to figure out it was indeed not a doctor.

The next floor down and I discovered they had a little section entitled 'On Air'. Yep, it was sponsored by Capital FM* and was a proper studio and desk at which I promptly walked up and stated that I wanted to play with the faders. However, since the desk was completely separate to their little soundproof studio it meant I needed a dj. I still don't understand dj's who don't drive their own desks; when we went to the BBC in The Mailbox, I couldn't understand it then either, why would you not want control over your faders, over when you play music or jingles is beyond me. Anyway, back to the problem at hand, my brother got roped in to be the dj and was promptly handed a script and told to go in the studio whilst I experimented with the naff jingles. I was ropped in as a dj for a bit where I ranted about JK Rowling's recently publicised views on body shape and echoed Gilly's rant about magazines. The desk was old, and not linked up to a computer, but it was still fun to mess about on. And I got to talk to the cool bloke who worked there - cool because he thinks Chris Moyles is hilarious [though lost points through admitting listening to Johnny Vaughan for all of about two weeks], had a mate who works for BBC Berkshire who is twenty three but sounds about fifty and like Terry Wogan, and because he studied English and consequently wrote his dissertation on Lord of the Rings**. I eventually managed to drag myself away the desk and to the Energy hall where my brother and I found a metal pole with a yellow circle round it and the words 'Do not touch'. On closer inspection, the blurb besides it revealed that when you crossed the yellow line, a warning sound started and got louder and when you touched the pole, it gave a small electric shock. The point was, with no barriers around the pole, would people still touch it? Well yes, obviously. A couple of electric shocks later and we whizzed through the Computing and Mathematics sections, well as much as you can whizz through a Maths section when you have a brother reading it for a degree.
And then we went to the Launch Pad. And it was at that point I discovered why I hadn't really encountered many annoying little kids in the rest of the museum, they were all in the Launch Pad, which was admittedly an hands on section for kids, but that is neither here nor there. Consequently I feel I need to go back when there aren't that many kids so I can play properly on all the exhibits but I did manage to play on the big satellite shaped talking thing which means you can talk across the room to someone and they can hear you despite the room being filled with the screams of little kids.

Plus somehow I felt that all this was draining enough so coming home, watching Macbeth***, and indeed crying my eyes out when Keeley Hawes jumped and James McAvoy was killed, warranted enough work for the day.


*Other radio stations available.
**Ok, I hate Lord of the Rings but even I admit that's cool.
***The BBC adaptation.