Going South (5): Dorchester Dinosaur Musem

Have you noticed how high tech a lot of museums and tourist attractions are becoming these days. They're not content unless they're bursting to the seems with 3D computer simulations, interactive holograms, teleporters and Hadron Colliders. Not like when I were a lad when museums were all "Do Not Touch" signs, plastic replicas of squirrel droppings and dusty fossils. Having said that, sometimes I long for the simple times. It's like Doctor Who. The modern day monsters might be impressively realistic CGI creations but there's still nothing as scary as a dustbin with a sink plunger on top. Maybe our imaginations worked a little harder back in them days...

All of which brings us to the next stop on our journey south, the Dorchester Dinosaur Museum - where the ancient relics are more than just the skulls of sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoth tusks. Many of the exhibits here transported me back in time not just to the Jurassic Age, but to the museums of my youth, before everything came with bells, whistles and flashing lights to grab our attention deficient youth. (What a fogey I must sound. Isn't it ace?)

That's not to say this museum was entirely without audio visual or interactive elements. For the former, there was a video of Jurassic Park on continuous loop. And for the latter... who needs computer games when you've got red plastic plates? Simply press the "button" to reveal the answer...

They certainly kept me entertained. Well, them and the huge plastic dinosaur that greeted us as we arrived...

No Ball Games

Summer's here and the time is right for playing ball games in the street.

Am I the only one who feels suddenly intimidated?

I have two major concerns when it comes to ball games in the street, and they have little to do with broken windows. They go a little something like this...

1) I have limited sporting ability. While I could occasionally, in my youth, catch a cricket ball if pressed to do so, this was largely a survival mechanism. Better it hit me in the palm of my hand than smack in the face, chest or unmentionables. I cannot, however, and never have been able to, kick a football. You know when you're walking down the street and two urchins are moving (passing?) a ball back and forth and one of them sends it swerving towards you and the "decent bloke" thing to do is stop (trap?) it with your foot and send (shoot?) it back to them? I cannot do this. If I try, I am more than likely to fall on my arse... or break somebody's window.

2) Balls are weapons. No, this isn't a Freudian thing. In my youth, I was, on various occasions the direct victim of GBHBB (general bodily harm by ball - come on, keep up). Tennis balls used as forearm-to-face missiles. Footballs booted with such savage velocity that they'd have taken off the heads of lesser men. Basketballs bounced repeatedly on my supine fizzog till it became porridgey mush. Well, you get the picture.

Through all that time, the one thought that kept me going (through what could, quite reasonably, have been dubbed My Childhood / Adolescence of Terror) was the idea that "Things won't always be this way". That I would reach a point in my life when I was older, when I commanded the respect of an adult, when I actually intimidated kids with balls more than they intimidated me.

I'm 39 now. I'm still waiting.