APRIL - Weeping Window

I'm sure most of you will remember the beautiful poppies of the weeping window at the Tower of London.  Well the poppies have been on tour and in March 2017, 5000 of them were pouring out of the window of our beautiful Maritime Museum.  Like Blade before them, they were the subject of many photos and selfies.  Here are a couple of mine.

After this we decided to pop along to one of our favourite pubs The Minerva for a drink.  For the first time ever, I managed to get sat in the smallest pub room in Britain!

Enjoying a pint in the smallest pub room in Britain in the Minerva

APRIL - First Shifts

In April I had my first volunteering shifts.  Both at Hull University, first up was the Science Festival.   This is an annual event and to be honest, I'm pretty sure they could have managed just as well without us vollies but it was lovely to have the opportunity to be a part of such a fun event.  It was a day crammed full of children's activities, all science based of course.

A couple of my 'Super-hero' volunteers

Next up was a shift of gallery invigilating and visitor welcoming at the BP Portrait Awards exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library, the same place as the Lines of Thought was held.  This was a fantastic opportunity for me to enjoy the amazing portraits on show.  When you are there for 3 hours, it's plenty of time to see them properly rather than rushing round which is what we all usually do if we are honest.  A few pictures below of some of my favourites.

MARCH - Fantastic Felines & Jason

There was an exhibition in the Streetlife Museum that I kept seeing mentioned on Twitter.  It was called Fantastic Felines and was a display featuring picture postcards designed by a music hall singer Violet Roberts.  Although born in Hammersmith in 1895, her family moved to Hull when she was 6 and she spent the rest of her life in Hull and later, Beverley.

A very talented lady, as well as singing, she was a postcard artist.  In Edwardian England, the postcard was almost like today's text message.  Postal deliveries were several times a day so you could send a postcard in the morning and get a reply by the afternoon post.  Violet's postcards featured drawings of comically dressed cats with amusing captions and the exhibition featured a number of them.



There's a great article and pictures on the KCom website here

On the way home through the station (now known as The Paragon Interchange although you'll never hear anyone from Hull call it anything other than 'station'), we stopped to have a look at the full-scale replica of Amy Johnson's biplane, the Gypsy Moth nicknamed 'Jason'.  As part of the prison’s reducing reoffending initiative, Hull-based artist Leonard J Brown worked with inmates to create the model.  I did spend a few minutes looking around for the model before spotting it up high.  It is a little too high up to be instantly noticeable in my opinion but it does look impressive.

Full-scale model of Jason hanging from the roof in Paragon Interchange.