Is there anything better than cheese?
The last week I have treated myself to (read: gorged my piggy self on) brie, lots and lots of brie, and farmhouse cheddar, and mozzarella, and quark, and parmesan, and wensleydale, and today, oh beautiful beautiful day, I tried halloumi for the first time. Oh halloumi. What kept us apart for so long?
The only thing arguably better than cheese (other than obviously tea, which goes without saying) is maybe cake, and for those of us who would far rather spend more time eating and less time arguing the toss, some genius invented cheesecake.
So I'm sure if I've met you in real life, I've probably at some point chewed your ear off about the Booth Museum. I love the Booth Museum (though not as much as cheese, it having the major drawback of not being edible).
The Booth Museum is a tiny free museum here in Brighton, crammed with...essentially weird Victorian shit.
Thomas Booth was a crazy man who loved to preserve wildlife. And when I say preserve, I mean massacre. He loved nothing more than to stride out into the wilds and enjoy nature by blowing the head off of anything that moved. So much so that he got thrown out of his Cambridge college for not turning up to lessons, instead toddling off to the countryside to bag himself a nice new corpse for his sitting room. He got very into taxidermy, and after his death he donated his extensive collection of carnage to the people of Brighton.
When you walk into the Booth Museum, the first thing you see is a large brown bear leering at you with what would clearly have been malicious intent if it didn't look so darn mangy and cross eyed. Here it is, beautifully modelled by my flatmate Lewis:
As you step inside, you notice to your right a large glass display case housing a stuffed bird. And on top of it, another display case with another stuffed bird. Then to your left, another. And another. You look up and realise that essentially it's stuffed birds as far as the eye can see. Swans, seagulls, ravens, ducks, geese, owls, and the charmingly named "little bustard". In the middle of the museum is a room they have set up like a Victorian sitting room, plush red and dark wood, hunting trophies everywhere, a drawing desk with inked sketches and drawers full of butterflies, tiger skin rug on the floor, monkey heads on the walls, stuffed badger (apparently it was even a celebrity badger, it was used for something to do with the Prince Caspian series). My particular favourite piece in the room is a tortoise hollowed out for use as an ashtray.
After that there's a room full of butterflies, thousands of gleaming jewels pinned to scraps of card line the walls, arranged into country of origin and shimmering through a full spectrum, then the moths dusty and brittle looking so drab in comparison.
Butterflies with the most ridiculous and colourful names, like a catalogue of fifties pulpy spy paperbacks or Mills and Boon trash - The Blotched Emerald, Maiden's Blush, Hoary Footman. Some are intriguingly bizarre - The Spinach, Satin Lutestring, Dingy Carpet.
Giant beetles and dragonflies, a tarantula.
Then the skeletons! It's so fascinating to see the inner scaffolding of so many creatures laid out bare in front of you. Comparing the ape with the human, marvelling at the alien nature of everything from the sea, admiring the beautiful curves of a tiger's skull.
"The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings Not that this guy will be doing much talking any time soon.
This is my other flatmate, Mathieu, I think he's chatting up the skinny lady in the corner. There's no accounting for taste.
This little treasure is a merman:
He used to travel around with Victorian curiosity sideshows. They knew he was definitely a merman because he only has two nipples, and as we all know mermaids have more than that. Of course, what he really is is a fish and a monkey stuck together, some sort of totemic item found by explorers in Africa. How much more fun would it have been to have lived in a time when so much less was explained by science? When the world was somehow a magical mystery and everything that was a bit odd was the work of fairies and spirits and gods. Though I guess an advantage is that nobody's likely to trepan off the top of your head to cure a headache.
This brings me on nicely to the 'Miracle from God Toad in the Rock'. Not a vastly overhyped version of a sausage and batter pudding meal, the toad in the rock is currently living at the Booth Museum. It looks like this:
It's a fossilised frog, found inside a stone. This baffled people for years, and was widely accepted to be proof of god's existence. Because like, how could a frog magically get itself inside a rock? Well, by climbing into the small hole in the side, then eating something and getting too fat to crawl out again, that's how. But 'Greedy Frog in a Rock' just doesn't have that same ring to it somehow.
Edit - P.S. I am an idiot - why can't I change my profile pictures? I am fed up of the beautiful Brighton sunset and me eating my own dress. I want to change it to a sweet picture of me looking utterly ravishingly sexy, thus:
The last week I have treated myself to (read: gorged my piggy self on) brie, lots and lots of brie, and farmhouse cheddar, and mozzarella, and quark, and parmesan, and wensleydale, and today, oh beautiful beautiful day, I tried halloumi for the first time. Oh halloumi. What kept us apart for so long?
The only thing arguably better than cheese (other than obviously tea, which goes without saying) is maybe cake, and for those of us who would far rather spend more time eating and less time arguing the toss, some genius invented cheesecake.
So I'm sure if I've met you in real life, I've probably at some point chewed your ear off about the Booth Museum. I love the Booth Museum (though not as much as cheese, it having the major drawback of not being edible).
The Booth Museum is a tiny free museum here in Brighton, crammed with...essentially weird Victorian shit.
Thomas Booth was a crazy man who loved to preserve wildlife. And when I say preserve, I mean massacre. He loved nothing more than to stride out into the wilds and enjoy nature by blowing the head off of anything that moved. So much so that he got thrown out of his Cambridge college for not turning up to lessons, instead toddling off to the countryside to bag himself a nice new corpse for his sitting room. He got very into taxidermy, and after his death he donated his extensive collection of carnage to the people of Brighton.
When you walk into the Booth Museum, the first thing you see is a large brown bear leering at you with what would clearly have been malicious intent if it didn't look so darn mangy and cross eyed. Here it is, beautifully modelled by my flatmate Lewis:
As you step inside, you notice to your right a large glass display case housing a stuffed bird. And on top of it, another display case with another stuffed bird. Then to your left, another. And another. You look up and realise that essentially it's stuffed birds as far as the eye can see. Swans, seagulls, ravens, ducks, geese, owls, and the charmingly named "little bustard". In the middle of the museum is a room they have set up like a Victorian sitting room, plush red and dark wood, hunting trophies everywhere, a drawing desk with inked sketches and drawers full of butterflies, tiger skin rug on the floor, monkey heads on the walls, stuffed badger (apparently it was even a celebrity badger, it was used for something to do with the Prince Caspian series). My particular favourite piece in the room is a tortoise hollowed out for use as an ashtray.
After that there's a room full of butterflies, thousands of gleaming jewels pinned to scraps of card line the walls, arranged into country of origin and shimmering through a full spectrum, then the moths dusty and brittle looking so drab in comparison.
Butterflies with the most ridiculous and colourful names, like a catalogue of fifties pulpy spy paperbacks or Mills and Boon trash - The Blotched Emerald, Maiden's Blush, Hoary Footman. Some are intriguingly bizarre - The Spinach, Satin Lutestring, Dingy Carpet.
Giant beetles and dragonflies, a tarantula.
Then the skeletons! It's so fascinating to see the inner scaffolding of so many creatures laid out bare in front of you. Comparing the ape with the human, marvelling at the alien nature of everything from the sea, admiring the beautiful curves of a tiger's skull.
"The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings Not that this guy will be doing much talking any time soon.
This is my other flatmate, Mathieu, I think he's chatting up the skinny lady in the corner. There's no accounting for taste.
This little treasure is a merman:
He used to travel around with Victorian curiosity sideshows. They knew he was definitely a merman because he only has two nipples, and as we all know mermaids have more than that. Of course, what he really is is a fish and a monkey stuck together, some sort of totemic item found by explorers in Africa. How much more fun would it have been to have lived in a time when so much less was explained by science? When the world was somehow a magical mystery and everything that was a bit odd was the work of fairies and spirits and gods. Though I guess an advantage is that nobody's likely to trepan off the top of your head to cure a headache.
This brings me on nicely to the 'Miracle from God Toad in the Rock'. Not a vastly overhyped version of a sausage and batter pudding meal, the toad in the rock is currently living at the Booth Museum. It looks like this:
It's a fossilised frog, found inside a stone. This baffled people for years, and was widely accepted to be proof of god's existence. Because like, how could a frog magically get itself inside a rock? Well, by climbing into the small hole in the side, then eating something and getting too fat to crawl out again, that's how. But 'Greedy Frog in a Rock' just doesn't have that same ring to it somehow.
Edit - P.S. I am an idiot - why can't I change my profile pictures? I am fed up of the beautiful Brighton sunset and me eating my own dress. I want to change it to a sweet picture of me looking utterly ravishingly sexy, thus:
VIEW 27 of 27 COMMENTS
glassmachine:
Did you get the cake out of your hair?
zigs:
#1 Cheese is the shit. I love it. #2 you are beautiful 