Is it 1:20 am? Or is it 8:20pm?

Trying not to go to bed at 8:20, though I REALLY wanted to a couple of hours ago. I’m trying to stay awake though to better adjust to local time. So forgive this little travelog, It is, after all my very first international conference, so I’m allowed just a little excitement. My day started at 5am. UK time. My lovely wife drove me to the airport in time to get through security by 6:33. Then of course, having got through so quickly I had an hour to wait before my gate was announced. When it was it was a good long walk away, so that took about fifteen minutes, which was nice, then I sat down for a few minutes with Country Life. Seriously, when did they start giving Country Life away at airports? Anyhow, I picked it up because it had some lovely Light Sussex chickens on the cover, just like my girls. These particular chicken cover-girls were part of a feature article encouraging the landed gentry who usually read the magazine to use their local breeds.

IMG_4357[1]

I got a good view of the snow and mountains on Greenland as we flew over.

IMG_4361[1]

A couple of hours later I got the sort of views of Canadian lakes that made me want to come back as a tourist. But I only had long enough at Toronto Airport, to go through US border control, and then with three other passengers, board a little Beechcraft 1900 turboprop for the hop across Lake Ontario to Rochester.

IMG_4366[1]

Goodbye Canada

Goodbye Canada

Hello USA
Hello USA

 

I was welcomed to Rochester with a conference banner at the airport. When i told my wife about it, she said “It’s either a bigger conference than I thought, or a smaller airport.”

And  its gone 9pm local time, 2am at home, and I think I can allow myself to go to bed now.

Oh, and yes, I know. I promise – no more travelogues.

 

 

 


Written by

I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

Homepage RSS