A Museum Christmas Carol

St.Acetone, patron saint of museum workers composed this Christmas carol in a Byzantine prison cell where he was facing charges of excessive cleaning in the face of silver artefact tarnishing.

Any similarity to the tune of Away in a Manger is entirely coincidental


A day in a museum, no dosh and mislead,
The hassled curator lays down his tired head,
The boss in the office walked to where
he lay,
The sleeping curator was snoring away.

The public are moaning, the curator awakes
But tired curator, no excuses he makes
He asks museum manager, come down from on high
And stay by the front desk till home time is nigh

desk bells they ring, they are rung out by visitors all day,
until tours are done and delivered until Christmas day,

Be near me, scotch whisky, I ask thee to stay
Close by me for ever and soothe me, I pray
Bless all underpaid curators with their unkempt hair
And take us to conference and drink the tea there

desk bells they ring, are rung out by visitors all day,
until tours are done, and delivered until Christmas day,
thank Christ was born, for our 1 day off is Christmas day



Festive greetings to museum staff and volunteers everywhere

New Year's Resolution: Clear that backlog

Happy New Year dear reader.

After a Christmas break watching reviews of the year which singularly failed to mention the museum crisis in this country I began thinking about starting 2012 off as positively as possible given that the world is apparently guaranteed to end on 21st December 2012. This gives plenty of time for the conscientious museum professional to meet his or her maker with their museum meeting current accreditation standards.

So here is my to do list.

1. CLEAR THE ACCESSIONING BACKLOG ONCE AND FOR ALL. I can't allow everything to be destroyed in a global apocalypse without being properly recorded.
2. I realise I am unable create the time to do it myself, so I will apply for small grant funding to employ part time staff to clear the backlog.
3. In the current circumstances money is thin on the ground so I will instead recruit new volunteers and train them up to do it.
4. I don't have time to train volunteers myself. So I will recruit fully trained registrars as volunteers thereby cynically using the glut of recently unemployed museum professionals.
5. All unemployed registrars will still want paying and have already set themselves up as consultants so I will create four backlog clearance timetables based upon objectives 1-4.
6. I don't have time to create four timetables, so I will simply re-write the collections management strategy to reflect the available resources to clear the backlog.
7. Sod it - I'll just call it all a 'handling collection'.
8. Bugger - objections from the Education Manager means I will ethically dispose of the backlog, or failing that sell the stuff on ebay.
9. Bollocks - museums don't want to increase their collections and the trustees don't want to be seen to be selling their stuff.
10. Hire a skip and hope nobody notices before 21st December.

Happy New Year

Christmas is a time to think of car parking

I usually blog about the absurdity of museums, but at this time of year my thoughts (as well as those of millions of others in the western world) turn to car parking.
Admittedly I am constantly thinking about car parking spaces, but in a campaigning sense. I will not rest until the first real museum of car parking spaces is created. But in a world that lacks car parking space museums car parking is in need of cloudy thinking.
Christmas shopping is a time of good will towards all men, except in the shopping centre car parks when some sort of atavistic free for all exists. This is not because we become bad people but because car parking spaces do not reflect the different needs and character of the human Christmas shopping population.
Planners acknowledge people with disabilities and parents with young children by giving them their own spaces but what about everybody else? The vast majority of us. It would be too painful to deliberately disable ourselves and too criminal to kidnap young children. So what do we do? Here is my suggestion for car park planners across the globe.

• Keep disabled spaces
• Keep parent and child spaces 
• Add parent with parent spaces - for those of us taking aged mother out for her annual shop who then makes you carry around 12 months worth of shopping for the next 4 hours. 
• Add aged parent spaces - for the fiercely independent octogenarian, extra wide spaces with large numbering on posts as far away from everyone else as possible
• Add 'I've forgotten something and just need to pop back for 10 minutes and don't want to spend half an hour finding a space' space. Each with its own warden equipped with a stopwatch.
• Add  slimmer expert parking spaces nearer the shops for regular users and wider novice parking spaces near the aged parent spaces to prevent delays waiting for slow parkers
• Flashing spaces for people who can never find their car
• Males left in car listening to the football spaces - two lots colour coded spaces on opposite sides of the car park to keep fans apart with adjoining pie refreshment cabins
• Childless couple spaces - areas of calm away from crying children where couples can bicker in peace
• Singleton spaces - a chance to meet your future partner in mistletoe shaped spaces
• Reserved spaces that you earn by collecting frequent parker tokens

The result - car parking harmony full of yuletide spirit

Merry Christmas everyone