This week, we went to the Discovery Museum in Newcastle. Our original plan had been to go somewhere outside, but as it was in the middle of a thunderstorm when we set off in the morning, plus we also needed to go and buy some more bits of school uniform for BTP, we decided to revise our family outing to one of Newcastle’s museums, as this would also allow us to pop into Marks & Spencer to buy trousers, socks and the like.

The hunt for school uniform went well, and we stopped off in a cafe for some lunch; the GLW and I had bacon, brie and mushroom baguettes (very nice), while the kids had cheese savoury sandwiches with some crisps. The crisps were of the wotsits variety and, entertainingly, SWP decided to eat his using the ’spaghetti method’.

You do know what it is. It’s where you stick one end of the foodstuff into your mouth and slurp it in…

Anyway, after that we headed off to the Discovery Museum. The minor flaw in our plan is that now the rain had stopped, it was a hot day. That’s not precisely accurate — it was a ridiculously fucking hot day and we were lugging around big bags of school uniform, heavy raincoats, and from time to time, small children.

But we made it to the discovery museum, and saw the steam-turbine powered ship Turbinia. It isn’t just a steam-turbine powered ship, it was the first ever steam-turbine powered ship, built in 1894 by the local company Parsons, and it inspired the next generation of faster ships…

We then wandered around a bit where they showed the history of Newcastle through Roman times, Norman times (admiring the selection of broadswords, and various pieces of armour, including the helmets that you could try on) and later. We then wandered through Victorian times, through the second world war, and into the 1960s, where we found a strange set of blue doors with the words ‘police box’ above them.

A blue police box. Now where have we seen that before?

Ah yes. It’s the TARDIS console, isn’t it?

Well, for the kids that was obviously the highlight of the trip — it’s not every day you get to play with the TARDIS console and get it to make the dematerialising noise, is it? I wasn’t sure which Doctor that style of TARDIS console belonged to, although BTP was adamant that it was William Hartnell’s (and I suppose if we were in the 1960s part of the museum, it would have to be either Hartnell’s or Troughton’s).

There was also an opportunity to see something-or-other about the history of broadcasting, which had various old fashioned radios, old fashioned TVs, crystal sets and the like. The only slightly disconcerting part about it was that one of the “old-fashioned tellies” wasn’t too dissimilar to one we’d had when I was a child. Bah…

Then we wandered round a little more, and saw what appeared to be an emergency medical evacuation — some very pale and unconscious-looking young lady strapped to a medical board and being carried out by an ambulance/paramedic crew. Because, as I had mentioned, it was somewhat on the warm side, we presumed that the heat had caused someone to faint, and as the GLW was feeling overly hot and bothered, we thought we’d better go for a sit down and a drink in the cafe before someone else collapsed.

The cafe was surprisingly empty — there was a huge great set of shelves which was presumably supposed to be full of various 500ml bottles of drink, but we obtained the last bottle of diet coke and a couple of the last ten bottles of water to sit down for a few minutes, and have a much needed drink.

By this time it was about half past three, and as the museum was due to close at 5 o’clock, we now had to decide which bits to miss out, as we weren’t going to have time to see everything. I am glad however that we didn’t miss ‘The Science Maze’.

If you go to the Discovery Museum, take children, and make sure you go to the ‘Science Maze’ part. It’s basically the interactive part of the museum. They have magnets you can play with — I asked BTP to try and get the two ‘blue’ poles of different magnets to touch and he recognised that you couldn’t, telling me that ‘the air is pushing them apart’.

We then found an area where there were three puzzles you had to solve. The GLW sat at the far left, with the easiest puzzle. SWP sat in the middle, with the medium-difficulty puzzle. And I sat on the right hand side, with BTP next to me, attempting to solve the most difficult three dimensional jigsaw cube puzzle.

I wasn’t making much in the way of significant progress when BTP looked at me, and said in a somewhat exasperated tone…

Dad! You’re not doing it right! You have to join all of the coloured lines together…BTP

The coloured lines that I simply hadn’t noticed before. I therefore handed the puzzle over to BTP and asked him to fit the coloured lines together and about thirty seconds later…

Don’t you just hate a smart arse?

It just reminds me how different our two children are in terms of personality. BTP seems to be the cerebral one, with a very impressive vocabulary (how many four year olds use terms like ‘derailment’ in the correct context, or can say to someone ‘that’s just your opinion’?) and who is obviously good at problem solving, whereas he was very late in walking, and is nervous about swimming, whereas his younger brother SWP is a poorer communicator (even taking the age into account) but isn’t afraid to tackle anything physical: frequently head-first…

…there was just time to walk to one last section, and have a look at the Armstrong Whitworth car. Because, as usual, I was being ‘helped’ by two small children, I wasn’t able to find out anything about the Armstrong Whitworth car, other than noticing that its tax disc was out of date.

On the way out, we had to make an emergency trip to the toilets, as SWP was, for the first time, out for the day in ‘big boy pants’, rather than pull-up nappies, and had announced he needed the toilet, so me and him redirected over to the toilets, while the GLW and BTP waited by the front door. Not normally worthy of mention, other than to note that my wife got talking to one of the staff members, asking if she knew whether ‘the lady who collapsed in the heat’ was all right, only to find out that it wasn’t a heat-related collapse at all — we were told that it was a collapse owing to ’suspected substance abuse’.

Not exactly what you’d expect to see in a museum, is it? (Not that I would expect it to be a regular thing in that museum, either…)

So recently we’ve had family outings to St Mary’s Island, to Newcastle Keep, to the Centre for Life, to the Blue Reef Aquarium, to the Millenium Bridge, to the BALTIC, to Housesteads Roman fort, and now to the Discovery Museum. The question is, where next?