#43 RIAT ’17
The Royal International Air Tattoo is an annual excuse for many of the world’s air forces to congregate and show their cool stuff off to vast crowds: a full long weekend of fast pointy things, military nostalgia and incredibly loud engine noises. It’s a delight, despite being near Swindon, and the only hard part is choosing just one badge to pick out of the thousands upon thousands on offer. I got this patriotic little Eurofighter after some internal consternation.
#44 HAMPTON COURT PALACE
The second (and last… for now) astronomical clock in my collection! This one, from Hampton Court, is from 1540 and still works. On the Thames upstream of London, Hampton Court is probably the best of London’s royal palaces: a huge, sprawling and extremely engaging architectural pile, half authentic Henry VIII Tudor bits, half Dutch William-era English Baroque (a 1690s refurb was cancelled halfway through owing to the death of Queen Mary II.)
#45-49 WELSH ADVENTURE 2017
I went to Snowdonia with my parents and partner in the summer of ’17 and, well, went a little bit mad.
Cadw, the Welsh heritage organisation, produce custom badges for all their castles, with Caernarfon and Conwy shown. We climbed to the top of Mount Snowdon honestly but rode the Snowdon Mountain Railway down (it was raining and my other half has short legs). No.8 is from Portmeirion, where The Prisoner TV series was filmed, and the train is one of the mini-Garratts from the Welsh Highland Railway (the loco has a fascinating history, having been built to haul crops on South African fruit 5lines that were themselves built from surplus First World War trench railways). After this splurge I started restricting myself to one or two per holiday.
#50 NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has been knocked about a bit by a refurb and is quite difficult to navigate (I’ll always be bitter about the loss of the 20th Century Seapower gallery) but is still an unending treasure, especially the new Nelsonian and Empire galleries, which present nuanced and compelling histories of the period when Britain – for better or worse – ruled the waves. This little pewter ship of the line is a first-rate souvenir of the place. Background is NAM Rodger’s “The Command of the Ocean.”#50A
Some years ago I was struggling quite badly with a temporary job posting I absolutely loathed and which made me deeply morally uncomfortable. To cheer me up, my then girlfriend* got some DIY advent calendar boxes and filled them with little gifts, one for each day I had remaining in that job, each with a tiny accompanying letter. One of those was this badge featuring a naval crown – note that it’s made of sails and sterms – which has somehow ended up as a recurring theme in our relationship.
#51 LEAF (Dartmoor)
On a heavily delayed train west to Devon to visit the Reeves, I found myself chatting (as I commonly do on trains) with a lady across the table from me. She turned out to be the chief executive of the farming-environmental charity LEAF, and as I was working on a farming related policy area at the time we had an excellent and (I hope mutually) enlightening conversation about work. She gave me this LEAF badge as a present. Background is Philip’s book A Darkling Plain.
Back to foreign travel with this lovely pair of pins from a holiday to Italy and Rome. I adore the gold ripples on the water in the Venice badge especially. This is another of the holidays I travelblogged – you can read all about it here.
A work trip to Brussels coincided with getting to visit a friend and have a flying visit around the city (cracking army museum, appalling roads, highly advanced chip technology.) This rather lovely pin shows the city’s Brabantine Gothic town hall.
I went down to Brighton to see the opening show of a new run of The Ministry of Biscuits, by Philip Reeve and Brian Mitchell. A good time was had by all, and you can find the soundtrack here: http://thefoundrygroup.bandcamp.com
Before seeing the show, we went to see Brighton Pavilion, the mad oniony architectural fantasia shown on this little badge. Background is the alternative Brighton of the Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, illustrated here by David Wyatt.
I don’t think I’ll ever again have an experience quite so much like visiting an alien planet: the weird palette (black soil, feldgrau vegetation, white snow), the rarefied human existence (small, spread-out towns; geothermal plants draping pipes across the landscape like silver nets; lonely earth-movers toiling mysteriously in the distance; the vast aching emptiness separating all of them); the strikingly hostile, alien landscape, experienced snatches at a time before retreating to the warm safety of a vehicle; the unique letters, the mad pricing, the steam oozing up through cracks in the ground, the otherworldly aurora dancing above.I got this at Thingvellir, a very interesting landscape which is also Iceland’s most historically significant site – and kept travelogues of the whole trip here. (Some have pointed out that the logs sound a bit negative – I had a really good time, honest! Maybe it was just the darkness making me sarky.)
The city museum in Bristol is a perfect urban museum: it’s a handsome old Victorian building with high ceilings and mosaic floors and holds a little bit of everything. It has historic maps, local conservation, dead animals in glass cases, an incredible collection of shiny rocks, the mandatory Egyptians (and bonus Assyrians!), lots of paintings and interesting ceramics, and of course DINOSAURS. Of which this is one. Backing is a lovely Bristol print a friend gave me for Christmas.