Skip to main content

Exchange time

                                The Silver Swan, Bowes Museum

                                             Image: BBC

Just a quick personal post. Our old friends Jacques and Catherine have been with us while our French exchange is on. It's been a good opportunity to do a bit of walking and exploring around this lovely part of England.

Malham Cove and Gordale were rather beautiful yesterday and the day before we did a drive up to the Bowes museum in Barnard Castle. Visit it if you get a chance. It's an amazing story really. The illegitimate son of an aristocrat, John Bowes, never really accepted by the aristocracy, goes to France, uses some of his large inheritance to buy a theatre, falls in love with a young actress, Joséphine, buys her a château near Paris (as you do), then they decide to put their collections of art, ceramics and other objects into a museum of their own creation in northern England. They buy some land in Barnard Castle, Northumberland, and have a huge museum built by a French architect, a museum which resembles a French château. The museum is not finished until after the death of both John and Joséphine. Joséphine was a talented artist herself and many of her paintings are on display in the museum.

The museum's main attraction (apart from two stunning Canaletto paintings) is the Silver Swan, a silver automaton swan made about 250 years ago which is allowed to function once a day at two o'clock. Visitors gather round for a 32 second display from this clockwork marvel.

If you enjoy pottery (which I don't really) the collection of European porcelain and earthenware is amazing. Otherwise there are paintings by Goya, Courbet and Sisley.

We are off to France tomorrow for a week in Puyravault.

Comments

  1. Langwitch8 April 2010 at 11:52

    I love Bowes Museum! I believe some of our pupils were involved in restoring some of the silver leaves around the Swan. Also some distant relative of mine who was a taxidemist did some of the taxidermy in the basement rooms (nice job, not!)
    Enjoy France,
    Helena

    ReplyDelete
  2. Miss Brodie9 April 2010 at 20:52

    Wow! That sounds really interesting. Back in the dark ages I was educated in the West Riding, and after forty years in other places am planning a nostalgic tour to check out old haunts (next Autumn), so will keep the address!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...
26 comments
Read more