The Museum of Underwater Archaeology - Bodrum, Turkey

23rd May 2014 - 20TL (about £6) (joined by Amanda Leat)

I'm a Turkish delight.

Merhaba, you old dogs.

Stuck on a south-western peninsula of Turkey, in one of its last bastions of secularism, sits Bodrum (née Halikarnassos), pride of the Aegean. The vista provides a sensorial overload that requires none of the brooding contemplation of the Lake District or Dartmoor. There’s something in the human soul that recognises sea, mountains and trees in that order as just good. The colour palate’s dazzling to the point of supernormal stimuli, reminiscent of those hideously printed kids books by Michelin or the AA, circa 1985.

In the centre of the bay sits the castle, the city’s frontispiece, with its high walls and twisting minarets. To say it was built during the crusades and has survived a litany of sieges and uprisings, it’s in remarkably good nick. It’s been built and rebuilt and is now used to tackle the greatest army to swarm the Mediterranean: tourists. The colossal floor space within is used (rather wonderfully) as the grounds for “Turkey’s only underwater archaeology museum”. Well… yeah. 

Museum of London - London, UK

4th May 2013 - Free

"Leave it, you slag"

Apples and Pears. Ronnie and Reggie. Snooker loopy. Terry meets Julie. Step in time and I was at Violet’s funeral. It’s time to doff one’s top hat to the Bow Bells and snort jellied eels at a pop-up restaurant till the war’s over by Christmas. I don’t know what I’m saying. Welcome to London. 

(n.b. for this blog I’ll be making up my own rhyming slang)

London’s tectonic (plate/great). It’s big and smelly and glorious and fun and dirty and expensive and different and exciting and waaaaay too busy and that’s why we love it. Sure, it rains like a jungle, but who comes here for the weather? 

Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition - London, UK

15th April 2014 - Free

Two bald heroes

1. Out, Damned Blog!

It’s four, five, o years since the Bard got born,

And three, nine, eight since he got made a corpse.

Here’s the best stage to see Shakespeare performed,

But can the Globe’s exhibition hold course?

Shall I compare it to the summer holidays?

It is more noisy and more tedious.

Middle-class kids do shake the dads of May

And for £13.50, are you serious?

I said, “Tuesday’ll be when no one’s seen”

But there were less kids in Bugsy Malone.

I was greatly outnumbered by French teens -

For Harry and St. George, fetch my longbow!

But I wouldn’t let this split our nations, two. 

So, stopped being a twat and said, “apres vous”.

The Tower of London - London, UK

28th February 2014 - £21.50 (joined by Shelagh Deeney & Emmet Deeney)

Joe Deeneyan Rhapsody

The infamous White Tower was the first addition to London’s iconic skyline and I imagine the locals objected to the ostentatious monument to a swaggering foreign power much more than we did with the Shard. For hundreds of years, the Tower of London loomed over the Thames as a stark reminder to England of its ruling classes. Now, it looms over the Thames as a stark reminder to England of its touring classes. It is the world capital of tourism. It’s where tourists come to out-tourist each other. It’s a place so touristy that my parents and I, three Northerners dressed in macs and backpacks, were made to look as local as Danny Dyer buggering a pigeon to the Lambeth Walk. 

Like every wave of outsiders travelling up the Thames, those in the Tower saw us coming and slapped us in the face with a £21.50 entry fee (and later had the gall to speak of folk being executed for extortion). Historic Royal Palaces must be laughing all the way to the Royal Mint with this one. They understand that the ToL is an essential visit for most tourists, like the Eiffel Tower or Christ the Redeemer, and ergo can charge whatever they can get away with. I looked to my phone’s train ticket app for an example of the furthest destination I could afford for £21.50. Blackpool. I joined the fucking queue.

National Football Museum - Manchester, UK

22nd February 2014 - Free (joined by Kez Casey and Will Sanderson)

Two selfies, one love

Football (or soccer if you’re American or one of those weird Brits who prefers American sport) is the world’s national game. It can be played with a tin can amid the favelas of Rio or before half the world in Soccer City’s arena of television cameras, prawn sandwiches and vuvuzelas. It’s not called ‘the beautiful game’ for nothing, although nothing’s how it feels when you’re watching your beloved team draw nil-nil at Luton in the pouring rain as you eat a tepid, grey pie that set you back six quid. 

England has an especially close relationship with the game. It was invented here and, until the rest of the world became familiar with the rules, we were really quite good at it. The Urbis building in Manchester was chosen in 2012 as the nation’s arca of the nation’s game, but, at the end of the day, does it give 110%?

Cinema Museum - London, UK

31st January 2014, £10 (by appointment only)

“When you love life, you go to the movies!” French advertising slogan.

Did you know that, after Hollywood, Mumbai and Cannes, Kennington in South London is the world’s foremost cinematic locale? No? Good because I made it up. It may sound strange for the nation's Cinema Museum to be set there, but if we keep in mind that my hometown Bradford declared itself “City of Film”, the location of the nation’s love-letter to the big screen doesn’t seem so extraordinary. South London (my current home) has a bit of an image problem when it comes to the silver screen. Sure, we had A Clockwork Orange and Attack the Block, both fine films, but neither are going to do wonders for tourism. Does South London have any of the Hollywood dazzle of it’s Northern, Eastern and Western inmates? Well, yes it does. Charles Spencer Chaplin. We win. 

National Portrait Gallery - London, UK

17th January 2014 - Free

Joena Lisa, Joena Lisa 
men have named you

Britain, ey? What are we like? Well, we’re a bit like France, a lot like America, some like Germany with a little bit of Irish thrown in. In fact, name a country, we’re more like them than not. Some would say Britain's the last bastion of chivalry, galloping through the ages like Boudicca in her chariot - the most over-achieving land on God’s green. Others say we’re the result of geographic fortune in our isolation that meant a strong navy and lucky winds stopped many invasions and said ships could double up as hulking great slaving vessels, bursting with their quarry. The folks at the National Portrait Gallery have committed to showing us the faces of those who've built this ragtag, past-tense, tin-island empire that sixty million of us call home.

For reasons way too boring to bother you with now, I was up at the crack of dawn on the day of my visit and was, subsequently, the first person through the gates. I could have run to the centre of the gallery and shouted “first!” like those absolute FANNIES do on the internet, but I really didn't want to.