Neil Turner

The Art of the Brick exhibition in Leeds

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Various large animals made out of Lego at the Art of the Brick exhibition

A couple of weeks ago, we went to see The Art of the Brick, an exhibition of Lego sculptures by Nathan Sawaya which is currently visiting Leeds.

Sawaya is an American sculptor who primarily uses Lego to make his pieces. As you enter the exhibition, there’s a short film where you get to hear more about Sawaya and how he works, before you continue into several rooms with different Lego sculptures. Each room broadly has a theme.

Some are quite abstract – humanoid shapes, with a single colour of brick. But there are also animals – many life size – and some Lego depictions of famous sculptures like Michaelangelo’s David, or of paintings like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Some sculptures are designed so that you can see inside them – most are hollow. Almost all of them are made using standard sized Lego bricks – there’s very few of the bespoke pieces you get in some official Lego sets nowadays.

At the end of the gallery is the ubiquitous gift shop, and also a huge pit full of Lego for little ones to play in.

For me, my favourite bit was the animals – the models are quite detailed, and are a bit like those you would see at Legoland.

It’s not a very big exhibition – we got around it in about an hour, and it cost us about £30 for the three of us. The exhibition has been on a world tour and only has Montreal, Marseille and Schenectady to go; it was in London last year. If you do decide to go, use the promo code AOTB10LEEDS to get 10% off. It’s around until the end of next month.

Miscellaneous notes on North Wales

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This is the one final holiday post before I get on with writing about the other things we’ve done on this holiday. It’s a few assorted notes and observations from our time away.

North Wales is popular with dog owners

If you want to bring your dog on holiday, then North Wales seems to a popular choice. The cottage we rented was dog-friendly, with hard floors in most of the rooms, and in Llandudno we saw at least one hotel specifically marketing itself as dog-friendly. In fact, there was even a dog toileting area to the side. Alas, I didn’t catch the name of it, and can’t find it on Google Street View, but I think it was on Church Street.

We certainly saw plenty of people out and about with their dogs.

Charging our electric car wasn’t much of an issue

Getting a new electric car less than a week before we went on holiday was an interesting decision in retrospect, but we coped well. Whilst there are literally no public chargers in Conwy, and we weren’t permitted to charge it at the cottage we rented, there were a couple of rapid chargers a few minutes away in Llandudno Junction. These kept us going when we couldn’t charge on days out, however, several of the places that we visited did offer public charging. We only had to go out of way once to charge up; the rest of the time, we fitted our charges around the activities that we’d planned.

Signage is in Welsh first, then English

North Wales has a higher concentration of people who speak Welsh as their first language, than other parts of Wales. So, Welsh tends to appear first on road signs with English beneath. This isn’t universal, and elsewhere in Wales it’s English first. And whereas in Ireland, where the Irish text on road signs is in italics, both the English and Welsh are in the same font, same colour and not italicised. I don’t speak Welsh – I tried it on Duolingo for a couple of weeks before going back to French – and so reading signs took a little longer as I had to look where the Welsh stopped and the English started.

Christine, meanwhile, is still learning Welsh on Duolingo.

It’s also notable that all the Welsh signs instantly disappear as soon as you cross the border back into England.

The Welsh NHS is separate to the English NHS

I forgot to pack any spare hearing aid batteries, and so needed to find somewhere that sold them. Being English, I went to the nhs.uk web site to find somewhere that would sell them, but it turns out that, despite ending in ‘.uk’, nhs.uk is just the web site for NHS England. So when I searched for nearby pharmacies, for example, all the results were in Cheshire and Merseyside.

Healthcare is a ‘devolved’ matter in the UK, and so the regional governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own branches of the NHS. (Technically, it’s not the NHS in Northern Ireland but HSC instead).

NHS Wales confusingly has two web sites. The main NHS Wales web site, at nhs.wales, is more of a corporate web site – if you want health advice, or to find services, you need NHS 111 Wales, which is at 111.wales.nhs.uk.

I know NHS England is being abolished but you would expect a web site called ‘nhs.uk’ to apply to the whole of the UK, and not just England.

For completeness, health advice in Scotland comes from NHS Inform, at nhsinform.scot, and in Northern Ireland, it’s part of NIDirect.

Our 2025 holiday: Chester Zoo

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A pair of rhinos at Chester Zoo

This is the last of my blog posts about what we did on our summer holiday to Wales – bearing in mind we’ve been back for over six weeks. Our last stop was on the way home, and as with our visit to Beamish on the way home from Northumberland, not actually in Wales. This was a visit to Chester Zoo.

I last blogged about a visit to Chester Zoo in 2018, when I took our then two-year-old on a day out when Christine was working a weekend. We’ve been back many times since, despite it being over an hour’s drive away. Indeed, we had an annual membership for a year – unfortunately, that year was 2020 when the zoo was shut for several months due to the pandemic, although we still managed seven visits that year. Our last visit was almost exactly two years ago.

This year’s Chester Zoo visit was prompted by receiving gift vouchers at Christmas from my parents, who joined us this time. It had been much longer since they had last visited, and I imagine the zoo has changed significantly since then.

Heart of Africa

Our main focus for this year’s visit was the new Heart of Africa zone. This replaces an area of the zoo which was starting to feel a little run-down, and makes it more like the other newer areas of the zoo. The rhinos, painted wild dogs and meerkats remain roughly where they were before. The giraffes have moved to a new mixed savannah habitat here, along with zebras, ostriches and antelope. It’s definitely an improvement, and the animals feel more in context with themed surroundings. There’s also a mock-up of a lab, showing the work that zoo staff do to ensure the animals’ welfare.

Snow Leopards

Another recent arrival at Chester Zoo were a pair of snow leopards. We got to (briefly) see the male snow leopard, but the female is off show as she’s recently given birth to an adorably fluffy cub. These have a new purpose-built habitat in the older part of the zoo, near to the Red Pandas. Which were doing the usual Red Panda thing of sleeping in a tree, as it was a hot summer day.

Chester Zoo is huge, and even if you get there at 10am and stay until closing, it’s almost impossible to see everything in one day. As such, on this year’s visit, we prioritised seeing the new zone and specific animals that we enjoy seeing. Alongside the new zone is The Reserve, which is Chester Zoo’s first on-sight overnight accommodation for visitors and overlooks the savannah area with the giraffes, so you can extend your visit to two days.

Accessibility

Accessibility is reasonably good, although the site isn’t completely flat – thanks to Flag Lane, which is a public right of way that cuts through the middle of the site. There are two crossings of Flag Lane; the one by the elephants and nearer the entrance is best for wheelchairs. The other crossing, the Bat Bridge, is wooden.

Wheelchairs and mobility scooters are available to hire, and there’s a changing places toilet near the main entrance. Chester Zoo really want you to download their app, but I managed to find a PDF of the current map here – it’s very buried on their web site.

Chester Zoo is located next to one of Chester’s Park and Ride sites, and so you can get a bus from Chester railway station (this is what we did on our first visit as a couple in 2012). Ample parking on-site is available, and there are 20 medium-speed 7 kW electric car chargers close to the entrance. However, when we arrived on a busy summer Saturday, these had all been taken by 10:30am, and I had to pop back at lunchtime to move my car to a bay that had become free. They’re on the Pod Point network.

Cohhee Intelligent Battery Charger

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A photo of a Cohhee intelligent battery charger

Today I’m reviewing this Cohhee Intelligent Battery Charger (sponsored link) that I recently bought from Amazon, to recharge my AA and AAA batteries.

This isn’t the first ‘intelligent’ battery charger that I’ve bought – I have an older one, but it could only charge pairs of batteries (not single batteries) and didn’t detect batteries that could no longer charge. This Cohhee battery charger doesn’t have these faults; you can charge single batteries if needed, and mix and match between AA and AAA batteries. And, it’ll tell you if a battery is unable to be charged anymore.

Charging is quite fast – about 5 hours for AA batteries, and two hours for AAA. There’s a screen along the top that shows the charging progress of each battery. It’s relatively compact, and doesn’t need to plugged into a wall socket. Instead, it’s powered by a USB-C cable. It claims to have over-charging and over-heating protection too.

Having used it for a couple of months, I’ve found that the batteries I’ve charged up in it last longer than before. That’s probably because it charges the batteries individually, rather than as pairs, and identified the dud batteries that I could then get rid of.

Its normal retail price is only £9, but it’s on sale for £8 at the time of writing. Batteries not included.

Our 2025 holiday: RSPB Conwy

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A photo of some birds at RSPB Conwy

I’m almost done with our holiday posts – this is the penultimate one, and is about the RSPB Nature Reserve at Conwy. It’s relatively new, having opened in 1995, and exists because of the building of the A55 North Wales Expressway.

Tunnel spoil

When the A55 Conwy tunnel was built, the spoil created from the excavation needed to go somewhere. Major tunnelling projects often result in the spoil being used to create nature reserves: Samphire Hoe was created from the Channel Tunnel, RSPB Wallasea Island from the Elizabeth Line, and when HS2 is finished, it’ll result in new chalk grassland in the Chilterns. For the A55, the spoil was placed along the side of the Conwy Estuary, to create a new wetland habitat during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Many birds have now made this wetland their home, and we saw plenty of white egrets, lapwings and whimbrels that you wouldn’t often see elsewhere. The site consists of two large lagoons, with paths and bird hides around them, although the smaller of the two lagoons was completely dry when we visited, as a result of the exceptionally dry summer that we’ve had this year.

A photo of a six-spot burnet at RSPB Conwy

Visitor centre

There’s a large visitor centre at the site, home to the shop as well as information about what you can expect to see. Obviously, the birds there are wild, and so nothing is guaranteed, but we saw a good variety. You can also pick up maps for the trials around the lagoons – we didn’t do the longest path, as we were just visiting for the afternoon. There’s also a café, plenty of places to eat a picnic, and a small playground.

One of the hides that we visited also had an extensive history of the building of the road tunnel, and how that led to the establishment of the nature reserve.

We had a nice, relatively peaceful afternoon at RSPB Conwy. There is the background noise of traffic on the A55, but it was nice to go somewhere with a slower pace.

Accessibility

The site is mostly flat, although the paths are mainly gravel, or wooden boards across the wetter areas. There are various colour-coded trails that you can follow, and the maps provide information about gradients.

Access to the site is from Junction 18 of the A55 – it’s directly connected to the roundabout here. Work was ongoing to improve cycle access when we visited, and it’s a about a half mile walk from Llandudno Junction railway station. RSPB members get free entry.

Just the one child, thanks

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When you start a serious relationship with someone, friends and family often start to ask when you’re planning to move in together. November 2010, in our case.

Then they want to know when you’re going to get engaged. October 2011, in our case.

Then they want to know when you’re going to get married. May 2013, in our case.

Then they want to know when you’re going to have a baby. December 2015, in our case.

Then they want to know when you’re going to have a second child. This is where Christine and I have been for almost 10 years now. And we’ve decided that this is where we’re going to stay, thank you very much, with just the one child.

The Three Milestones

When it came to deciding when to have another child, we agreed three milestones that must be passed:

  1. We must be eligible for funded childcare for our first child.
  2. We must have a tumble dryer, to handle the increased washing.
  3. Both Christine and I needed to be able to drive.

We achieved milestone one when our (now) nine-year-old turned 3, and became eligible for 30 hours of funded childcare per week, during school term time. Nowadays, much younger children qualify for this, but this was the minimum age at the time. Milestone two came at the end of 2022, after we’d had our kitchen refitted. And milestone three came at the end of last year, when Christine passed her driving test. So, without wanting to go into lots of salacious details about our sex lives, we stopped not trying for a baby. My choice of words there was deliberate – we haven’t been actively trying for another baby. But we stopped using means by which to a prevent a pregnancy from happening. Suffice to say, no pregnancy happened.

Why stop now

So why are we now stopping, and accepting that we’ll only ever have one child? Well, there’s a few reasons:

  1. We’re getting on a bit. We’re both older now than my parents were when I was born. And even if we somehow conceived this week, we would both be in our 60s by the time the resultant baby turned 18.
  2. Related to this, as we’re older, there’s a greater risk of complications. A pregnancy is more likely to be unviable, and there’s a greater risk that the child could be born with disabilities.
  3. Our nine-year-old already has additional needs. They’re not profoundly disabled – they attend a mainstream school and we don’t require significant social care for them. But they are likely to experience some challenges, especially when it comes to exams, and they probably won’t appreciate having a little brother or sister disrupting their exam revision. But also, as we already have one child with additional needs, I don’t think it would be fair on any of us to bring another child into the world who may have more profound additional needs.
  4. We have boxes and bags full of old baby and toddler clothes and toys, and we really want to get rid of them. If we’re no longer holding onto them for a hypothetical second child, that’s a lot of space we can reclaim in our house.
  5. Once our nine-year-old has ‘fled the nest’ and our mortgage is paid off (probably in 2037), we’ll be more free to move house if we don’t have a second child to tie us down.

So, we’re going to remain a family of three. And we’re happy about that.

The Cat That Slept for a Thousand Years

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A photo of The Cat That Slept for a Thousand Years

Whilst I’m not quite done writing about our holiday in Wales, I’m going to squeeze this blog post in here because it’s about a special exhibition which closes a week on Sunday: The Cat That Slept for a Thousand Years at the Manchester Museum.

Fundamentally, it’s just a giant inflatable cat – there’s (someone else’s) small child in my photo above for scale. It’s illuminated, and its tail and ears twitch every now and again. The room it’s in has low lighting, and soothing background music. And yes, you’re welcome to touch the giant cat. It’s like a huge sensory room.

In addition to this, there are some feline objects from the museum’s collection alongside, and before you enter the space with the cat, there’s a fictional short film about how the cat was ‘found’ by scientists in the Antarctic.

It’s a bit of fun, and I imagine younger kids, and those with additional needs who respond well to soothing sensory environments, will love it. The exhibition, like the rest of the museum, is free, but donations are welcome and you do need to book a timed ticket to manage crowds. It wouldn’t be much of a sensory space if everyone piled in there all at once.

The rest of the Manchester Museum

If Swarm is correct, then this was our seventh visit to the Manchester Museum – and yet, as far as I’m aware, I’ve never blogged about any of our six previous visits. Which is a shame, as it’s one of our favourite museums, and a worthy winner of this year’s European Museum of the Year prize.

Like Jodrell Bank, it’s part of the University of Manchester, and has been open since 1867. More recently, it re-opened in February 2023, after an 18 month closure. This saw the opening of a new exhibition space (where the giant cat currently is) and several additional permanent galleries. It’s also actively involved in repatriations of some of the artefacts in its collections to the communities and societies where they belong. Whilst we were there, visitors were encouraged to contribute to a consultation about the display of an Egyptian mummy, and whether it’s still appropriate to display human remains in this way nowadays.

Our favourite bit is the Vivarium, which is the only part of the museum with live animals – namely frogs and lizards. The live collections originate from the university’s zoology department, and the museum is involved in breeding programmes for rare species of frogs. There’s more in the Manchester Frog Blog.

Accessibility

Though housed in a late 19th Century building, the Manchester Museum has, as mentioned, had a number of refurbishments in recent years, and it tries hard to be as accessible as possible. Though it’s on multiple floors, there are lifts and stairs can be avoided. Wheelchairs are available to hire.

It’s a short walk from Manchester Oxford Road station, along, appropriately enough, Oxford Road. It is, however, some way away from the nearest tram stop (St Peters Square) but there are plenty of buses that pass right outside the entrance. For car parking, the University of Manchester’s Car Park D is a short walk – it’s a multi-storey with almost 1000 spaces, including 8 for electric vehicle charging (both medium 7 kW Type 2 chargers and some rapid chargers).

As mentioned above, entry to the Manchester Museum is free, but donations are welcome.

Septembaargh

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Good grief, is it September already?

Work-wise, September isn’t quite as busy as August for me, but still very busy – it’s when the majority of our new university students start their courses. Christine’s birthday is also this month, although it’s not a round number this year. Still, we both have the day off work. Meanwhile, our nine-year-old goes back to school after the long summer break.

25 years ago

This September marks 25 years since I started my A-levels at college. My secondary school didn’t have a sixth form, so instead most of us went to our local college. Indeed, the college was much more local than my secondary school, so I no longer needed a lift to school or to get a bus home.

That summer, I’d been bought my first MP3 player, when such things were still very new – it was a Samsung Yepp YPE-64, which we picked up at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone. The ’64’ referred to the 64 megabytes (yes, megabytes) of flash storage on board, although there was a slot to insert a SmartMedia card to add up to 128 MB additional storage. Data transfer was via a IEEE 1284 Parallel cable – no USB. Still, it was smaller than a MiniDisc player, which at the time was the smallest type of portable music player available, and I remember some classmates marvelling at how small it was.

Other anniversaries

In terms of other anniversaries, it’s 23 years since I started university, and also 23 years since I switched to Movable Type. Incidentally, TypePad, which was essentially a paid-for hosted version of Movable Type, announced it was closing for good last week. Those who are still using it have until later this month to export their data and move elsewhere. It’s a bit of a sad end to that chapter of blogging, but I guess most people just use WordPress now.

It’s also ten years ago since we bought our first car.

Our 2025 holiday: Bodnant Garden

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A photo of Bodnant Garden.

The next place we went to on our 2025 holiday to North Wales was Bodnant Garden. It’s another National Trust property, and consists of the formal gardens attached to the larger Bodnant Estate.

Bodnant Garden is located to the south of where we were staying, in the Conwy Valley. The garden itself began to be developed in 1874 (so just over 150 years ago), when the Pochin family bought the estate at auction. Over time, the garden was extended multiple times, and is now home to a number of prize-winning trees. It came into the National Trust’s care in 1949, but the rest of the Bodnant Estate remains family-owned.

If you look at the prices for Bodnant Garden, you’ll see that they’re towards the higher end of the scale compared to some National Trust properties. That’s no accident – Bodnant Garden is huge, and we ended up spending all day here. Being as it was the summer holidays, there was a Wallace and Gromit Augmented Reality Trail running, although today was its last day, sorry. Our nine-year-old really enjoyed doing the trail, which included some hands-on activities too.

A photo of Bodnant Garden.

The Wallace and Gromit trail took us to the far end of the site, and then we made our way steadily back along the stream that flows through it. There’s lots to see – even if you’re not a big horticulturalist, it’s still very pretty.

In all, we probably saw about two thirds of what was there – we missed some of the fringes as it is just so big. Indeed, there is more than one café there; one at the entrance, and another near the Old Mill towards the middle of the site. It’s definitely somewhere I’d consider going to again, and taking a different route around.

Accessibility

You enter the site at the top, and then there are slopes down to the stream – some more gentle than others. The map shows a couple of step-free routes that encompass most of the site, but there are some steep slopes. Most of the paths are gravel.

There are two electric car charging sockets in the car park. On the plus side, they’re both completely free to use, however, one is a medium-speed 7 kW Type-2 charger, and one is just a 3-pin plug. We ended up having to use the latter with our granny charger, but then we were there all day, and it was free after all. It managed to charge our Nissan Leaf up from 31% to 59% over around five hours.

The nearest railway station is Tal-y-Cafn on the Conwy Valley Line, however, it’s a 40 minute walk, it’s a request stop, and there are only 6 trains per day (4 on Sundays). If arriving by public transport, a better bet is the number 25 bus, which runs from Llandudno and calls at Llandudno Junction station. That being said, there’s still only one bus every two hours.

Nearby attractions

The Bodnant Estate also runs an adjacent garden centre, and Bodnant Welsh Food is a short drive away. We nipped into the shop there, although it was rather expensive and didn’t have a great range.

On the other side of the valley, and about a ten minute drive away, are the Conwy Water Gardens. We didn’t go as the TripAdvisor reviews aren’t great; it seems like somewhere that used to be better than it is now.

Playlist of the month: Welsh pop music

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Screenshot of the Welsh Pop Music playlist

It’s almost the end of the month, and so it’s time for this month’s Playlist of the month. As I’ve been busy writing about our holiday in Wales (and I’m not quite finished), I thought I’d focus on pop bands and artists from Wales this time. As per usual, you can listen to the playlist on Spotify.

  • “Road Rage” by Catatonia. This song came out when I was 14, and at the time I had a huge crush on a girl who was really into Catatonia. Nowadays, lead singer Cerys Matthews is probably best known for her weekly show on BBC 6 Music.
  • “Juxtaposed with U” by Super Furry Animals. Super Furry Animals originally only sang in Welsh, but found success when they started singing in English too. I like this song.
  • “If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next” by Manic Street Preachers. The Manics have been going for (checked Wikipedia) 39 years, and yet this was only one of two number one singles for them. The music video was also quite memorable.
  • “Dakota” by Stereophonics. I was surprised to find that Stereophonics have released 13 studio albums, since I could probably only name four. I wasn’t a big fan of their JEEP (Just Enough Education to Perform) era but “Dakota” is better.
  • “Mercy” by Duffy. Duffy was pretty big in the late 2000s, this being her debut single.
  • “Sexbomb” by Tom Jones. You can’t have a list of Welsh singers without Tom Jones, who is still performing well into his 80s. This 1990s remix of Sexbomb with Mousse T is probably my favourite of his, but with 41 (!) studio albums under his belt it’s tough to choose just one.
  • “Get The Party Started” by Shirley Bassey. And you can’t have a list of Welsh singers without the great Shirley Bassey either. Three years older than Tom Jones, I’ve included her excellent cover of P!nk’s “Get The Party Started” as it’s exactly what you would expect a Shirley Bassey cover to sound like, in the best possible way.
  • “Monster” by The Automatic. I want to like The Automatic more, as this and “Steve McQueen” are amongst my all-time favourite songs. Anyway, here’s what’s coming over the hill.
  • “Crazy Chick” by Charlotte Church. Church found fame as a child soprano, singing classical music. As a young adult, she pivoted to pop music in 2005 for an album entitled “Tissues and Issues”. There’s some good songs on there, and Church remains someone who proudly still lives in Wales.
  • “Just The Way I’m Feeling” by Feeder. “Just A Day” is my favourite Feeder song, but I’ve already used it in a playlist and so this is my second favourite of their songs. It was from their fourth album, “Comfort in Sound”, which is a bittersweet album recorded following the death of the band’s drummer.