Last Friday we had a day out. We went to the London Transport Museum Depot, out at Acton (West London), for one of its open days. It was an amazing experience. It is housed in an old London Transport depot and is full of all kinds of old equipment, trains and memorabilia from the London Underground.
I have always been fascinated by the London Underground, ever since I moved to London. Taking a train across a city, that travelled only underground, was so new and different. Since then, I have found that the history of the London Underground also ties in with so much of our social history.
Then something uncomfortable happened.
We were looking at a restored old tube train and a guide was telling us all about it. I realised that I used to travel in that type of tube train when I moved to London. Then I saw they had, preserved, the ticket machines from the same time, the ones I had used almost daily back then. Looking around the museum, I saw serval other exhibits I remembered from when they were in use.
I remember things in everyday usage, from when I was an adult, that are now exhibits in a museum. I am old enough to remember museum exhibits when they were in everyday use.
When I was a child, exhibits in museums were strange and very old things, things from a different world, an old world that was securely in the past. Now I can go to a museum and find something there that I can remember when it was in everyday usage.
Life can be so complicated.
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