The London Museum

I took a good long walk to the London Museum today, as it seems I'll only start work tommorrow or Thursday.
May as well make use of the day to do something interesting.

It's worth a visit, currently free until February.

I always get a little confused by museums, never really sure what to take in or exactly what I may be getting out of my visit. It's like reading the history of the Roman empire as a short comic, albiet with better visuals.

The tour starts with a large video screen showing flyovers of "London before London", an impressive 3D rendering that spins you back to the ice age and then back to the present.

You then start on a well laid out path which takes you from 2000BC to the present.

It made me think of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent in Islington, 2 million years ago. I half expected to see an exhibit of a chesterfield sofa and Dent with a bone in his beard, alas, this wasn't covered.

There's something lacking in most museums and the London Museum is no exception - the ability to touch things.

I had a yearning to reach out to touch and wield a stoneage axe and wondered if they couldn't include an interactive section where you get to chop down a tree. Naturally this could lead to some complications, however, I remain dissapointed that this wasn't possible.

They have little replica rooms of what Roman life in Londinium may have been like.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could take part in it and recline on a sofa, eating grapes and then don a toga and attend an orgy ?

I'd decline an interactive version of the Black Death, however, it would be fine to throw rotting vege at someone in the docks (or someone in docs) and later have a pint with Wren.

Ah well, I'll have to settle with a walk in the rain to Waterloo station, 2006.
Now that's interactive !

Two for the price of one

The consumer society here has been honed to an alarming degree and nowhere is this more apparent than the supermarkets.

Virtually every product on the shelves has some sort of offer, the most common being "buy two, get one free"

It works on human greed at its most base level and really only serves to both entice people to buy more than they really need and also to fool people that they are getting a bargain.
You have to ask yourself why they don't just reduce the price of a single article instead of offering you a free one if you buy two ?

Cans of drink have had "33% extra" pasted on their rims for as long as I can remember, so why do it ?
If it were a short term tactic of selling a product at the same price as one without that extra 33%, I'd understand.

The persistance of .99 remains embedded in the psyche of marketing hype, so I figure we must all be subliminally fooled by it. £9.99 is 1p short of £10. A single penny.
Somehow, our minds seem, against our best wishes, to get lured toward £9. It works, despite the fact that we all know it shouldn't.

Therefore all these other enfuriating tactics also work.

Another aspect of shopping here that I haven't been lured into (not yet anyway), are saver cards, where if you buy a certain amount, you get discounts. Again, this is an attempt to make us buy more than we need. The mouth of the consumer constantly being force fed with enticements.
At every checkout till, the words "Have you got a Nectar card" or some such malarky.
I don't even know what one is, or where to get one and I haven't bothered to find out yet.

Is all this really different from markets of old ?

Did people a 100 years ago get a free sack of spuds with every piglet they purchased ?
Buy two kegs of ale, get a free cabbage ?

Perhaps they did, in fact, I'm certain that these same tactics have been with us for as long as we've bartered and traded for goods.

I'm not so certain that a piglet would have a branding of "33% extra" on it's hind quarters, although it's an interesting visual.

I recently wanted to buy a CD marking pen and for the life of me, I could only find them in packs of two. I asked the shop attendent if I couldn't just buy one, which confused the poor lout no end. He was about to consult his manager. Turns out, when I got home, one of them didn't work anyway, so I ended up with one for the price of two.

Works both ways I guess.