Weather-conscious

'..Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility. For instance, some of our fellow-citizens became subject to a curious kind of servitude, which put them at the mercy of the sun and rain. Looking at them, you had an impression that for the first time in their lives they were becoming, as some would say, weather-conscious. A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and their mood. A few weeks before they had been free of this absurd subservience to the weather, because they had not to face life alone; the person they were living with held, to some extend, the foreground of their little world. But from now on it was different; they seemed at the mercy of the sky's caprices, in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally.' - The Plague, Albert Camus.

Bakelite Museum

In the car-park of the Bakelite Museum in Williton, Somerset, resides a small brown and white bubble-shaped caravan and its relation, the baby black pod. The Pod is a cute sleeping vessel that can be towed by a car, and also provides cooking, washing, seating and storage facilities.

Bakelite, invented in 1907, was the world's first fully synthetic plastic, and the museum is crammed with examples. Egg-cups, hair-dryers, televisions, radios, plastic knives, dolls, telephones, and hundreds of other objects, many with bright colours or with the Bakelite speckled pattern.
Also in the museum are Victorian pre-Bakelite objects, posters on the walls from around the time when Bakelite was popular, old farming equipment, and a cafe that serves cream teas.

The museum is in an old mill, and when I visited it, seemed eerily quiet, as the only other people visiting appeared when I wandered upstairs. An elderly woman entered the museum and excitedly said that she used to own similar items to those that were on display, and asked whoever she was with if they remembered. Not having been around in the era that most of the plastic came from, the museum was not really much of a nostalgia trip for me, although I recognized a few of the objects. The collection of plastic, which some might consider to be just a clutter of kitsch items that are no longer useful, I found intriguing and somehow pretty.