As my granddaughter became slightly less demanding and started sleeping more at night, my daughter-in-law was able to focus a bit less on the baby and we began to be required a bit less. So we were able to go out walking, though there had been some rain, and it was a bit wet underfoot. We had a short walk this time, to Fletcher Moss Park, which also includes an area of Botanical Gardens.
The gardens slope down a hill, with a pond at the bottom. I stood looking up the hill for this photo. As you can see, the side of the hill is designed as a rockery. It is quiet and peaceful, as relatively few people seem to know it and the weather still wasn't really warm. It was too early in the year for many flowers in the rockery, but the contrasting coloured leaves of the many different trees compensated for the relative lack of blooms. There is clearly meant to be a rill tumbling down the slope, but there's no water in it at present, and the pond at the foot of the hill clearly needs more work.
If you stand at the foot of the hill looking away from the rockery, the view is different but just as pretty.
The pond is still being renovated, so it will undoubtedly improve in time, with many more plants. And, once water is tumbling down the rill, the pond will be oxygenated and the water will be clearer.
The spring blossom was to be found at the top of the hill.
We were fortunate to be there when the blossom had just appeared and before the wind had blown it away.
There were drifts of daffodils too.
These blooms were the biggest I've ever seen. You can't see it from this photo, but each one was almost as big as the palm of my hand.
A couple of days later, we drove to the airport to collect my daughter-in-law's eldest sister and her son, who stayed with us for 5 or 6 days until May 1st. With all the toys in the spare room at my son's house there isn't room for two beds so they stayed in our flat. As well as having space (just) for two,beds, I also have two bathrooms, which makes it easier for having guests. And of course, they got a good night's sleep in my house, free from noises of wakeful babies.
So we had a busy end to the month, conducting guests around Manchester when my daughter-in-law was busy. We took them to the newly opened Whitworth Gallery, which I'm afraid Paul and I did not like much. The collection is large - 55,000 items - and apparently includes major drawings and watercolours by 18th-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and and 19th-century landscapes by the likes of J. M.W. Turner, Thomas Girtin and Samuel Palmer, as well as an important group of Pre-Raphaelite works by Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Burne-Jones. Later Impressionist works include the likes of Degas, Van Gogh, Pissarro and Gauguin, while works of European Modernism apparently include Picasso and Paul Klee, as well British artists of the early and mid-20th century, like Sickert, Epstein, Hepworth and Moore. So we were delighted to think that we might be able to see such a very wide sweep of art in a relatively small gallery.
Unfortunately, we didn't. Most of the things I had hoped to see were not on display at all; there were several Turner watercolours, but displayed 5 deep up the walls, obliging us to stoop over to see the lower ones, and needing binoculars if we wanted to examine the higher ones. Hardly any of the Pre-Raphaelite works were on display; it was hard to find a single Impressionist work. I did find one lonely Picasso, lurking downstairs in the 'People's Choice' section. I was the only visitor down there at the time - and Paul and our visitors never found it at all.
Instead, the concentration in the newly re-opened gallery was on Contemporary art, in which which Paul and I have no particular interest. I suppose I should be grateful not to have to go to the Venice Biennale to see Sarah Lucas, but I was unable to work up much enthusiasm for things such as 'Tits in Space', described as 'multiple pairs of cigarette-encrusted orbs that float against a pitch black background.' Actually, the Sarah Lucas exhibition is entirely sculptures made from cigarettes, mostly human torsos from the waist down made from cigarettes. Not my kind of thing at all!
I was more enthusiastic about our visit to Dunham Massey the following day. Dunham Massey is another finalist in the Art Fund Small Museum of the Year 2015, having been transformed by the National Trust back into a First World War hospital to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. I would write about this in more detail, but we went again later in May, so I'll leave it until then.
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