Leaving The Dead Zoo, Dublin

I'd been meaning to revisit the Dublin Museum of Natural History, known as The Dead Zoo, since it reopened recently, having been closed for renovation/repair a few years ago (after a staircase collapsed). I had taken photographs of the exhibits being temporarily removed in November last year. And long before, in the mid 1990s, I had taken my Nikon F3 inside and shot a few frames, including this Self Portrait.

So this afternoon I took the wean with me, despite his half-hearted reluctance. Not much appears to have changed since my last visit. The skeleton of the giant reindeer (Seamus Heaney's 'astounding crate full of air') is still near the entrance. And the interior still has the feel of a creaking but sturdy Victorian ark, its hold crowded with glass crates, a myriad of frozen tableaux.

I had already mentioned the huge skeleton of the Fin whale that was suspended from the glass ceiling, but I soon realised that this was upstairs. We wandered around, looking at the faded African game, the trophy heads, the tarry-looking flesh of the rhino and elephant. He had the whale skeleton on his mind. When he asked me how large it was I made the mistake of saying that it was 'as big as the whole room'. He promptly decided that he would be frightened of it and was adamant that we should not go upstairs. I tried to talk him out of it and tug him along. No dice. We went outside (since he was getting loud in his protests). I could have given up, but I really wanted him to see that that there was nothing to be frightened of, so I staged a sit-in on the grass, my back against the railings, refusing to take him home till he at least had a look. It took a good while, about 15 minutes or more, but he eventually gave in, insisting that he wouldn't actually step into the room. We had another conference at the doors; he could see animals in glass cabinets through the windows, and a little girl who walked out with her parents. More importantly, he could see how innocuous the whale skeleton was, quite diminished by the many other exhibits. I thought it might be as well to approach the object of his fear gradually, but once inside, he didn't seem at all scared, and went looking for the bogey-whale. He also wanted to go to the crocs he spied on the upper gallery, but the attendant told us it was still closed. The wean also wanted to see some dogs, and I forgot about the Irish Wolfhound (which I had once photographed) till we passed it. After a little while he'd had enough, and so had I, almost, but I wanted to take some more photographs. the one above shows him leading the way, persuading me out into the beautiful blue and living Autumn day.