“So normally we close at 1, but we always love people coming so please do take as long as you want.”
I checked my phone. 12:52. Probably just as well she had said that. Eight minutes would have been a disappointing time limit.
“Through there and to your right,” she continued beneath her mask, “The dinosaurs are just round the corner.”
I beamed. That could be my new favourite sentence. I’d not been expecting dinosaurs! Of course the island itself has only been an island for around 8,000 years. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose and the Solent valley flooded, separating the island from the mainland. Before then it was all part of a Europe that had once seen dinosaurs just like everywhere else.
There were the bones! A neovenator and an iguanadon! At least part of those animals - a foot and a fractured pelvis. The blurb said they had probably died together and been washed downstream, disconnecting their skeletons until they tumbled into a mudslide. The artist’s impression of the carnivorous neovenator looked angry! Well he would, wouldn’t he?
The rest of The Museum of Island History was just as interesting. Bronze Age artefacts, pottery and coins, island rulers from the past, the geology and history of this ever-sliding landscape. There was Henry Beauchamp, one time ‘king’ of the island under the Westminster fist of Henry VI. Later Queen Victoria’s nephew who’d been its governor. Richard Worsley, a baron who’d collected antiques, and David Seely, last of the governors who handed it back to the crown in 1995.
There were histories of shipwrecks too! The Varsissis which had crashed into the Needles in the 1940s, shedding its cargo of tangerines and Algerian wine, the HMS Pomone, a naval ship from the 1810s that sank when a crew member mistook one lighthouse for another and accidentally ran it aground. It was all very well described.
Newport itself is the county town of the island. It’s not the largest town, but it does serve as something of a provincial capital. We found the square of land where the Queen alighted for her first visit. Ceremonially, and maybe geographically, it’s very much the heart of the island.
The minster rises peacefully above the streets of shops and tea shops. The guildhall too, in its deep grey stone, stands soberly between jolly streets leading down to the quay.
It had stopped raining by the time we came out of the museum so we sat by the river a while, then found a charmingly labelled ‘God’s House of Providence Tea Rooms’.
It irks me that we didn’t ask them in there, just why they were celebrating Christmas. But, joyfully, perhaps unbelievably now that I think about it, they really were! I thought of all the people I know who would have been enraptured, and then of all those who would been outraged. It amused me that that divider might be 50-50.
A gigantic Christmas tree sat in the stairwell. Fairy lights spanned around its green branches, intertwining with the wooden bannisters, spiralling up to a flashing gold star that looked like it was pointing the way to the toilets. A choir of voices were singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ somewhere, and halfway up the stairs, a red-faced, plastic Santa beamed a joyless greeting to absolutely nobody. There must have been a reason. We never asked.
And that was the Newport Plan. I took a quick detour to Costa (planned and done before ratification could be discussed), we waited for the bus with two teas and an earl grey, and now we’re pootling back across the middle of the island again, though this time the rain has cleared and there’s a bit more to see.
I’m very tired, even though I’ve done no driving and no navigation-management today. I suggested a plan for tomorrow, our last day on the Isle of Wight, but I don’t think it will get the full-backing of the council. I might float it again later at the inevitable cup-of-tea review of the day.
To be honest though, I might be asleep.
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