I will say this for the Pre-Raphaelites, they had great pictures frames.

That one looks like a doorway to a temple… a temple of bad art, but a temple none the less. Don’t bother with the picture though or you will be stuck wondering how Eve in the Garden of Eden managed to shave her armpits.

How about this frame?

It could be the doorway to an up-market brothel.

Then there’s this.

It’s a frame so humungous that it has to have another picture to hold it up. The model, for once, is expressing an emotion other than boredom. I think that’s her OMG I’ve run out of laudanum face.

How many times have you seen this picture in art books, calendars, and coffee mugs?

And how many of them bothered to include the frame, with its writhing and debauched grapevines?

It was a treat to see The Hireling Shepherd, which featured in later versions of Brian Aldiss’s Report on Probability A.

Aldiss’s book, in which various groups of people in different universes watch each other in a huge circular chain but nothing actually happens, truly captures the Pre-Raphaelite spirit of boredom. Hey, another nice frame, too.

The Manchester Art Gallery has some Pre-Raphaelite furniture, too. It’s not boring.

It’s not exactly beautiful…

…. but you’re not going to fall asleep sitting at one of those.

The gallery has a habit of putting one contemporary painting in each period gallery, so Banksy gets to rub shoulders with Constable…

… and the Dutch masters have to share a wall with self portraits taken in a Las Vegas nuclear bunker.

It may not look like a typical nuclear bunker, but it’s owned by members of the Avon Cosmetics family, and includes a dance floor, swimming pool, garden, and artificial seasons.

OK, let’s get out of the gallery for some street art.

I recognized Alan Turing and Quentin Crisp. The others are Emmeline Pankhurst, Anna Phylactic, and Foo Foo Lammar.

I also really liked this mural, all done in brickwork, on a building in Manchester’s Chinatown.

Greg and I paid our respects at the Alan Turing memorial.

On the bench behind him is a line of Enigma code, but nobody can remember what it is supposed to say, not even the sculptor.

On to the Manchester museum of Science and Industry. They have the oldest surviving railway station in the world there.

Sadly the trains don’t stop there any more, and most of the furniture is gone, but they do still have the ticket counter in the first class booking hall.

It’s a long counter because a lot of people worked there. In 1830 the tickets were hand written.

Two of the exhibit halls there were closed for renovations, so I have no pictures of airplanes or steam trains (apart from Stevenson’s Rocket which we already saw when it was in London). However, they do have a Coronation Street Monopoly set…

… a TV the shape TVs were going to be in the future…

… and a replica of the first computer that could store a program in memory.

The instruction set was pretty simple. There were only eight instructions.

It’s left as an exercise to the reader to prove that this machine was Turing-complete.