Saturday, August 17, 2013

What’s good for the goose

Bentley Waterfowl and Motor Museum has become my current favourite unlikely museum combination. It exists, I passed a sign for it on a recent trip to the UK and did an intergoogle on it.

Waterfowl and motor vehicles are not part of a symbiotic ecosystem. Contact between ducks, geese, etc and cars, motorbikes, etc are seldom mutually beneficial. In fact there is a special word for waterfowl that have come into contact with motor vehicles: roadkill.


Perhaps if the cars were half submerged into a lake providing good nesting places, this would be a way that the relationship could benefit the birds, however, it’s clear the cars get the short end of the deal here. There seems no way for them to coexist harmoniously except in cartoons, where I am sure I have seen ducks drive cars and motorbikes swim in ponds.

The museum makes no attempt, as far as I can tell, to connect them. The two sides of the museum seem entirely separate. The only connection is that they are housed in the same grounds. In fact, now it seems they are expanding and pushing the site as more than just a museum of two incongruous things, but it is calling itself a Country Park (isn’t all of the countryside basically a park?) which houses an even wider collection of incongruous things (a country house, a miniature railway and even the death-defying excitement of willow tunnels*).

So far they have ignored my suggestion of rather than justifying the incongruities by adding to them, they fix them by combining the elements to make something new an exciting. So far the website has no mention of Goose Stock Car Racing, Coot Hot Rods or Monster Duck Trucks. We wait.

Website: http://www.bentley.org.uk/
Notes: * - Willow Tunnels is not and never has been a star of adult movies.

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