The Late Shows with Moorbank

I love The Late Shows.

I work full time so having stuff open in the evening is spot on for me. Plus, as a hard-of-hearing non-drinker, I've gotta to say pubs are losing their appeal... But how about a visit to a gallery or the botanic gardens of a Saturday night instead? Now yer talking!

The Late Shows are in their 6th year & put on a defiant front in the face of the Civic Centre's vicious Arts funding cuts. The range of events & activities over last Friday & Saturday night was just amazing.

All aboard the culture bus

The venues where scattered throughout Newcastle & Gateshead, so the open-topped sight-seeing buses were drafted to ferry people from Moorbank Botanic Garden at the top of Claremont Road, to Ouseburn & over the river to The Baltic & The Shipley Gallery in Gateshead.

Attacked by a cherry tree on the open-topped bus back into town

 

Many of the events were free & visitors got glow stick - a really nice idea: as the night draws in & you walk from venue to venue, you can spy fellow culture vultures. You realise quite how many people aren't just out for the usual night on the lash.

Got me a glow stick!

1st stop for me was Moorbank. The Garden has had a stay of execution since I wrote about it last, & the Friends are working their socks off trying to secure the funding & the permissions to keep it open. All power to 'em!

It was a bit too dark for visiting the outdoor areas but the glasshouses were just magical in the evening light.

Totally Tropical

How orchids should look, rather than dead like mine

In the Tropical House the orchids were putting on a spectacular show. On my last visit the volunteers mentioned that most of the orchids are donations - folk buy them from M&S, but once the flowers die they've no idea what to do with them. Moorbank clearly do! I really should've donated mine rather than consigning it to the compost heap...

Gotta love pitcher plants

Moorbank also has quite a collection of carnivorous plants, & I do love them for their weirder shapes. I know they're quite difficult to keep but the ones here, like everything else, just look amazing.

Desert sessions

If you visit Moorbank during the day, the key atmospheric difference you notice between the 2 main glasshouses is the humidity: moist in the Tropical House; dry in the Desert House. But visiting in the evening you also get: hot in the Tropical House; cold in the Desert House. Ah yes, desert can get cold at night. I always forget this, even though we saw frost on Saharan dunes (& I froze my ass off) on our Tunisian daybreak camel ride (on holiday, a thousand years ago).

A number of cacti were flowering

After admiring Moorbank's cactus & succulent collection, you could mosey round to the Cactus & Succulent Society's stand & take a little bit of the desert home with you - on the walk up Claremont Road, it was so cool to pass happy customers proudly clutching their new pets.

Not so starry night

Folks from Kielder Observatory were also a Moorbank for The Late Shows. The Gardens back onto part of the Town Moor & so are in one of the darkest areas of the City, so the plan had been to do a little stargazing... No great surprise then that we had the foggiest night so far this Spring. I have this kind of track record with astronomical observations: I made the trip to our nearest event for Stargazing Live a couple of years ago & of course it was cloudy. We got luckier in 1999 after hauling ass down to Cornwall for the eclipse - it was cloudy but we were at Mullion Cove on The Lizard, one of the few places in the UK where the cloud lifted right on cue. Pretty damn cool.

So instead of looking at Saturn & Jupiter, the lads from Kielder took us though some beautiful photos from the Cassini probe (& others). Check this film of the Huygens lander floating down to Titan:

It's liquid methane down there & the surface was described as like "crème brulee" - crispy on the top & squidgy underneath.

Is there anybody out there?

The Kielder chaps also spoke about the potential for life on other planets, & about waterbears. These microscopic chaps are a tough as they are tiny - this from Wiki:

Tardigrades can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, as well as pressures greater than any found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation — at doses hundreds of times higher than would kill a person and have lived through the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for nearly 120 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

Why did they need to evolve this battery of superpowers to survive life on earth?
Well, maybe they didn't.
Maybe they.... CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!!!

Summer breeze

With my mind well & truly blown, I hopped onto the culture bus to hit the Laing Gallery & their current Sunlit Pleasures show. Ahhh... virtual Vitamin D... mmm...

The Late Shows - here's to more of them.