The Museum of English Rural Life
@TheMERL
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The MERL, @UniofReading . We explore the history of rural England, its communities, and its people. Chaotic Good.
Reading, Berkshire, UK
Joined February 2009
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Ok, we found something amazing and we demand you to come on a journey with us:
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Richard put an 18th century chicken in some trousers.
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So, we found a live bat in our rare book store.
🦇a thread 🦇
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Richard Beale is just one of many doodlers throughout history, but it’s through these drawings that people from the past are brought to life and made flesh and blood.
We love archives, and we love it when people use them. Get in touch if you want to:
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Are we the most interesting museum out there ? No. Do we have the finest collection of objects detailing the human condition ? Nah, not quite. But do we get up, every day, and try to be the best we can be for the good people of the world ? Also no.
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We are a museum.
And we run a $0M portfolio of businesses.
This is our daily routine.
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He got through a tiny hole to begin with (which we're plugging) but the hole was so tiny that our bat couldn’t find the exit, like a bewildered father in IKEA.
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Every day we stray further from the light
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Leonardo DiCaprio unrecognisable in new Martin Scorcese film
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(the bat signal is a librarian out of their depth screaming
‘there is a BAT
in the LIBRARY’
down the corridor)
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hello if you are not literally this cow right now but you are this cow emotionally
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* * . * . * . *
. * . * . .
* * . * 🦇 *. *. . *. .
* . * * . *. * .
. * . * . .
A BAT
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fun fact: farmers historically reared rectangular sheep so that they could be stacked up high and arranged in intricate LEGO-like structures
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he's stroking that cock far too hard
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British passive aggressiveness at its finest
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this sheep is perfectly bred to the exact dimensions of carry-on luggage
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(they also had a boy named Seaman in every generation, which is just unfortunate, and a story for another time)
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We think his family owned this dog, which pops up all over the place.
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This morning, our museum witnessed a miracle.
Put down your most urgent work, let your end-of-the-week deadlines breathe, and join us for something amazing.
📖 a thread 📖
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Okay...maybe bats can have library cards.
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@UniRdg_Library
Seriously, she saves bats and nurses them back to health in a spare room and then releases them back into the wild.
Our team is full of secret X Men.
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Bart Simpson says "Don't have a cow, man" when people are unhappy. And yet, if we had a cow, we'd be delighted
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Richard also starts incorporating his doodles into his mathematics, with beautiful ships, lighthouses, street scenes and trees.
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whatever else 2018 has been, it's been a pretty good year for going from a fairly obscure museum in south east England to a global thicc boi distributor so here are some highlights
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lots of people are understandbly excited about the upcoming videogame Cyberpunk 2077. while you wait, why not check out our latest, equally worthy, though completely unrelated online exhibition: the history of wagons
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Can we put a sheep into space in a car now please it's 2019
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We've invented electric sheep and they're called Teslewe and they cost 12000 of your English pounds
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we have just been fleeced by a Hampshire Down lamb.
And guess what he took?
Our hearts.
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this account is now just about garlic bread
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Brands act like people on Twitter because they want your money; museums act like people on Twitter because we want you to learn and have fun.
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wow the next Assassin's Creed looks amazing
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Because the universe is weird, though, one of our volunteers and former
@UniRdg_Library
librarian also looks after bats in her spare time.
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⚡️ Museums around the world are sending each other solicited duck pics ⚡️
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But here he is, chilling above a fire exit he can’t even open.
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Right now, a lot of folks are talking about cottagecore, an aesthetic category romanticising the rural idyll.
This is (almost literally) our field of expertise.
So, this morning, let's chat cottagecore and, specifically, a cottagecore icon: uh, Marie Antoinette.
[a thread]
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pigs but as you scroll they get longer — a thread
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@UniRdg_Library
We've named the bat MERLin (...).
He is helping a current project capturing and ringing Nathusius' pipistrelles, so we can learn more about their migratory habits.
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now fortnite is dying and apex legends is on the up we are certain the next hot game for kids will be walking into The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, UK and making good use of the facilities
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Here it is chasing a rabbit with a friend.
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@UniRdg_Library
@_BCT_
The latest update on Merlin is that:
‘it took him ages to get the hang of self feeding but there’s no stopping him now so he’s put on rather a lot of weight and needs a bit more flying practice before we can release him.
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Petition to close down the internet except for r/happycowgifs
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in the 2020s, we will be amazed—and quite frankly appalled—if chicken grooming doesn't make a major comeback
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please put this cow in more paintings
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@UniRdg_Library
@_BCT_
Thanks for listening to our bat story!
If you want it in a format that isn't about fifty difficult-to-read tweets, we put it in a blog too:
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Jurassic Park
• expensive
• extremely obvious risks to health and safety
• majority of facilities shut due to escaped dinosaurs
The Museum of English Rural Life
• free
• we care about you, your safety and enjoyment
• no dinos
• and if there are any, it would be a miracle
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would you just
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Teenagers arriving for
#readingfestival
!
Instead of taking drugs, creating memories and making mistakes
why not make the BEST mistake of your lives by coming to our museum and discover you actually have a deep fascination for tractors and it becomes a lifelong obsession
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@UniRdg_Library
We thought the bat was a type of pipistrelle, and after examining the ratio of forearm to 5th finger, and wing venation, it turns out to be a Nathusius' pipistrelle.
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We find it very touching, and very beautiful, that when strangers on the internet see a large cow they think of us first.
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their destination? The Museum of English Rural Life
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We actually can't believe we just won an award for tweeting a sheep.
Thank you
@MandHShow
#MandHAwards
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So we bleat on, goats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the pasture.
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do you like how we have a verified account like we've genuinely had to protect ourselves against anyone setting up an imitation account of a mid-sized, rural museum in Reading
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@UniRdg_Library
First things first is to check the gonads, which confirmed the bat is a boy.
Male bat genitalia look like, and we quote, ‘an albino hedgehog’.
#NSFW
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Goodbye Burt Reynolds.
You were neither English nor especially rural.
But you had a fine moustache.
And we respected that.
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Sick of your family?
Of course you are.
Come back to your real family, The Museum of English Rural Life.
We're open 10am-5pm, 27-30 December.
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Godspeed, you bat emperor.
Merlin was released this evening in
@TheMERL
garden. Slightly worryingly he headed straight for the building he'd been trapped in but then he got his bearings and zoomed off to the trees. Go well, Merlin, we'll miss you! Thanks to
@info_ecology
for the video
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The very best
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If Richard was indeed the 13 year old, he had a beautiful hand. His mathematics are laid out like a dream.
But, like every teenager, mathematics couldn’t fill the void of Richard's heart.
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@elonmusk
you can keep the absolute unit as your profile picture if you come and judge the sheep at the
@Berkshire_show
do we have a deal
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Except this isn’t your normal farm diary.
It's not even a diary.
It’s a Mathematics book owned by someone called Richard Beale, from a farm in Biddenden, Kent.
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