Stuck at home? Lots of us at the Museum are too, but although we may have temporarily shut our doors to visitors during the Covid-19 outbreak, we still have lots of fantastic goodies for you to savour from the comfort of your own home.

So, how are you feeling?

Feeling confined? Spare a thought for Tim Peake who was hauled up in the tiny Soyuz TMA-19M capsule with two of his crewmates Yuri Malenchenko and Tim Kopra as he descended back to Earth from the International Space Station back in 2015. Although the journey was just under three and a half hours, this little confined capsule saved his life. Remember: staying in your house right now can save lives too.

Feeling peckish? With Easter just around the corner, how about this 100-year-old Easter egg? Not your thing? How about this compilation of traditional Welsh recipes. I'll give the Oatmeal Gruel a miss, Eldeberry Wine however... now you're talking!

Feeling curious? Ever wondered why Jones is such a popular Welsh surname? Check it out now, in a minute.

Feeling arty? Why not try your hand at some botanical illustration.

Feeling adventurous? Take a trip underground at Big Pit National Coal Museum and experience life as a real miner.

Feeling nostalgic? Take this opportunity to snoop around some of the houses at St Fagans National Museum of History whilst no one’s watching!

Feeling crafty? Print out and make this paper calculator.

Feeling blue*? Mix things up with some natural colour inspiration from our mineral and crystal collection.

Feeling fabulous? Check out this spectacular, and very old, Bronze Age gold bling; some perfect pieces to compliment your work-from-home attire.

Feeling stiff from sitting at your home desk? Time to take a break and follow these simple stretching exercises. Plus, here are some tips on sitting correctly in front of your computer to prevent aches and pains.

Feeling active? How many times can you run up and down the stairs before your kettle boils? One, two, three, go!...

Feeling poorly? Then all of us here at the Museum wish you a hastly and speedy recovery. Get well soon! x

Not sure how you feel? Then we have over half a million other possibilities to whet your interest, fire your imagination and scratch that curiosity itch... go have a rummage!

* The meaning of this phrase may come from old deepwater sailing ships: if a captain or officers died at sea then a blue flag was flown, or a blue strip painted on the hull of the ship when returning to port. Find out more about the psychology of colour.

My name is James and I just want to sketch out a typical day as a part of the Volunteer Book Project in St Fagans.

We’re a small group, one of many in the museum, that has been running for over a year. Our group was set up to raise funds for St Fagans’ grounds by selling second hand books.

Usually, we go into the museum once a week. Communication with one another is straightforward, using a Whatsapp group. Someone from the group will decide a day to go in, the rest of us will say yay or nay. It’s very flexible. More often or not, there are a bunch of us in at any time and over the past year have developed a good working bond and friendship with one another.

We have two locations where we sell our books in the museum, Y Gegin, the main cafe, and Gweithdy, the crafts’ cafe and we’re very excited, too, because we’ve just found out that a space in the Buttery Cafe, which will be opening soon, is going to be available to us to sell books. Also, every cafe has its own particular subject, so if you are in the museum, try and visit them all if you can.

Our job is to keep the supply of good quality books for sale on display. Our generous donations from visitors keep the volume of turn over very fast, which has brought in a high amount of collection money. So far we have raised £3,000 from the project and the money is set to be spent on arches with integral seating for the Rose Garden and also to plant some extra trees nearby.

After picking up the stacks of books from the reception area, and checking what gaps there are to fill in the cafe, we make our way over to our little store room (in Tŷ Gwyrdd), walking and chatting as we pass along the path under the trees. You’ll hear the rumbling of our crate a long way off.

Sorting through the books is always interesting because we receive quite a diverse range of subjects, from popular fiction to highly specialist topics. Whatever we pick up, we price them, discuss them, keeping a close eye on what is selling well and what isn’t. The whole process is quite stimulating. We’re pretty much in charge of the whole running of the books project. It’s nice that St Fagans shows that level of trust in its volunteers.

Once we have gathered enough books to fill the empty spaces in the shelves, we rumble on over to the cafes to get the books out on display. We like to keep a check on how well books sell. For instance, we will photograph the shelves before and after a shift and also make a little pencilled note of the month the book goes on display. This information helps us to tailor our selections as much as possible to the tastes of the many varied people who visit St Fagans. Also, a few of our members have started selling some of our rarer books on eBay, so that we can maximize the funds we collect to be spent on adding more beautiful features to the museum.

A typical day lasts around three hours. At the end we all sign out at the reception desk with a satisfying feeling that there are a fresh load of low-priced and good quality books out for sale. It’s a rewarding role and we always feel appreciated by the museum for our work. There is a sense of belonging here and it’s really opened my eyes to new things.

After the UK Government took the decision to place much more severe restrictions on our lives and work due to Covid-19 – a demonstration of care for our health - we had to close all of Wales’ national museums almost immediately.

In just four days, teams across the organisation implemented the shut-down with extraordinary speed and efficiency. I am so grateful for their united and dedicated response to the extreme challenge we have faced, in what is in effect a national emergency.

I know that for very many of us, including me, closing our museums, leaving our offices and losing our day by day contact with our colleagues and friends has been an emotional and upsetting experience. But we have done it to protect the safety of our staff, our volunteers and our visitors.

We now have protocols in place at each of our museums to meet all the eventualities we can think of, and swift channels of communication to manage operations through the Duty Manager and Duty Director.

Yesterday was the second day where I was Duty Director and Bethan Lewis, Head of St Fagans National Museum of History was Duty Manager.

We worked with a dedicated pool of staff who will be managing the security of our seven national museums, collections, buildings and other public property. Our particular thanks go to them, IT, Finance, HR, Heads of Sites and the staff of other departments who have worked so hard to ensure that the Museum can continue to operate in these very difficult circumstances.

We will also keep in regular contact with all of the Amgueddfa Cymru family as they carry on as best they can to work from home.

We know that communication is harder when we cannot meet each other in person, and only remotely through a computer or a phone. I urge Amgueddfa Cymru staff and others to keep in touch with the people you work with regularly, especially if you have not heard from them for a while.

We invited some Big Pit Miner guides - Barry Stevenson, Richard Phillips and Len Howells - to share their memories of working underground.

These films include photos from the Cornwell Collection, and were originally made for the 'Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Visions' exhibition, along with this guide to the workings of the headgear:

On 15 March we launch our new LGBTQ+ tours at National Museum Cardiff. The tours have been developed in partnership with Pride Cymru working with self-confessed Museum queerator Dan Vo and an amazing team of volunteers.

You may already have read Norena Shopland's blog about the Ladies of Llangollen, and Young Heritage Leader Jake’s post, Queer Snakes! There are so many more LGBTQ+ stories in our collection – stories that have been hidden in dusty museum closets for too long. Friends, it’s time for us to let them out!

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick glimpse at one of the works you might spot on the tour…

The Mower, by Sir William Hamo Thornycoft

The Mower is a bronze statuette on display in our Victorian Art gallery. It is about half a metre high and shows a topless young farmworker in a hat and navvy boots resting with his arm on his hip, holding a scythe. This sassy pose, known as contrapposto, was inspired by Donatello’s David - a work with its own queer story to tell.

The Mower was made by William Hamo Thornycroft, one of the most famous sculptors in Britain in the nineteenth century, and was given to the Museum in 1928 by Sir William Goscombe John. An earlier, life-size version is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and is said to be the first significant free-standing sculpture showing a manual labourer made in Britain.

Thornycroft became fascinated with manual labourers and the working classes after being introduced to socialist ideas by his wife, Agatha Cox. He wrote ‘Every workman’s face I meet in the street interests me, and I feel sympathy with the hard-handed toilers & not with the lazy do nothing selfish ‘upper-ten.’ In The Mower, he presents the body of a young working-class man as though it's a classical hero or god – a brave move for the time.

Queering the Mower

With the rising interest in queer theory, many art historians have drawn attention to the queer in this sculpture. In an article by Michael Hatt the work is described as homoerotic, which he describes as that ambiguous space between the homosocial and homosexual.

One of the main factors is the artist’s relationship with Edmund Gosse, a writer and critic who helped establish Thornycroft’s reputation in the art world. Gosse was married with children, but his letters to Thornycroft give us a touching insight into their relationship.

He describes times they spent together basking in the sun in meadows and swimming naked in rivers; and they are filled with love poems and giddy declarations of affection. ‘Nature, the clouds, the grass, everything takes on new freshness and brightness now I have you to share the world with,’ he wrote. Gosse was so obsessed with Thornycroft that writer Lytton Strachey famously joked he wasn’t homosexual, but Hamo-sexual.

Gosse and Thornycroft were spending time together when the first inspiration for The Mower hit. They were sailing with a group of friends up the Thames when they spotted a real-life mower on the riverbank, resting. Thornycroft made a quick sketch, and the idea for the sculpture was born. A wax model sketch from 1882 is at the Tate.

The real-life mower they saw was wearing a shirt, but for his sculpture Thornycroft stripped him down. He explained to his wife that he wanted to ‘keep his hat on and carry his shirt’ and that a brace over his shoulder will help ‘take off the nude look’.

Brace or no brace, it’s difficult to hide the fact that this is a celebration of the male body designed for erotic appeal. Thornycroft used an Italian model, Orazio Cervi. Cervi was famous in Victorian Britain for his ‘perfectly proportioned physique’ (art historical speak for a hot bod!)

Later in the century, photographs of The Mower and other artworks were collected and exchanged in secret along with photographs of real life nudes, by a network of men mostly in London – a kind of queer subculture, although it wouldn’t have been understood in those terms back then.

This was dangerous ground. The second half of the nineteenth century saw what has been described as a ‘homosexual panic’, with rising anxieties around gender identity, sexuality and same-sex desire. Fanny and Stella, the artist Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde were among many who were hounded and publicly prosecuted for ‘indecent’ behaviour.

These tensions showed up in the art world too. Many of the artists associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements in particular were under scrutiny for producing works that were described as ‘effeminate’, ‘degenerate’ or ‘decadent’. But works like The Mower suggest that art might have provided a safer space for playing out private desires in a public arena at this time.

Book your place on our free volunteer-led LGBTQ+ tours here, and keep an eye on our website and social media for future dates!