The diary of a local museum director
Part 1
After the slagging we got in the local rag last Christmas – headlines like “Scrooge you, curator” and “Dismas gratings” come to mind – I’m now regretting the staff brainstorming we held last March for this Christmas.
The low points were: the community bobby musing that one of our two Santas was not up to date with his CRB clearance – “not clever sticking under-eights on a child molester’s knees” – and my infant niece identifying our beautifully crafted (if cheap), cardboard reindeer herd as “Christmas goats”.
The high points were: saving money by keeping the Diwali lights up until Twelfth Night, and having fewer than 100 negative public complaints about our plastic needleless Christmas tree.
We hadn’t turned our back on Christmas exactly, it was just that we agreed in advance that any social history museum worth its gritting salt should embrace the other realities of winter in the UK: drunk-driving deaths, hypothermia hospitalisations, festive redundancies and the increased admissions to psychiatric wards and women’s refuges.
Granted, calling this hard-hitting exhibition Epiphany was always going to be a bit controversial, but there is nothing like a televised frothing bishop to get them through the doors.
This year we’ve got a grotto and a rota of incredulous staff-Santas cluttering up our hard-won gallery space.
They also had a say in what goes in every grotto goody-bag (£15 each) so they now comprise: a boxed sliver of medieval timber; a plastic eyeball on a string; three dinosaur erasers; and a small bag of butterscotch sheep . Our head of marketing is flogging them as “Baaa Humbugs..”
What else?
The low points were: the community bobby musing that one of our two Santas was not up to date with his CRB clearance – “not clever sticking under-eights on a child molester’s knees” – and my infant niece identifying our beautifully crafted (if cheap), cardboard reindeer herd as “Christmas goats”.
The high points were: saving money by keeping the Diwali lights up until Twelfth Night, and having fewer than 100 negative public complaints about our plastic needleless Christmas tree.
We hadn’t turned our back on Christmas exactly, it was just that we agreed in advance that any social history museum worth its gritting salt should embrace the other realities of winter in the UK: drunk-driving deaths, hypothermia hospitalisations, festive redundancies and the increased admissions to psychiatric wards and women’s refuges.
Granted, calling this hard-hitting exhibition Epiphany was always going to be a bit controversial, but there is nothing like a televised frothing bishop to get them through the doors.
This year we’ve got a grotto and a rota of incredulous staff-Santas cluttering up our hard-won gallery space.
They also had a say in what goes in every grotto goody-bag (£15 each) so they now comprise: a boxed sliver of medieval timber; a plastic eyeball on a string; three dinosaur erasers; and a small bag of butterscotch sheep . Our head of marketing is flogging them as “Baaa Humbugs..”
What else?