It was the best museum visit of the year. There wasn't a terracotta warrior or a Lee Miller naked back to be seen. It left me so grateful I very nearly bought a bear playing the Bonny Bonny Banks on its dear little bagpipes.
You truly would not want to have been at John o'Groats in the sodden dusk, with the rising mist almost but not quite blotting out the hulk of the derelict Victorian hotel, and making it impossible to see how late the Orkney ferry might be.
It was the infant Samuel who spotted it, and there was indeed a small sign saying museum, and a hand written notice in the porch that said open.
The Last House is never going to win any awards. It will never, ever be registered or designated. You know what was crammed into the two rooms, there are just such collections in every corner of the land: milking stools and cooking pots, newspaper cuttings about thrilling shipwrecks, curling photographs of long dead midwives and schoolteachers, fish creels and baby bottles.
Samuel tried on a tin hat. As we carefully replaced the blob of Bluetack and the scrap of card identifying a locally worn ARP helmet, the tangible battered truth of it hit home, in a way the multimillion pound displays at the Imperial War Museum can't quite.
The British Museum wants £50m for a new gallery, Tate Modern £165m for its ziggurat, Merseyside £68m for its new Museum of Liverpool, and jolly good luck to them all.
The great museums sometimes feel as if, in the relentless struggle to be bigger and shinier they forget what they're really good at. The displays at the Last House could have been made on Samuel's pocket money, with change for an ice cream. Sometimes just being there, and being full of stuff, and having an open door, is enough.
You truly would not want to have been at John o'Groats in the sodden dusk, with the rising mist almost but not quite blotting out the hulk of the derelict Victorian hotel, and making it impossible to see how late the Orkney ferry might be.
It was the infant Samuel who spotted it, and there was indeed a small sign saying museum, and a hand written notice in the porch that said open.
The Last House is never going to win any awards. It will never, ever be registered or designated. You know what was crammed into the two rooms, there are just such collections in every corner of the land: milking stools and cooking pots, newspaper cuttings about thrilling shipwrecks, curling photographs of long dead midwives and schoolteachers, fish creels and baby bottles.
Samuel tried on a tin hat. As we carefully replaced the blob of Bluetack and the scrap of card identifying a locally worn ARP helmet, the tangible battered truth of it hit home, in a way the multimillion pound displays at the Imperial War Museum can't quite.
The British Museum wants £50m for a new gallery, Tate Modern £165m for its ziggurat, Merseyside £68m for its new Museum of Liverpool, and jolly good luck to them all.
The great museums sometimes feel as if, in the relentless struggle to be bigger and shinier they forget what they're really good at. The displays at the Last House could have been made on Samuel's pocket money, with change for an ice cream. Sometimes just being there, and being full of stuff, and having an open door, is enough.
