Free admission has been preying on my mind again, and not just because it's one of those months with a lot of month left at the end of the money.
I vividly remember a morning back in the early 1990s, when the V&A was about to re-introduce charging and thereby completing the rampart of tills around the South Kensington museums. There were a few whimpers of protest from malcontents like me.
The then director, in a tone of sweet reasonableness, intended to squelch dissent, and inquired: "Is anyone seriously suggesting that any of us in this room couldn't afford a fiver to visit this museum?" Which was so precisely not the point.
There wasn't a soul in that room full of curatorial types and designers and arty hacks, who wasn't a serial lifelong museum visitor. If it was a question of our lunch money or a museum - a debate I saw conducted in doleful reality on the steps of the V&A, by a young German couple, on the day it did introduce the charges - the museum would win every time.
But probably none of us would have to make that choice: some bit of plastic, a press card, an Art Fund membership, a Museums Association card, would sweep us past that turnstile and the queue of people anxiously counting their 50p pieces.
I thought of it again as two mothers and four children tumbled laughing with relief out of a downpour and into the Pier arts centre in Stromness on Orkney: culture and shelter, free. And again at the opposite end of the country, as I slogged up a steep hill to my b&b in St Ives, against torrents of sleety rain.
The gradient and the distance were identical to the journey the miraculously restored Bernard Leach pottery will have to persuade visitors to make, to pay £4.50 at the top. Would I, I wondered, as I took off my glasses to wipe them yet again?
Would I, not the notional typical museum visitor but me personally, would I drag a protesting child and a mate with no interest whatsoever in 20th century British studio pottery and the first Japanese climbing kiln in the West, up that steep hill? I do hope the answer is yes.
I vividly remember a morning back in the early 1990s, when the V&A was about to re-introduce charging and thereby completing the rampart of tills around the South Kensington museums. There were a few whimpers of protest from malcontents like me.
The then director, in a tone of sweet reasonableness, intended to squelch dissent, and inquired: "Is anyone seriously suggesting that any of us in this room couldn't afford a fiver to visit this museum?" Which was so precisely not the point.
There wasn't a soul in that room full of curatorial types and designers and arty hacks, who wasn't a serial lifelong museum visitor. If it was a question of our lunch money or a museum - a debate I saw conducted in doleful reality on the steps of the V&A, by a young German couple, on the day it did introduce the charges - the museum would win every time.
But probably none of us would have to make that choice: some bit of plastic, a press card, an Art Fund membership, a Museums Association card, would sweep us past that turnstile and the queue of people anxiously counting their 50p pieces.
I thought of it again as two mothers and four children tumbled laughing with relief out of a downpour and into the Pier arts centre in Stromness on Orkney: culture and shelter, free. And again at the opposite end of the country, as I slogged up a steep hill to my b&b in St Ives, against torrents of sleety rain.
The gradient and the distance were identical to the journey the miraculously restored Bernard Leach pottery will have to persuade visitors to make, to pay £4.50 at the top. Would I, I wondered, as I took off my glasses to wipe them yet again?
Would I, not the notional typical museum visitor but me personally, would I drag a protesting child and a mate with no interest whatsoever in 20th century British studio pottery and the first Japanese climbing kiln in the West, up that steep hill? I do hope the answer is yes.
